Biography | Daisy Veerasingham — The August Morning AP Named Its Fourteenth Leader

People treat the Associated Press as an American newsroom that only ever promoted from its own copy desk.

On 3 August 2021 the cooperative named Daisy Veerasingham president and CEO, effective 1 January 2022.

She would be the fourteenth person to lead AP since 1846.

She would also be the first woman, the first person of colour, and the first person from outside the United States to hold the job.

The New York Times, Poynter and AP's own news story all carried those firsts on the same day.

She was 51.

The announcement was issued from New York, where AP had sat at 200 Liberty Street since early 2017.

An AP photograph used with the story was made at that headquarters on 27 July 2021.

She was already executive vice president and chief operating officer, the title given in February.

Gary Pruitt, 64, would stay through 31 December after nearly a decade in the role.

AP chairman Steven R. Swartz, also president and CEO of Hearst, said the board had appointed her in a meeting the previous week.

The cooperative was then 175 years old.

About 40 percent of its revenue was coming from outside the United States, double the share of fifteen years earlier, a change AP itself tied to the appointment.

She had joined in London in 2004 and had never been a reporter.

The building across West Street from the World Trade Center site is where that fact stopped being a curiosity and became the job description.

Photo: Don Ramey Logan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons