Biography | Daisy Veerasingham — The February Memo That Moved Her Off Oval Road

People treat the 2021 promotion as a New York coronation.

The paper trail starts in London.

On 10 February 2021 the Associated Press named Daisy Veerasingham executive vice president and chief operating officer, effective immediately.

AP's press release said every department — news, business and technology — would now report jointly to her and to president and CEO Gary Pruitt.

She kept the revenue division she had run since January 2019 and stayed on the management committee.

The same release recorded the geography: based in London, she would relocate to AP headquarters in New York.

That headquarters was already at 200 Liberty Street, the former One World Financial Center in Brookfield Place, where the cooperative had moved in early 2017.

The London base she was leaving was still The Interchange at Camden Lock.

Pruitt's staff memo, quoted in AP's own write-up, credited her with guiding revenue through the first pandemic year.

She was then 51, a first-generation British national of Sri Lankan descent, and still not a journalist by training.

Six months later the same board would give her the top job.

This February title is the last one she held while the public record still placed her on Oval Road.

Photo: Metroskop (Benjamin Holler), CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons