September 14, 1998.

A friend of mine calls it the ultimate form of channel surfing.

The world passes in front of my eyes every work day, on a 13" computer screen that is linked to every corner of the globe by an Associated Press satellite dish on the roof of our building. Every so often I press Shift and click the mouse to save one those images of the world because I think it might be of interest to our readers.

The pictures come from a variety of sources...from AP staff photographers; from "stringers" or freelance photographers who are hired by assignment or who have sold a particular photo to the wire; from member newspapers; and from other wire services around the world, such as Tass in Russia, or Kyodo in Japan.

There is a diverse collection of photos, though it is by no means complete. Britain's Reuters and the French Agence France Presse are competing wire photo services, which offer their own coverage of foreign (and some domestic) news.

And so on, and so on. Every two minutes or so, another picture flows from the satellite into the system.

Many of the AP staff photos mirror what one sees on network television news shows. They are photos of symbolic events, often staged for press coverage. They are what became known as "photo opportunities" in the Nixon White House.

The member photos, the photos from the 1,000 or so American newspapers that subscribe to the AP, are often the most delightful ones to look at. They show a myriad of slices of life, people doing improbable things, and moments you wouldn't believe if you didn't see the photos. Some are hard-hitting, gut-wrenching news photos, some are humorous, and some are there not because they are necessarily strong images, but, rather, because their news content is important.

The AP is a cooperative that was founded 150 years ago, by a group of New York City newspaper publishers. Faced with high telegraph costs, they pooled the resources to have a boat in Halifax, Nova Scotia sail out to ships coming in from Europe and get their news. That news was then telegraphed to New York, from Boston, according to "Flash," a newly-published history of the Associated Press.

United Press, International News Service, and Acme were competing, for-profit news services that didn't survive (UP and INS combined to form United Press International, which is still in business, but is nowhere near the force that it used to be).

Technology has had as vast impact in the wirephoto network as it has had on any part of the communications industry. The earliest, crudest form of "transmitting" photos is described in "The Complete Book of Press Photography, published in 1950 by the National Press Photographers Association. Imagine two people sitting at desks in distant cities, talking on the phone. Each has piece of paper, with a grid overlay. The person "transmitting" describes the grid laid over the photo, square, by square, telling the other person whether to color in black, medium gray, or white on a blank piece of paper on the "receiving" end.

The first AP photo transmissions by phone line were in 1935, starting with a photo of the scene of an airplane crash in upstate New York. While we can now get a color photo every two minutes, until about 1990 when the AP started to abandon phone transmission and began Photostream, or its satellite delivery of the photo report, it took eight minutes to get a black and white photo from the AP photo network, and 24 minutes to get a "color project." Color photos were delivered in three black and white prints...one was the cyan printer, one the magenta printer, and the third the yellow. A seperate printing plate was made of each, and together, with a black printer, they made up a color photo.

In 1988 we thought we were hot stuff because we had our first color election photo ever in the Journal Times. We had gotten a color photo of President Bush from the White House and the color seperations were in place by election night. In 1992, we had five live photos of Clinton and Gore celebrating in Little Rock by 12:15 a.m., when we had to make our final selection for the front page.

When it came time to edit photos from the Super Bowl, we also saw the advantage of Photostream. Imagine yourself as the photo editor of a morning paper with deadlines throughout the night. The game starts at six p.m. Photographers shoot madly, couriers pick up their film, negatives are processed, and prints have to be made. The first photo...from the first few minutes of an hour long game...moved at seven p.m. The crackle and beeping of the Laserphoto receiver told you that the cyan printer of that first photo is on its way. You looked at the photo and cringed. By now the play it showed was meaningless in the scope of the game, and you had gotten a photo you didn't want to use. You would't see the next photo, though, for almost a half hour, because the AP was still sending the magenta and yellow printers of that first image.

Though it is a standing joke that AP is an abbreviation of Anonymous Photographer, those photos are, indeed taken by real people, often at great peril to themselves. More and more newspapers are giving bylines to the photographers who contribute their photos to the daily wire photo report. AP member newspapers can use any AP photo, and they are expected, in turn, to contribute their own work to the wire.

Photographers are sometimes surprised when readers who are traveling see their work in another newspaper, whether it is across the country or half way around the world, and send them tearsheets. I remember boarding a plane for a flight home to New York and seeing a photo of mine in the Chicago Tribune when I left for New York, and then in the New York Post when I landed.

September 21, 1998.

The news goes on. And the pictures keep coming, every two minutes.

(This journal is dedicated to my late friend Jim Barber, who died of cancer January 30, 1992. He first brought me to this realization of the magic of a photo wire service as a snapshot of the world when he asked me to send him a day's collection of photos from United Press International. His self-published collection, "Today's Photographs: 9/3/75," was put together for a project when he attended the Rochester Institute of Technology)