United Press International

===United Press International===
Frank Bartholomew, the last UP president to ascend to the agency's top job directly from its news, rather than sales ranks, took over in 1955, and according to his memoirs cited in [[#Notes|Notes]], was obsessed with merging UP with the [[International News Service]], a news agency that had been founded by [[William Randolph Hearst]] in 1909 following Scripps' lead.

Bartholomew succeeded in putting the "I" in UPI in 1958 when UP and INS merged to become United Press International {{nowrap|on May 24.<ref name=mjmerg/><ref name=bbupinw/>}} The new UPI now had 6,000 employees and 5,000 subscribers, about a thousand of them newspapers.<ref name="rip"/><ref name="time magazine"/>

The merger was aimed at creating a stronger competitor for the [[Associated Press]] and a stronger economic entity than either UP or INS. The newly formed United Press International (UPI) had 950 client newspapers.<ref name="time magazine"/> Fearing possible antitrust issues with the [[Dwight D. Eisenhower|Eisenhower]] Administration [[United States Department of Justice|Justice Department]], Scripps and Hearst rushed the merger through with unusual speed and secrecy.

Although all UP employees were retained, most INS employees lost their jobs with practically no warning. A relative few did join the new UPI and the columns of popular INS writers, such as [[Bob Considine]], [[Louella Parsons]] and [[Ruth Montgomery]], were carried by UPI.<ref name="time magazine"/>

Rival AP was a publishers' cooperative and could assess its members to help pay the extraordinary costs of covering major news—wars, the Olympic Games, national political conventions. UPI clients, in contrast, paid a fixed annual rate; depending on individual contracts, UPI could not always ask them to help shoulder the extraordinary coverage costs. In its heyday, newspapers typically paid UPI about half what they paid AP in the same cities for the same services: At one point, for example, the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' paid AP $12,500 a week, but UPI only $5,000; the Wall Street Journal paid AP $36,000 a week, but UPI only $19,300. The AP, which serviced 1,243 newspapers at the time, remained UPI's main competitor.<ref name="rip"/><ref name="time magazine"/> In 1959, UPI had 6,208 clients in 92 countries and territories, 234 news and picture bureaus, and an annual payroll of $34,000,000, (${{formatnum:{{Inflation|US|34000000|1959|r=0}}}} in today's dollars).<ref name="rip"/><ref name="reports a record"/>

But the UP-INS merger involved another business component that was to hurt the new UPI company badly in later years. Because INS had been a subsidiary of Hearst's [[King Features Syndicate]] and Scripps controlled several other newspaper syndicates, both companies feared possible antitrust issues. So they deliberately kept their respective syndicates out of the combined UPI company. That move cost UPI the revenues of its previous [[United Feature Syndicate]] subsidiary, which in later years made large profits on the syndication of ''[[Peanuts]]'' and other popular [[comic strips]] and columns.

UPI had an advantage of independence over the AP in reporting on the [[Civil Rights Movement]] of the 1950s and 1960s. Because the AP was a cooperative essentially owned by the newspapers, those in the [[Southern United States|South]] influenced its coverage of the racial unrest and protests, often ignoring, minimizing, or slanting the reporting.<ref name="rip"/> UPI did not have that sort of pressure, and management, according to UPI reporters and photographers of the day, allowed them much freedom in chronicling the events of the civil rights struggle.<ref name="rip"/>

White House reporter [[Helen Thomas]] became the public face of UPI, as she was seen at televised press conferences beginning in the early 1960s.<ref name="rip"/> UPI famously scooped the AP in reporting the [[Assassination of John F. Kennedy|assassination of US President John Kennedy]] on Friday, November 22, 1963.<ref name="rip"/> UPI White House reporter [[Merriman Smith]] was an eyewitness, and he commandeered the press car's only phone to dictate the story to UPI as AP reporter Jack Bell tried—without success—to wrest the phone away so he could call his office.<ref name="in sorrow"/> Smith and UPI won a [[Pulitzer Prize]] for this reporting.<ref name="rip"/>