Navigating the News: AP Style

There’s a certain ‘language’ the journalism and news media world generally follows. It’s a shared knowledge that anyone writing or learning to write news stories will always learn how to write in something called AP Style. This style is how journalists determine how things like times, dates, and titles are written to keep the information while writing as clear, concise, and as unbiased as possible.

AP Style can be as general as: seasons are never capitalized, or as specific as: Spell out numbers one through nine, but write numbers 10 and above as numerals.

There is a physical handbook (revised every few years or so) that is over 600 pages long with nearly every guideline for grammar and citations you could think of. I don’t know of a single journalism student who was not required to purchase an AP Style Guide at some point in some capacity – some even numerous times to keep up with the updates. It was, well, a guidebook.

‘AP’ stands for Associated Press. The Associated Press was founded in 1848 by six newspapers in New York who wanted a simpler way to share resources for international news events. Ultimately, it helped them save money by sharing the news that arrived by telegraph and dividing the expenses evenly among the newspapers. The AP is now the largest news gathering organization internationally and continues to help keep the news easy to read.