Press Releases

01/29/2009

AP's Curley to receive White honor

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) -- Tom Curley, president and chief executive of The Associated Press and a leading industry voice on press freedom issues, has been named the 2009 recipient of the William Allen White Foundation's national citation.

Curley will receive the honor Feb. 6 at the University of Kansas.

Curley is considered one of the industry's fiercest defenders of press freedoms. In 2007 he was honored with the First Amendment Award by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press for his work encouraging media organizations to fight for the public's right to know.

The next year, he received the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation's First Amendment Leadership Award for his emphasis on open-records laws and First Amendment reporting.

Curley has also led the news cooperative's charge into digital delivery of news, including the creation of AP Exchange, the database that allows all Associated Press content to be searched by AP journalists and customers.

"Tom Curley represents big and appropriate repositioning at The Associated Press, which, like all of journalism, must redefine itself in this time of change," said Tom Eblen, chairman of the White Foundation.

White, whose name is on the university's School of Journalism and Mass communications, was the nationally known publisher of the Emporia Gazette until his death in 1944.

Previous honorees include Walter Cronkite, Helen Thomas, Bernard Shaw and Bob Woodward.