system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: The Associated Press (AP). What the heck is it? Do they have their own journalists? Are they a news agency? Where do they get their stories from?
gpt
Okay, you're a hotshot news editor for the Middle School Times, right? There's a friend that you have that also owns a news paper in the next town over, the Middle School Edition. Then there's a third paper, the Middle School Chronicle, that has a story that you and your friend want for your respective papers. So you go to the Chronicle and cooperate with them, creating a newspaper organization that allows you all to share stories with each other, re-writing or tailoring parts of the story to fit your specific paper but keeping the bulk of the story. Additionally, this new organization hires specific staff to write general stories for the three papers to all use. That's what the AP is, a cooperation of a lot of papers radio and tv stations throughout the country, which allows it's members to use stories from various locations and written by various individual news organizations that are part of the cooperation.