According to Richard R. John, the AP transformed into a news broker where information was a tradable commodity. News brokers were granted privileges like special rates and, crucially, priority access to the telegraph wires by telegraph officials. Now every newspaper has access to major news stories hours after they were first reported, as well as texts of influential editorials and speeches. Clippings from the New-York Tribune edited by Horace Greeley became especially influential for the Whig Party newspapers, and after 1854 for the press of the new Republican Party. The coordination of the distribution of time-sensitive information by newsbrokers, such as the AP, gave them substantial influence that many deemed politically hazardous, resulting in various public controversies during the Gilded Age. Richard R. John, "Recasting the Information Infrastructure for the Industrial Age," in Alfred D. Chandler Jr, and James W. Cortada, eds. A nation transformed by information: How information has shaped the United States from colonial times to the present (Oxford UP, 2000). pp 55-106 at p 83. Richard Allen Schwarzlose, The Nation's Newsbrokers: The formative years, from pretelegraph to 1865 (Northwestern University Press, 1989).
