AP names Daisy Veerasingham its new chief
By Katie Robertson
NEW YORK – The Associated Press said on Tuesday (3) that Daisy Veerasingham, a first-generation Briton of Sri Lankan descent, would become its new president and chief executive officer, the first woman and the first person of colour to lead the 175-year-old news agency.
She will succeed Gary Pruitt, who is retiring at the end of the year after almost 10 years in the role. Her start date is Jan. 1, 2022.
“There is no doubt it’s a challenging media environment, and like many other media organizations, we’ve come under revenue pressure from time to time,” Veerasingham said in an interview. “So we really have to shore up our core business in media, but we also have got to work really hard to expand.”
Veerasingham, 51, joined the AP in 2004 as a sales director for its television news division in London. She was promoted to chief revenue officer in 2019 and became the company’s chief operating officer and executive vice president in February.
The AP, which employs several thousand journalists reporting from 250 bureaus around the world, is interviewing candidates for executive editor, its top journalism job. Sally Buzbee left that post in May to succeed Martin Baron as the executive editor of The Washington Post.
“We’ve got really interesting candidates,” Veerasingham said, “and we would hope to be able to make an appointment within the next month or so.”
Pruitt said in a statement that he felt it was the right time “to pass the baton.”
“There is no better person to lead AP into its next chapter than Daisy, with whom I’ve worked closely over the past decade,” he said.
Veerasingham’s appointment speaks to the changing portrait of the AP, where 40% of the company’s revenue, double what it was 15 years ago, is now generated outside of the United States.
She’ll be tasked with continuing to diversify income sources. The AP, caught in the same financial vise as most of the media industry, saw its revenue drop to $467 million in 2020, down more than 25% in a decade.
Veerasingham said she’s determined to maintain the AP as a source of fact-based, nonpartisan journalism, and to fight for freedom of the press and access to information. The AP produces roughly 2,000 news stories, 3,000 photos and 200 videos every day, reaching more than half the world’s population.
-New York Times/AP