Staats to retire from AP after 40 years
By DAVID GREER
Member Services Director

After a dozen news and administrative positions around the country with the Associated Press, Louisville AP Bureau Chief Ed Staats never counted on staying in one place so long. It was late 1984 when Staats became Louisville bureau chief. In April, the West Virginia native will retire from AP after more than 40 years of service. Staats and his wife, Charlene, Oldham County residents, plan to stay in suburban Louisville after retiring.

“After 17 or 18 years, it seems like there is no place better to go,” Staats said of Kentucky. People here are among the most cordial he’s met anywhere, he said. As bureau chief in Louisville, Staats has been responsible for AP's news staff, the news and photo reports and the business relationship with member newspapers.

The lengthy stay in Louisville and Kentucky has been good for him personally and professionally, Staats said. On the personal side, the long stay has allowed him to make many friendships. Those friendships are among his fondest on-the-job memories, he said. Professionally, having a bureau chief who oversaw the AP's news and picture coverage statewide for nearly two decades, including 17 runnings of the Kentucky Derby, the series of artificial heart implants and other medical stories, the 1988 Carrollton bus crash, the 2000 census, the 2001 artificial heart implant and many election campaigns and elections provided continuity for the Louisville bureau.

During his four decades with the AP, Staats held a variety of positions — so many, in fact, that his career seemed like several different ones, he said. For instance, he worked in the AP broadcast division in Denver and Dallas and as an administrator in the AP’s Washington, D.C. broadcast news center prior to coming to Louisville.

Before Washington, he worked for four years in AP's headquarters in New York City. He also has held a variety of news and administrative positions elsewhere in the AP — including its bureaus in Dallas, Houston, Denver, Salt Lake City and Albany.

Staats began with AP upon graduation from the University of Texas at Austin. Along the way, he worked as a reporter, bureau chief, administrator and even had a stint in broadcast marketing. At the time, Staats was working out west and the marketing job gave him the opportunity to get on the road and out of the bureau.

“I really snapped that up and found myself driving up and down the roads of the Rocky Mountain states encouraging broadcasters to buy our services,” he said. Once in Kentucky, Staats became active in KPA and the Western Kentucky Press Association, the Girl Scouts of Kentuckiana board and recently completed a term on the board of the Kentucky Broadcasters Association.

An AP career is a challenging one, Staats said, because so much is expected of its journalists. They must write for newspapers and broadcast and now that includes writing for the Web too.

Staats, who hopes to do some newspaper consulting work during retirement, is bullish on the newspaper industry’s future. He sees the Internet joining other media — print and broadcast. All will coexist for some time. But eventually, Staats said, he sees an electronic newspaper in the industry’s future.

“Forward-looking newspaper companies are experimenting and investing in this technology,” he said of electronic newspapers.