Associated Press

Access posture

About

The Associated Press Stylebook is the dominant style reference for U.S. news writing. It is not an equity-language guide and is not part of the commons corpus — it appears here as a reference source because the corpus guides constantly position themselves relative to AP decisions, and the commons’ syntheses cite four AP milestones in particular:

• 2013 — AP stops using “illegal immigrant,” restricting “illegal” to actions (“illegal immigration”), never people. It also banned “illegal alien,” “an illegal,” and “illegals” outside direct quotations. (Poynter, April 2, 2013)
• 2017 — singular “they” accepted in limited cases “when alternative wording is overly awkward or clumsy.” (Poynter, March 2017)
• 2019 — the hyphen dropped from dual-heritage terms: African American, Asian American, and parallel forms. (AP Stylebook announcement, April 2019)
• 2020 — Black capitalized (announced June 19, 2020), with a separate July 2020 decision not to capitalize white. The National Association of Black Journalists recommends capitalizing Black, White, and Brown alike — the AP/NABJ split is a live fault line several commons pages document. (Nieman Lab, Poynter, NABJ statement)

Access

Host posture is link-out-only: the Stylebook is a commercial subscription product and the commons holds no archive of it. The decisions above are cited via AP’s own public announcements and contemporaneous coverage (Poynter, Nieman Lab), each linked inline. The year above reflects the most recent cited decision (2020), not an edition of the book.