They have perished from artillery blasts, plane crashes, bullets, illness, and even execution — in war zones and dangerous locations across the globe.
In the 180 years since The Associated Press was founded, 38 of its journalists have lost their lives while doing their jobs for the independent, not-for-profit news organization.
This Thursday marks a sobering milestone: 150 years since the very first of those deaths. Mark Kellogg, age 43, was one of five civilians who died alongside Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his soldiers at the Battle of Little Bighorn.
Kellogg was embedded with Custer’s troops at the time, filing reports for The Bismarck Tribune and the New York Herald. The AP distributed his stories to readers across the nation. He was on the scene when Custer badly misjudged the size of a Sioux village before launching an attack against it.
Custer and his badly outnumbered soldiers made their final stand on a hilltop, where Native American defenders overwhelmed and destroyed them. Kellogg’s scalped body was discovered nearby.
His final published dispatch included this line: “I go with Custer and will be at the death.”
The words were meant as a poetic flourish rather than a forecast of his own end. Nevertheless, that final dispatch — and the story of how Kellogg died — spread widely through his employers and the AP wire. It brought lasting recognition to an otherwise obscure part-time journalist, a widower who had taken on various jobs to provide for his two daughters.
According to noted historian Sandy Barnard, Kellogg had developed a personal connection with Custer and spent time mingling with and interviewing soldiers at their camps.
“While his record as a journalist might be very small compared to modern reporters who go into combat, he certainly was doing exactly what they are doing,” Barnard said.
Kellogg’s diary and a collection of personal items — including his eyeglasses, tobacco, clothing, and a mosquito head net — are preserved by the State Historical Society of North Dakota. Deputy State Archivist Lindsay Meidinger noted that the fragile diary, now available digitally online, captures everyday details such as weather conditions, distances traveled, the order of riders in the column, and antelope sightings. The diary’s entries stop before the battle began.
“It’s a primary source of the historical event that not many other primary sources remain from that time period related to the Seventh Cavalry and Custer,” Meidinger said.
In some important ways, however, Kellogg bore little resemblance to journalists working today. Barnard — who authored a biography of Kellogg as well as other books about the Battle of Little Bighorn — noted that Kellogg carried a rifle into the field.
“During the last stages of the campaign, Kellogg was probably more of a soldier than he was a newspaper man,” Barnard said.
Kellogg also made no effort to conceal bias or racist attitudes toward Native Americans, whom he referred to as “red devils” in his writing.
Other AP journalists who have died while covering conflict include Mariam Dagga, a freelance visual journalist killed in an Israeli strike on a hospital in the Gaza Strip last August; Anja Niedringhaus, a photographer shot by a police officer while sitting in her car in Afghanistan in 2014; Myles Tierney, a videojournalist who died when a convoy he was traveling in came under fire in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1999; and Joseph Morton, a war correspondent who became the only known American reporter executed by the Nazis after being captured alongside Slovakian partisans in 1944.
