Only forty-five years old when he was appointed general manager of the Associated Press, Melville Elijah Stone already had been a reporter, the owner of a foundry and machine shop, the owner of two Chicago newspapers, a convalescing world traveler, and a bank president. If he had done nothing else, he would be remembered as the founder of the Chicago Daily News, one of the city's great newspapers, but it was through his long association with the AP--"founded by six wrangling New York publishers" about three months before Stone was born--that he recorded his most enduring accomplishments. Stone wrote only one book, Time magazine's obituary writer observed. "But his monument, the Associated Press, is a great unbound volume, an unceasing history attuned alike to hamlet and metropolis."

Energetic and resourceful as a news executive, Stone also was a thoughtful observer of the workings of American journalism. In...