The Associated Press announced Wednesday that it is changing the dateline on all of its stories from Crimea now that the region is being controlled by Russia, and not Ukraine.
The wire service said that it would no longer identify stories written there as coming from "Ukraine." Rather, they will carry the dateline "Crimea."
AP standards editor Tom Kent explained this reasoning in a blog post:
Previously, we wrote “SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine (AP).” But Ukraine no longer controls Crimea, and AP datelines should reflect the facts on the ground.
Therefore, effective this week, we are using the city name and “Crimea”: “SEVASTOPOL, Crimea (AP).”
The decision by a media company to tweak its datelines may seem trivial, but the AP is a powerful organization whose articles are read in thousands of newspapers and websites. Just as its decision to drop the term "illegal immigrant" or NBC News' decision in 2006 to call the Iraq War a "civil war" were seen as notable symbols of the way the mainstream political narrative was changing, so too is its choice about Crimea a potential symbol of the view that Crimea is, for now, fully lost to Ukraine.
Read the full post here.