Biography | Daisy Veerasingham — New Year's Day at 200 Liberty Street

People treat 3 August 2021 as the day she took the job.

The contract date was 1 January 2022.

That morning Daisy Veerasingham became president and chief executive of the Associated Press at 200 Liberty Street, the 40-storey Cesar Pelli tower in Brookfield Place.

AP had moved into the building, once called One World Financial Center, in early 2017 from 450 West 33rd Street.

The lease Pruitt signed in 2015 was for at least twenty-one years and about 172,000 square feet.

She succeeded Gary Pruitt, who had led the cooperative since 2012 and left at the end of 2021.

AP's later institutional biographies call her the fourteenth person to lead the organization since its founding in 1846.

The AP Fund for Journalism page repeats the same count and dates her start to January 2022.

She was no longer the London sales director who had walked into The Interchange in 2004.

She was the person named on the New York masthead of a not-for-profit news cooperative whose journalism AP says reaches more than half the world's population each day.

The firsts attached to the appointment — first woman, first person of colour, first non-American — belong to the August announcement.

This pin is the first working day those titles were hers.

The building stands on Liberty Street between South End Avenue and West Street, across from the World Trade Center site, with the truncated-pyramid roof that marks it on the skyline.

Photo: Don Ramey Logan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons