Since the 1999 sale of its broadcast client list to its one-time major rival, the AP, UPI has concentrated on smaller information market niches.

[11][12] It now maintains a news website and photo service and electronically publishes several information product packages.

Based mostly on aggregation from other sources on the Web and gathered by a small editorial staff and stringers, UPI's daily content consists of a newsbrief summary service called "NewsTrack," which includes general, business, sports, science, health and entertainment reports, and "Quirks in the News."

It also sells a premium service, which has deeper coverage and analysis of emerging threats, the security industry, and energy resources.

Howe, who was responsible for broadcasting policy, announced that the two wire services must “show their news source is accurate” in order to retain their licenses.

After complaints by Transradio that the move was an attempt by “selfish publishing and monopolistic interests … to destroy independent news services throughout the Dominion”, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which at the time was also responsible for regulating private radio broadcasters, agreed to reinstate Transradio's and BUP's licenses while also announcing a plan to enforce the ban on commercial news broadcasts by editing dispatches by the wire services before they were distributed to radio stations.

[21] Beginning with the Cleveland Press, publisher E. W. Scripps (1854–1926) created the first chain of newspapers in the United States.

At that time and until World War II, most newspapers relied on news agencies for stories outside their immediate geographic areas.

UP's president, Roy W. Howard, then traveling in France, telegraphed that the 1918 armistice ending World War I had been declared four days before it happened.

[23] Fearing possible antitrust issues with the Eisenhower Administration Justice Department, Scripps and Hearst rushed the merger through with unusual speed and secrecy.

[23] Rival AP was a publishers' cooperative and could assess its members to help pay the extraordinary costs of covering major news—wars, the Olympic Games, national political conventions.

[22][24] But the UP-INS merger involved another business component that was to hurt the new UPI company badly in later years.

Because the AP was a cooperative essentially owned by the newspapers, those in the South influenced its coverage of the racial unrest and protests, often ignoring, minimizing, or slanting the reporting.

[22] White House reporter Helen Thomas became the public face of UPI, as she was seen at televised press conferences beginning in the early 1960s.

[22] UPI famously scooped the AP in reporting the assassination of US President John Kennedy on Friday, November 22, 1963.

That service, United Press Movietone, or UPMT, was a pioneer in newsfilm syndication and numbered among its clients major US and foreign networks and local stations, including for many years the early TV operation of ABC News.

Scripps wound up giving the agency away to two inexperienced businessmen, Douglas Ruhe (son of David Ruhe, a member of the Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing body of the Baháʼí Faith) and William Geissler, originally associated with two better-known partners, who soon departed.

Bettmann was sold to Microsoft founder Bill Gates's separate Corbis Corporation, storing them underground in Pennsylvania and digitizing them for licensing, frequently without any notation of their UPI origins.

In August 2011, Corbis and AP agreed to distribute each other's photos to their clients, effectively combining the pre-1983 UPI library with that of its former main rival for some marketing purposes.

[30] UPI's remaining minority stake in UPITN was also sold and the agency was renamed Worldwide Television News (WTN).

[8][9] Mario Vázquez Raña, a Mexican media magnate, with a nominal American minority partner, Houston real estate developer Joseph Russo, purchased UPI out of bankruptcy for $40 million, losing millions during his short tenure, and firing numerous high-level staff.

De Borchgrave maintained that "what was brilliant pioneering work on the part of UPI prior to World War II, with radio news, is now a static quantity and so far as I'm concerned, certainly doesn't fit into my plans for the future".

He sought to shift UPI's dwindling resources into Internet-based delivery of newsletter services, focusing more on technical and diplomatic specialties than on general news.

The rump UPI thus sold the client list of its still-significant radio network and broadcast wire to its former rival, the AP.

[22][26] UPI was purchased in May 2000 by News World Communications, a media conglomerate founded by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, which also owned The Washington Times and newspapers in South Korea, Japan, and South America.

[11][33] UPI spokespersons and press releases said the company would be focusing instead on expanding operations in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, and reporting on security threats, intelligence and energy issues.

Among them: UPI reporters and photographers have won ten Pulitzer Prizes: Current History Americas Asia Europe Oceania