KENNETT NATIVE TAKES TOP PHOTO JOB AT AP

As a child, Sally Stapleton had a good time hanging out at the Daily Dunklin Democrat, the Kennett newspaper then published by her grandfather and father. Since those days, she also has hung out at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe. On Monday she began overseeing the photo operation of the world's largest news-gathering organization.

Stapleton, who joined the Associated Press in 1990, is the AP's new deputy executive photo editor. She heads a far-flung staff that has won 27 Pulitzer Prizes for photography.

She is the daughter of Jack Stapleton, a Jefferson City-based political writer and analyst whose work appears in the Southeast Missourian.

The Kennett newspaper was Stapleton's playground as a child.

"Everyone felt like they had to be nice to us. We ran wild. But I liked the action and the people who worked there," she said in a phone interview from New York City.

Stapleton graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1980 with a magazine degree, focusing on design. In New York interviewing with women's magazines, she discovered the only jobs available to her were as an assistant or secretary, with no chance for advancement.

In shock she returned to the Daily Dunklin Democrat to work on its weekend magazine. She soon realized that photography intrigued her more than design.

"It wasn't the horizontals and verticals and how they played on the page that I got into," she said. "It was what was in those horizontals and verticals."

She returned to the University of Missouri to get a master's degree in photojournalism. Offered a job as a photo editor at the Tampa Tribune in 1983 she took it, thinking she'd finish her master's degree in her spare time.

That was a period when newspapers were converting to color production, and picture editors were in demand. Jobs at metros in Minneapolis, Miami and Boston followed. In each case she was hired as photo editor but also took photos.

The AP hired her in 1990 as its senior Latin America photo editor.

Broadening is the word Stapleton uses to describe her photo sojourns in Colombia, Haiti and Rwanda. "They were all experiences that kind of help you think beyond your stupid inconveniences," she says, "to think broader about what's important and how to spend your time."

The AP's new bureau in Havana symbolizes the broader photo coverage she hopes to champion.

Stapleton expects to think about her experiences in Africa on her death bed. She was in Rwanda taking photographs only four months before the genocidal struggle between the Hutus and Tutsis came to the attention of the world in 1994.

The media missed an important part of the story, she says. "It was very much an ethnic cleansing but also a political cleansing of one group wanting to eliminate the other."

Expanding the AP's African coverage is one of her most important contributions, she says. "I think it's made the world more cognizant of what's going on in Africa. Our goal is not only covering the news but also lifestyle issues."

Technology has dramatically improved the wire service's photographic content, she says. At the time Stapleton was hired, transmitting a single color photograph to the newspapers around the world took 24 minutes. Photographers generally were able to move just one photograph of an event. "By its very nature it almost seemed to be the safe picture," Stapleton said.

The process now is completed in 15 seconds, meaning many more pictures can be distributed.

The generosity of people telling their stories and allowing journalists to spend time with them and photograph them, often in the most extreme circumstances, still takes Stapleton by surprise.

"I have always been amazed at that concept," she says.

Her new job is "bigger than anything I could have imagined. But when I think about it, I've had a lot of luck," she said.

Being Jack Stapleton's daughter helped, she said. "My father is an amazing journalist. In my mind he is one of the most natural and clear-writing journalists I have read." Besides being a writer, her father also teaches at the University of Missouri.

A few years ago, the university's School of Journalism finally granted Stapleton a master's degree, waiving her remaining requirements in favor of experience.