Tom Curley, president and chief executive of The Associated Press and a leading industry voice on press freedom issues, has been named the 2009 recipient of the William Allen White Foundation’s national citation.

Curley will receive the honor Feb. 6 at Kansas University.

Curley is considered one of the industry’s fiercest defenders of press freedoms. In 2007 he was honored with the First Amendment Award by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press for his work encouraging media organizations to fight for the public’s right to know. The next year, he received the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation’s First Amendment Leadership Award for his emphasis on open-records laws and First Amendment reporting.

White, whose name is on KU’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications, was the nationally known publisher of the Emporia Gazette until his death in 1944.