News Agencies

Anachronism or Lifeblood of the Media System?

Stephen Jukes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000580914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores the role of international news agencies and investigates whether they have been able to adapt to the contemporary media landscape following the disruption wrought by fake news, social media and an increasingly polarised public discourse.

News Agencies addresses the key players in the industry, beginning with the 'big three' (Reuters, The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse) and then moving on to the newest global player, Bloomberg. It also explores the role of alternative providers of international news which are seeking to challenge the Western-centric perspective of the agencies. Drawing on interviews with senior editors, Jukes investigates the challenges agencies face in terms of their editorial strategy and business models in today's social media context. At a time when there is widespread distrust in the media and agencies are relying increasingly on user-generated content as a source for news, Jukes critically explores the role of these agencies in the debate over fake news and policies on objectivity, impartiality and verification.

Shedding light on a sector of the news industry that has steadfastly remained out of the public spotlight, this book will be of interest to students and academics in the fields of journalism and media studies.

1From carrier pigeons to social media

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003029656-2

The founders of the early telegraph agencies in Europe, Messrs Havas, Reuter and Wolff, were cosmopolitans of their time … they knew something about publishing, journalism and business: in short, they were the dot.com businessmen of their age.

Terhi Rantanan (2009: 30)

Introduction

It started with a distinctly analogue combination of carrier pigeons and semaphore, a Frenchman named Charles-Louis Havas and his business-savvy realisation that there was money to be made in gathering, distributing and selling news and stock price information to European newspapers. And so, in 1835, Agence Havas was founded as the first international news agency,¹ soon to be joined in 1849 by the Berlin-based Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau and in 1851 by Reuters. Within just a few years, the three news agencies would expand their reach by embracing the emerging technology of the telegraph and then the first transatlantic undersea cables linking Europe to the United States. Across the Atlantic, the Associated Press came into being in 1846 when five New York City newspapers joined forces to finance a pony express route to deliver news of the war between the United States and Mexico. The race to be first to provide news around the world had begun.

It is a race that has continued for more than 150 years and one that at every turn has seen international news agencies embrace the very latest technology in a bid to outpace the competition. Today news agencies have some of the most advanced communications systems in the world and “beats” are measured in seconds. It is a far cry from the mid-19th century when foreign correspondents such as William Howard Russell were sending dispatches from the Crimean War by letter, with the result that they could take up to three weeks to arrive back at the editorial headquarters of The Times in London via horse and steamer.²

These fledgling news agencies, riding the wave of rapidly developing technology and the expansion of daily newspapers, quickly added “hard news” stories to their repertoire of stock market reports and prices and soon became known for speed, accuracy and straight forward reporting. By the time of the Franco-Prussian war (1870–1871), the idea of a foreign correspondent’s letter or dispatch was becoming a thing of the past and British newspaper readers expected news from overseas to be available for the next day’s edition (Williams, 2011: 53). The offering of news was beginning to take in a now familiar diet of wars and disasters, ranging from floods and earthquakes to street riots and strikes. In 1883, Reuters correspondents were sent a message from its editorial headquarters³ that might almost have been written today:

It is requested that the bare facts be first telegraphed with the utmost promptitude, and as soon as possible afterwards a descriptive account, proportionate to the gravity of the incident. Care should, of course, be taken to follow the matter up.

(cited in Read, 1992: 101)

The first part of this chapter focuses in more detail on the development of the news agencies, how they contributed to the rise of globalisation and their pivotal role in setting the values and practice norms of Anglo-American journalism, norms that had held largely uncontested until the rapid emergence of social media in the 21st century. The second part explores the challenges to those norms that news agencies have had to cope with during the most recent decades, challenges that have been wrought by wide sweeping societal, economic, political and technological changes that almost overnight threw their traditional business model into question.

Birth of the agencies

The emergence and development of international news agencies since the middle of the 19th century bears an uncanny resemblance to preoccupations in today’s media landscape. The agencies have at times acted as a cartel, monopolies or duopolies, as has been the case with wholesale television news footage where the market has effectively been dominated by Reuters and AP operations (until a recent challenge by AFP); they have been early adopters of new technology, embracing at first the telegraph and since then every advance in communications to speed up the transmission of stories and images; they have at times been funded, both secretly and openly, by governments and continually been confronted with censorship at times of war; they have been instrumental in establishing a style of “plain vanilla” journalism and spreading Western news values around the world both in colonial and post-colonial times; their adherence to fact-based reporting has been seen as a core strength and yet has often been criticised, especially when it comes to the discipline of presenting opposing sides of a sensitive story, sometimes at times of conflict leading to charges of lack of patriotism; they have been content to operate behind the scenes in day-to-day news gathering but have stood up publicly against harassment, imprisonment and, sadly, the murder of their own correspondents.

It is unlikely that Charles-Louis Havas had an inkling of what was to come when he set up Bureau Havas in 1832, an agency which was to become the precursor of today’s Agence France-Presse.⁴ While initially the goal at Havas was to translate foreign newspapers for the growing French press, within three years it was producing its own news in the name of L’Agence Havas. Foreshadowing what was to become the agency ethos of speed and accuracy, Havas’s watchword was “vite et bien.”⁵ Soon Paul Julius Reuter, who had been a sub-editor at Havas, and Bernhard Wolff, also a Havas employee, had launched their own rival agencies in London and Berlin, respectively. All three could ride the wave of strong growth in Europe’s printed press and growing demand for news which was rapidly becoming a commodity that the likes of Havas, Reuter and Wolff could sell. At the same time, they could exploit the fast developing telegraph network, from where the language of “wire” services and “cables” would stem. Indeed, the first Havas stories appeared in French newspapers in 1853 as “Dépêches télégraphiques privés” (Bielsa, 2008: 351). The first experimental telegraph system had been invented in the 1790s by a French engineer Claude Chappe (a sort of semaphore system), while the first commercial electronic telegraph was established by the mid-1840s by the British scientists Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke (Parry, 2011: 197).⁶ But the true advance came with the laying of the first major submarine cable link from Dover to Calais in 1851 and the first reliable transatlantic cable in 1865 (ibid: 200). It was because the telegraph networks expanded so rapidly in Britain, France and Germany that the three fledgling European agencies were able to break out of a national framework and internationalise their operations so quickly (Williams, 2011: 51), starting to “follow the cable” to the United States, then Africa and India in the 1860s and China, South America and Japan in the 1870s (ibid). Indeed, “follow the cable” would become one of the watchwords of Julius Reuter (Palmer, 2019: 13). During the Mexican-American war of 1846, there were no telegraph networks in the immediate vicinity to rely on. News dispatches originated in Veracruz, crossed the Gulf of Mexico by boat and landed at Mobile, Alabama where they were met by a pony express rider to beat the US mail coach to Richmond and the telegraph terminus. The riders were only paid if they arrived 24 hours ahead of the mail.⁷

Those early years of relaying messages from country to country by homing pigeon or pony express may have become part of the news agency legend and the stuff of film.⁸ But the real expansion was driven by the industrialisation of the mid-19th century. As Palmer observes in his history of news agencies (2019: 12):

Pigeons, boats and ponies nonetheless remained part of a romantic mythology of transmission. Less romantic, telegraph networks were, with the railways (or in US parlance, railroads), the real accelerators of messages, people and goods across time and space.

Establishing news values and norms

The emerging power of the news agencies, combined with the technological limitations of the telegraphic system of communications, had a profound effect in establishing the style of reporting and what were to become deeply entrenched Anglo-American norms of journalism. Those norms have been consistently challenged, especially in the emotion-driven era of social media, and Chapter 3 will explore in detail how the news agencies are addressing this challenge. But the concept of objectivity remains core to discussions about journalism as a profession and works across national frontiers (Maras, 2013: 5). The origins of what has loosely been termed the “objectivity paradigm” are disputed both historically and in the academic field of journalism studies, but it is clear that a series of parallel developments in the United States and Britain contributed to what was to become a reliance on fact-based journalism. This was the age of Darwin, positivism, the primacy of reason over the senses and a growing belief in scientific facts. Schudson (1978) characterises journalists at the turn of the century as “naïve empiricists” who believed in facts as aspects of the world itself, rather than human statements about the world.

But there were also far more prosaic reasons for the emergence of the objectivity paradigm. The news agencies faced entirely practical considerations of reliability and price as they tried to increase their provision of news and sales to expanding newspaper markets. They soon found that telegraph costs were extremely high, leading to a clipped, truncated style that used as few words as possible. Read notes that in the 1860s it cost as much as £1 per word to send a cable from London to India so that early Reuters cable telegrams to and from the world outside Europe were usually kept to bare essentials (1992: 92). At the same time, early telegraph connections were notoriously unreliable – the first transatlantic cable was too thin and failed after less than one month. So, a fact-based news style based on the “Five Ws” (who, what, when, where and why) became the norm, meaning that if the telegraph broke down, the chances were that the most important part of the story, at the top, would arrive in tact. The style of the inverted pyramid story leading with the five Ws became enshrined as an ideal format, and one that is taught in journalism schools to this day.

In the early days of US press expansion in the first half of the 19th century, enabled by the introduction of the rotary press and then steam-powered press, newspapers were expected to present a partisan viewpoint. But as the new technology of mass printing allowed newspaper barons to increase their circulation and, by extension, potential profits, so they pursued politically less partisan coverage to appeal to a wider readership. Once again, this played into the agencies’ hands and their factual news accounts. An emphasis on accuracy and telling a story from more than one perspective also emerged as a selling point for the agencies. Paul Julius Reuter, for example, ensured that he had correspondents covering both sides of the 1859 Franco-Austrian war, gaining him credit for objectivity (Read, 1992: 31).

It is remarkable that many of the tenets of modern journalism, some of which are clearly controversial and contested, emerged during this period of the mid-19th century. The style became known as “wire copy” or in German “Telegrafenstil.” It concentrated on the five Ws, told a story from multiple perspectives, eschewed sensation, prized freedom from bias and separated fact from comment. During the early 20th century, the fact-based style became even more deeply entrenched within Anglo-American norms as journalism tried to establish itself as a profession distinct from the emerging discipline of public relations. Joseph Pulitzer endowed the School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York in 1904; Walter Lippmann, the journalist and political commentator, vowed to upgrade the professional dignity of journalists and provide training “in which the ideal of objective testimony is cardinal” (cited by Schudson, 2001: 163). The general manager of the Associated Press, Kent Cooper, who joined AP in 1910, actually encouraged his reporters to use livelier prose, added human interest stories and in the 1920s relaxed the agency’s ban on bylines. But while Cooper steered the AP into a more modern age of radio and news photos (Halberstam, 2007: 410), he was steadfast in his adherence to fact-based journalism (cited by Schudson, 2001: 162):

The journalist who deals in facts diligently developed and intelligently presented exalts his profession, and his stories need never be colorless or dull.

Cooper was even more explicit in a 1943 speech on the AP’s future, stating (cited in Kreinberg, 2016):

I have said that true and unbiased news is the highest original moral concept ever developed in America and given the world. This concept, the AP of the future must fight for, as it has through the years.

Competition and the Agency Alliance Treaty

It didn’t take long for the success of the first news agencies to generate competition. In another parallel development to today’s personality-driven social media, in which sensationalist news poses a challenge to drier fact-based media, rival news agencies that sprung up in the second half of the 19th century sought to provide a livelier style of news. In the United Kingdom, the Central News Agency, founded in 1863, and Exchange Telegraph (1872) were soon providing competing news services, while Dalziel’s news style (set up in 1890) was perceived as being less institutional than that of Reuters and inundated European newspapers with American human interest and sports stories (Palmer, 2019: 59).

The Dalziel threat lasted only three years but the three original European agencies, Reuters, Havas and Wolff ha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: News agencies – a world unto themselves
• 1 From carrier pigeons to social media
• 2 Weathering the storm: Can more than 150 years of tradition save the news agencies?
• 3 Back to the future: Social media, fact-checking and plain vanilla journalism
• 4 Collaboration, community and state actors
• Conclusion: News agencies – rooted in the past and looking to the future
• Index