News

===Newswire===
The development of the [[electrical telegraph]], which often travelled along railroad lines, enabled news to travel faster, over longer distances.<ref>Wenzlhuemer, ''Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World'' (2013), pp. 31–32.</ref> (Days before Morse's Baltimore–Washington line transmitted the famous question, "What hath God wrought?", it transmitted the news that Henry Clay and Theodore Frelinghuysen had been chosen by the Whig nominating party.)<ref name="Allan, 2004 p. 9" /> Telegraph networks enabled a new centralization of the news, in the hands of [[wire services]] concentrated in major cities. The modern form of these originated with [[Charles-Louis Havas]], who founded Bureau Havas (later [[Agence France-Presse]]) in Paris. Havas began in 1832, using the French government's optical telegraph network. In 1840 he began using pigeons for communications to Paris, London, and Brussels. Havas began to use the electric telegraph when it became available.<ref>Bakker, "Trading Facts" (2011), p. 15.</ref>

One of Havas's proteges, [[Bernhard Wolff]], founded [[Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau]] in Berlin in 1849.<ref>Starr, ''Creation of the Media'' (2004), p. 180.</ref> Another Havas disciple, [[Paul Reuter]], began collecting news from Germany and France in 1849, and in 1851 immigrated to London, where he established the [[Reuters]] news agency—specializing in news from the continent.<ref>Salmon, ''The Newspaper and the Historian'' (1923), p. 118.</ref> In 1863, William Saunders and Edward Spender formed the [[Central News Agency (London)|Central Press]] agency, later called the [[Press Association]], to handle domestic news.<ref>Salmon, ''The Newspaper and the Historian'' (1923), pp. 117–118.</ref> Just before insulated telegraph line crossed the English Channel in 1851, Reuter won the right to transmit stock exchange prices between Paris and London.<ref name=Wenzlhuemer90>Wenzlhuemer, ''Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World'' (2013), pp. 90–92.</ref> He maneuvered Reuters into a dominant global position with the motto "Follow the Cable", setting up news outposts across the [[British Empire]] in Alexandria (1865), Bombay (1866), Melbourne (1874), Sydney (1874), and Cape Town (1876).<ref name=Wenzlhuemer90 /><ref>Hachten, ''World News Prism'' (1996), p. 43.</ref> In the United States, the [[Associated Press]] became a news powerhouse, gaining a lead position through an exclusive arrangement with the [[Western Union]] company.<ref name=Starr177 />

The telegraph ushered in a new global communications regime, accompanied by a restructuring of the national postal systems, and closely followed by the advent of telephone lines. With the value of international news at a premium, governments, businesses, and news agencies moved aggressively to reduce transmission times. In 1865, Reuters had the scoop on the [[Assassination of Abraham Lincoln|Lincoln assassination]], reporting the news in England twelve days after the event took place.<ref>Bakker, "Trading Facts" (2011), p. 16.</ref> In 1866, [[Transatlantic telegraph cable|an undersea telegraph cable]] successfully connected Ireland to Newfoundland (and thus the Western Union network) cutting trans-Atlantic transmission time from days to hours.<ref name="Allan, 2004 p. 17">Allan, ''News Culture'' (2004), p. 17.</ref><ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Headrick | first1 = Daniel R. | last2 = Griset | first2 = Pascal | title = Submarine Telegraph Cables: Business and Politics, 1838–1939 | journal = Business History Review | volume = 75 | issue = 3 }}</ref><ref>Graham Meikle, ''Interpreting News''; Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; p. [https://books.google.com/books?id=axwdBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA152 152].</ref> The transatlantic cable allowed fast exchange of information about the London and New York stock exchanges, as well as the New York, Chicago, and Liverpool commodity exchanges—for the price of $5–10, in gold, per word.<ref>Hills, ''Struggle for Control of Global Communication'' (2002), p. 32.</ref> Transmitting On 11 May 1857, a young British telegraph operator in Delhi signaled home to alert the authorities of the [[Indian Rebellion of 1857]]. The rebels proceeded to disrupt the British telegraph network, which was rebuilt with more redundancies.<ref>Wenzlhuemer, ''Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World'' (2013), pp. 211–215.</ref> In 1902–1903, Britain and the U.S. completed the circumtelegraphy of the planet with transpacific cables from Canada to Fiji and New Zealand (British Empire), and from the US to Hawaii and the occupied Philippines.<ref>Hills, ''Struggle for Control of Global Communication'' (2002), pp. 145–146.</ref> U.S. reassertions of the [[Monroe Doctrine]] notwithstanding, Latin America was a battleground of competing telegraphic interests until World War I, after which U.S. interests finally did consolidate their power in the hemisphere.<ref>Hills, ''Struggle for Control of Global Communication'' (2002), pp. 153–178.</ref>

[[File:Eisenbahnen- und Telegraphendichte der Erde um 1900.jpg|thumb|World railway and telegraph system, 1900]]
By the turn of the century (i.e., {{Circa|1900}}), Wolff, Havas, and Reuters formed a news cartel, dividing up the global market into three sections, in which each had more-or-less exclusive distribution rights and relationships with national agencies.<ref>Oliver Boyd-Barrett, {{"'}}Global' News Agencies", in Boyd-Barrett & Rantanen, ''The Globalization of News'' (1998), pp. 26–27. "The principal feature of the world's news market in the second half of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th, was the cartel. This was an oligopolistic and hierarchical structure of the global news market controlled by Reuters, Havas and Wolff at the top tier, in partnership with an ever-increasing number of national news agencies. Each member of the triumvirate had the right to distribute its news service, incorporating news of the cartel, to its ascribed territories: these territories were determined by periodic, formal agreements. […] The triumvirate of Reuters, Havas, and Wolff supplied world news to national news agencies in return for a service of national news […] (although the practice was rather more complicated) the national agencies had exclusive rights to the distribution of cartel news in their territories, and the cartel had exclusive rights to the national agency news services."</ref> Each agency's area corresponded roughly to the colonial sphere of its mother country.<ref>Bakker, "Trading Facts" (2011), p. 22.</ref> Reuters and the Australian national news service had an agreement to exchange news only with each other.<ref>Bakker, "Trading Facts" (2011), p. 36.</ref> Due to the high cost of maintaining infrastructure, political goodwill, and global reach, newcomers found it virtually impossible to challenge the big three European agencies or the American Associated Press.<ref>Bakker, "Trading Facts" (2011), p. 23.</ref> In 1890 Reuters (in partnership with the Press Association, England's major news agency for domestic stories) expanded into "soft" news stories for public consumption, about topics such as sports and "human interest".<ref>Bakker, "Trading Facts" (2011), p. 28.</ref> In 1904, the big three wire services opened relations with ''Vestnik'', the news agency of Czarist Russia, to their group, though they maintained their own reporters in Moscow.<ref>Michael Palmer, "What Makes News", in Boyd-Barrett & Rantanen, ''The Globalization of News'' (1998), pp. 180–181.</ref> During and after the [[Russian Revolution]], the outside agencies maintained a working relationship with the Petrograd Telegraph Agency, renamed the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) and eventually the [[TASS|Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS)]].<ref name=Palmer184>Michael Palmer, "What Makes News", in Boyd-Barrett & Rantanen, ''The Globalization of News'' (1998), p. 184.</ref>

The [[Chinese Communist Party]] created its news agency, the Red China News Agency, in 1931; its primary responsibilities were the ''Red China'' newspaper and the internal ''Reference News''. In 1937, the Party renamed the agency ''[[Xinhua]]'', New China. Xinhua became the official news agency of the [[People's Republic of China]] in 1949.<ref name=XinXin>Xin Xin, "A developing market in news: Xinhua News Agency and Chinese newspapers"; ''Media, Culture & Society'' 28.1 (2006).</ref>

These agencies touted their ability to distill events into "minute globules of news", 20–30 word summaries which conveyed the essence of new developments.<ref name=Palmer184 /> Unlike newspapers, and contrary to the sentiments of some of their reporters, the agencies sought to keep their reports simple and factual.<ref>Michael Palmer, "What Makes News", in Boyd-Barrett & Rantanen, ''The Globalization of News'' (1998), pp. 182–183.</ref> The wire services brought forth the "inverted pyramid" model of news copy, in which key facts appear at the start of the text, and more and more details are included as it goes along.<ref name="Allan, 2004 p. 17"/> The sparse telegraphic writing style spilled over into newspapers, which often reprinted stories from the wire with little embellishment.<ref name=MacGregor /><ref>Allan, ''News Culture'' (2004), pp. 18–19.</ref> In a 20 September 1918 ''Pravda'' editorial, Lenin instructed the Soviet press to cut back on their political rambling and produce many short anticapitalist news items in "telegraph style".<ref>Wolfe, ''Governing Soviet Journalism'' (2005), pp. 25–26. Translating Lenin: "Why instead of 200–400 lines you can't write in 20–10 lines about such simple, well-known, clear, and already mastered to a great degree, widespread phenomena like the base betrayals of the Mensheviks, those lackeys of the bourgeoisie, like the Anglo-Japanese invasion for the restoration of the holy law of capital; like the chattering teeth of the American millionaires against Germany, and so on, and so on. It is necessary to talk about this, it is necessary to register each new fact in this regard, but in a few lines; to pound out in 'telegraph style' the new appearances of old, already known and evaluated policies."</ref>

As in previous eras, the news agencies provided special services to political and business clients, and these services constituted a significant portion of their operations and income. The wire services maintained close relationships with their respective national governments, which provided both press releases and payments.<ref name=OBB23>Boyd-Barrett, {{"'}}Global' News Agencies", in Boyd-Barrett & Rantanen, ''The Globalization of News'' (1998), pp. 23–24. "Earnings were generally derived from the sale of news services to media, financial or economic institutions, and governments, which were important as sources of revenue and as sources of intelligence, and it is generally considered that their news services reflected their respective national interests."</ref> The acceleration and centralization of economic news facilitated regional economic integration and [[economic globalization]]. "It was the decrease in information costs and the increasing communication speed that stood at the roots of increased market integration, rather than falling transport costs by itself. In order to send goods to another area, merchants needed to know first whether in fact to send off the goods and to what place. Information costs and speed were essential for these decisions."<ref>Bakker, "Trading Facts" (2011), p. 33.</ref>