Concept
news agency
An organization that gathers news and sells it to many newspapers and broadcasters; with the telegraph it sped up the turning of news into a commercial product in the 19th century.
A news agency is an organization that, with its reporters and subscribing outlets, gathers news once and distributes it to many newspapers and broadcasters. Havas was founded in Paris in 1835; Paul Julius Reuter opened his telegraph office in London in 1851; the early agencies made using the fastest means, pigeons and then the telegraph, the heart of their business . In America, in 1846 New York papers set up a joint arrangement to share the cost of Mexican War news, and that arrangement later became the Associated Press .
The social result is that the same text appears in many newspapers on the same day. A national and international agenda can thus form without an item having to be “local”. This connects directly to the later discussions of agenda-setting and gatekeeping.
Example
(Hypothetical example.) If three different newspapers in Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir publish a prime-ministerial statement with the same sentences on the same evening, it usually shows that the same agency copy was used.