News Agency - Wire Services

A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and radio and television broadcasters. A news agency may also be referred to as a wire service, newswire, or news service.


General History of the beginning of Wire Services 

Charles Louis Havas, Paul Reuters, and Bernard Wolff changed the world by creating news agencies that used the telegraph to rapidly transmit information. Charles-Louis Havas (1783–1858) started his working life as a supply officer for the French military, serving in Nantes, France. Later he was a banker, a cotton importer, and a newspaper entrepreneur. Because of his work in both imports and news, he found it easy to view information as an international commodity.

In 1830, following the July Revolution, Louis-Philippe succeeded to the French throne. Having strong liberal tendencies, Louise-Philippe proclaimed freedom of the press, and Havas saw the need for better organization of information and news traffic (Havas 2015). His first step was to set up a foreign newspaper translation bureau in Paris. The bureau was also a bookstore and a focal point of international politics and information. Three years later it became Agence Havas, the world’s first news agency (Shrivastava 2007).

In the beginning, Havas used carrier pigeons to bring news from the morning’s British newspapers to Paris by 3.00 p.m., in time for the evening editions. When the telegraph arrived in France in 1845, Havas was the first to use it. The Havas agency became a publicly traded company after the death of Charles-Louis Havas in 1858, and was the largest of the world’s news agencies for almost a century.