Wire services | Revolutions in Communication

Paul Julius Reuter

The media institutions we call “wire services” — including the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Press, and ACAN-EFE, among others — have their roots in the need for rapid interconnection of newspapers and magazines in the 1830s and 40s.

It’s an era of increasingly democratic institutions, especially in North America and Europe, and the ideas of the political revolutions were spread rapidly by the new medium of telegraphy.

Before the telegraph, news from other cities or countries came from newspapers carried in the mail, translated, edited, and then reset into type. The process could take weeks or, for transatlantic communication, from two to four months.

Charles Louis Havas (1783–1858), Paul Reuter (1816-1899), and Bernhard Wolff (1811-1879) revolutionized mass communication in the 1840s by creating news agencies that used the telegraph to transmit information.

Havas 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.

Berhnard Wolff and Paul Reuter were two Havas employees who, with the help of Havas, founded two other major telegraphic news agencies. Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau started in Berlin a year after the Revolution of 1848 and the liberalization of press laws. Wolff was manager of the National Zeitung, founded that year, which started a policy of carrying news dispatches by telegraph from Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt. By 1869, WTB was so closely associated with the government that it had offices in the main postal and telegraph building.

Paul Reuter was a journalist and bookstore owner who married a British banker’s daughter. He and his wife left Germany after the collapse of the revolution of 1848 and he began working for Havas in Paris as a translator. Seeing opportunity in the expanding telegraph, Reuter moved to Aachen, Germany, in October of 1849 and opened a news and stock service. Aachen, that year, was the end of the line for the telegraph from Berlin.

When the French opened a telegraph line from Paris to Brussels, Reuter was in the middle. He began filling in the 140-kilometer (90 mile) gap across the border by using carrier pigeons and express riders. As the telegraph network expanded, Reuter stayed ahead. He moved to London and opened an office in the heart of the city’s financial center one month before the new London–Paris submarine telegraph cable started operating.

Havas was also influential in the creation of other news agencies. Guglielmo Stefani (1819–61) was a journalist from Venice who joined the 1848 revolution and fought for Italian independence from Austria. He was imprisoned by the Austrians but then exiled, and in 1853, with help from Havas, he set up Agenzia Telegrafica Stefani. After his death, Havas acquired half of the agency, which continued as the major Italian news agency until 1945.

Havas also linked up with a Spanish news agency established by Nilo Maria Fabra, a Barcelona journalist, in 1865. The Agencia de Noticias (news agency) Fabra merged with two other agencies in 1939 to form EFE, the world’s largest Spanish-language wire service.

With so many countries communicating by telegraph, international cooperation was necessary. In May 1865, a Berlin convention on telegraphy decided to adopt Morse code as the international telegraph alphabet. The group continued to meet regularly, and eventually became the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the oldest organization incorporated into the United Nations system in the mid-twentieth century (ITU 2010).

The big three European wire services were able to dominate the competition through the 19th and into the 20th centuries. In 1870, Havas, Reuters, and Wolff formed a cartel that divided up territories for exclusive news services. Wolff ’s Telegraph Bureau (WTB) would serve northern and eastern Europe; Reuters would serve the British Empire; and Havas would serve the Mediterranean and Latin American regions (Storey 1951). The cartel agreement was extended into the US with a deal between Reuters and the AP.

The European wire services were often seen as semi-official agencies of their respective governments. Wolff ’s had little choice in 1933 when the Nazis merged the agency with smaller competitors. Havas and Stefani were also left without choices when faced with fascist governments. After the war, Havas was replaced by Agence France Press, Stefani was replaced by Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA), and Wolff ’s was replaced by Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA).

Today a dozen major news agencies from the era of the telegraph—especially AP, Reuters, AFP, EFE, and DPA—compete in twenty-first-century global news markets.

Havas, 1835–1945,France,Charles-Louis Havas,AFP – Agence France Press

Associated Press, 1846–present,United States,Moses Beach,AP

Wolffs, 1849–1933,Germany,Bernhard Wolff,DPA – Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Reuters, 1851–present,Britain,Paul Reuter,Reuters

Stefani, 1853–1945, Italy, Guglielmo Stafani,ANSA – Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata

Fabra, 1865–1939,Spain,Nilo Maria Fabra,EFE

Itar-Tass, 1925–present,Russia,St. Petersburg Tel. Agency (1904),ITAR-TASS

Xinhua, 1937–present,China,Red China News Agency (1931),Xinhua

Press Trust of India, 1947–present,India,AP India (1909),PTI

Kyodo, 1947–present,Japan,Domei News Agency (1936), Kyodo

United Press Int’l, 1958–2000,United States,United Press (1907) and Int’l Press (1909), (inactive)

Inter-Press Service, 1964–present,International,Roberto Savio,IPS [/table]