Wire
The wire is the continuous stream of dispatches a news agency sends its clients. How it works, and why the reader never sees it directly.
The wire is the continuous stream of dispatches a news agency transmits, in real time and without pause, to subscribing newsrooms. The name comes from the telegraph and then the teleprinter, which printed news continuously onto a paper tape; the machine is gone, the word stayed.
A wire is not a news website: it is a product sold to professionals. It is graded by urgency levels — from a few-word alert to a fully built piece — categorised by topic and country, and lands inside newsroom software, not in a browser.
Understanding the wire explains much of the news you read: when twenty sites publish the same information in the same wording within ten minutes, it is neither coincidence nor plagiarism — they are all running the same dispatch.
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