What is a news agency?

A news agency is an organisation that gathers information at source and sells it on to other media as dispatches, photographs, video or data. It's the wholesaler of the chain: you're not its customer, newsrooms are. That's why its name usually appears in tiny type at the foot of an article — "with AFP", "Reuters" — even though it supplied most of the text.

What an agency is for

No newsroom, however large, can have someone everywhere. The agency solves that by pooling: it maintains a network of correspondents and sells the same stream to hundreds of clients, which makes economically possible a coverage none of them would fund alone. Without agencies, news from a distant country would simply not exist for most outlets.

• It covers continuously, with no day off and no favoured time zone.
• It writes in a deliberately neutral, reusable style: the client must be able to run it as-is or rewrite it at will.
• It also supplies stills and video, often the most expensive and hardest part to obtain.
• It acts as a shared clock: when a major agency moves a story, newsrooms worldwide know at the same instant.

Global agencies and national agencies

The convention is to distinguish three agencies with global reach — AFP, Reuters and the Associated Press — from a large number of national agencies covering their own country in depth and exchanging with the global ones. Switzerland has its own, Keystone-SDA, born of the merger between the Swiss Telegraphic Agency and the Keystone photo agency; it publishes in German, French and Italian, a peculiarity tied directly to the country's multilingualism.

How an agency works

An agency wire isn't a series of finished articles, it's a text that grows. A first alert of a few words signals that something has just happened. It's followed by a short dispatch, then a fuller version, then a text enriched with reactions and context, each superseding the last. A single fact can thus produce a dozen successive versions in one day, which is why an online article "citing AFP" can change several times in front of you without the newsroom having decided anything at all.

This mechanism imposes a particular writing discipline. A dispatch has to be accurate at every moment of its life, including when it's incomplete: you never write a hypothesis into it to correct later, you write what's established and stay silent on the rest. It's a harder constraint than it looks, because it forbids exactly what competition encourages — guessing slightly faster than the next outlet.

The flip side: uniformity

Hundreds of newsrooms drinking from the same well carries an obvious cost: on a distant event you'll often read the same sentence, barely reworked, in ten different papers. If the agency got it wrong, the error propagates everywhere at the same speed — which is exactly why agencies maintain very strict correction procedures, with explicit kill or correction advisories. For the reader the reflex is simple: when ten sources say the same thing, check whether they're ten sources or one source quoted ten times.