The major global news agencies

A handful of agencies feed nearly every newsroom on earth, around the clock. When something happens far from you, an agency almost always witnessed it first, and the paper you read is working from its dispatch. Knowing who those agencies are, under what statute they operate and who owns them is therefore among the most useful things a reader can learn.

Our method — and why this is not a ranking

This page is a curated editorial selection, not a ranking. We order nothing by size, audience or influence, and the sequence means nothing: the first agency listed is not "better" than the next. We publish no audience, circulation or headcount figures, because we have not measured them ourselves, and repeating a number we cannot verify would amount to inventing it.

The only criteria used are structural and publicly verifiable: the home country, the legal statute (cooperative, private company, public body, sui generis status), what is actually produced (text, photo, video, data) and the real reach of the correspondent network. These are structural facts, not quality judgements.

The three genuinely global agencies

Only three agencies cover the entire world, in several languages, with their own network of bureaux and permanent correspondents. They differ less in what they cover than in what they are: three radically different ownership structures, each designed to keep editorial independence at arm's length from a shareholder.

AFP (France)

Agence France-Presse descends directly from the Havas agency, founded in Paris in 1835 and generally regarded as the world's first news agency. AFP took its present name at the Liberation and received a sui generis statute in 1957: it is neither an ordinary commercial company nor a state administration, but an autonomous body on which the law imposes independence and universality of coverage. That one-of-a-kind statute is the heart of what you need to understand about AFP: it was written precisely so that no shareholder, the state included, could dictate its editorial line. It produces in French, English, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Arabic.

Reuters (United Kingdom)

Founded in London in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter, the agency is today the news arm of Thomson Reuters, the group formed by bringing together Reuters and Canada's Thomson. It is thus the only one of the three attached to a listed company — which is exactly what makes its Trust Principles essential: those founding principles, whose observance is watched over by a dedicated structure, require among other things integrity, independence and freedom from bias in the supply of news. Reuters has historic strength in business and financial information, inherited from a model in which the markets were always a major client.

AP (United States)

The Associated Press grew out of the 1846 realisation, among competing New York papers, that it was cheaper to share the cost of gathering news than for each to pay it alone. It has kept that shape: a not-for-profit cooperative owned by its members, that is, by the outlets that use it. Where Reuters answers to shareholders and AFP to a legal statute, AP answers to its own customers, who are also its owners. Its style guide, the AP Stylebook, became a reference for the American press far beyond the agency itself.

A second tier: the national and regional agencies

The agencies below are not in the same category, and that is not a shortcoming: their remit is different. A national agency covers its own country first, in its own language or languages, for that country's outlets, and leans on the global agencies for the rest of the world. Putting them on a par with AFP or Reuters would mean comparing two distinct trades.

• Keystone-SDA — the Swiss national agency, formed by the merger of the photo agency Keystone with the Swiss news agency (SDA in German, ATS in French). It produces in German, French and Italian: structurally, the agency of a multilingual country.
• dpa — the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Germany's national agency, whose capital is spread across German media companies, none of which can take control of it.
• ANSA — Italy's national agency, set up as a cooperative of press publishers, on a principle close to AP's.
• EFE — Spain's national agency, publicly owned, with a strong presence across the Spanish-speaking world and Latin America in particular.

State agencies: a structural fact worth knowing

Some agencies with international reach are state agencies: Xinhua is the official agency of the People's Republic of China, TASS that of the Russian Federation. This is not a judgement on the content of any given dispatch, it is a structural fact — and exactly the kind of information a reader should hold in mind, just like AP's cooperative status or Reuters' Trust Principles. Knowing who owns a source never excuses you from reading it; it only tells you who it answers to.