Static GK Quiz: Newspapers and News Agencies of the World

Charles-Louis Havas opened Agence Havas in Paris in 1835 to translate and sell foreign news, which makes it the first news agency in the world; the business was reorganised in 1944 and has been known since then as Agence France-Presse.

Paul Julius Reuter, who had earlier worked for Havas in Paris and had used carrier pigeons to carry stock prices between Aachen and Brussels, moved to London and founded his telegraph news office there in 1851, close to the Stock Exchange.

Xinhua, whose name means new China, was set up in 1931 as the Red China News Agency, took its present name in 1937 and works from Beijing as the state news agency of the People's Republic of China.

Yonhap News Agency works from Seoul and is the main wire service of the Republic of Korea, widely quoted abroad for reports on the Korean peninsula.

In 1976 the government merged the Press Trust of India, United News of India, Hindustan Samachar and Samachar Bharati into one agency called Samachar, a step widely seen as part of the control of the press during the Emergency.

The Press Trust of India was registered in 1947 and began work in 1949, taking over the business of the Associated Press of India, and it is owned by the newspapers that subscribe to it; its surplus goes back into the service rather than to shareholders.

Pravda, which means truth in Russian, was founded in 1912 and became the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, printing the party line on every question until the Soviet Union broke up; Izvestia, meaning news, was the paper of the Soviet government.

Shimbun is the Japanese word for newspaper, and Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun are the two best known Japanese dailies; Yomiuri Shimbun has for many years had one of the largest circulations of any newspaper in the world, and Nihon Keizai Shimbun, known as Nikkei, is the leading financial daily…

Jinnah founded Dawn in Delhi in 1941 as the English newspaper of the Muslim League, and after partition it moved to Karachi, where it continues as one of the best known English dailies of Pakistan.

The World Press Freedom Index has been brought out since 2002 by Reporters Without Borders, a non-governmental organisation based in Paris, which ranks countries on the conditions in which journalists work.