Newspapers and News Agencies of the World: Notes

A newspaper reaches the reader, but most of what it prints does not belong to it. The report of a war, an election or a trade deal is usually bought from a news agency, a wholesale house of news that keeps correspondents everywhere and sells the same despatch to hundreds of papers, broadcasters and websites. For an examiner this topic is therefore two lists held together by one idea: which agency belongs to which country, and which newspaper belongs to which capital. The questions are almost always pairs, and the marks go to the candidate who has memorised the pairs rather than read about them.

What a news agency is

A news agency, also called a wire service, gathers news and photographs and supplies them to subscribing media houses for a fee. Some are cooperatives owned by the newspapers they serve, such as the Associated Press of the United States and the Press Trust of India. Some are state owned and speak for their governments, such as Xinhua of China, TASS of Russia and the Korean Central News Agency of North Korea. Some are commercial companies, such as Reuters. The oldest of them all is the French agency now called Agence France-Presse, which began in 1835 as Agence Havas, founded in Paris by Charles-Louis Havas, the man from whose office two of his clerks, Paul Julius Reuter and Bernhard Wolff, went on to start their own agencies in London and Berlin.

The news agencies of the world

Smaller agencies are asked in matching questions: Bernama of Malaysia, Antara of Indonesia, the Associated Press of Pakistan, Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha of Bangladesh, Rastriya Samachar Samiti of Nepal, IRNA of Iran, WAM of the United Arab Emirates, the Middle East News Agency of Egypt, Prensa Latina of Cuba and the Australian Associated Press.

News agencies of India

The Press Trust of India, set up in 1947 and in operation from 1949, is the largest Indian agency; it is a non-profit cooperative owned by Indian newspapers and took over the business of the Associated Press of India. United News of India followed at the end of the 1950s, and Hindustan Samachar and Samachar Bharati served the Indian languages. During the Emergency these four were merged in 1976 into a single agency called Samachar, which was broken up again into its parts in 1978. Among the later agencies, the Indo-Asian News Service and Asian News International supply text and video news.

Famous newspapers of the world

Firsts and awards worth memorising

• The earliest news sheets were the Acta Diurna, the daily notices put up in ancient Rome.
• The first printed newspaper is taken to be Relation, published at Strasbourg in 1605 by Johann Carolus.
• The oldest newspaper still in existence is Post- och Inrikes Tidningar of Sweden, begun in 1645.
• The first newspaper of India was Hicky's Bengal Gazette, started at Calcutta on 29 January 1780 by James Augustus Hicky.
• Pravda, meaning truth, was the organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Dawn was founded by Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1941.
• The Pulitzer Prize for journalism, awarded since 1917 through Columbia University, comes from the bequest of Joseph Pulitzer.

Press freedom

World Press Freedom Day is observed on 3 May every year, a date that follows the Windhoek Declaration of 1991 and was proclaimed by the United Nations in 1993. The World Press Freedom Index, which ranks countries by the conditions for journalism, is published by Reporters Without Borders, a body based in Paris. The World Association of News Publishers represents newspaper publishers, and in India the Press Council of India is the statutory body for press standards while the Registrar of Newspapers for India keeps the register of titles. Candidates should remember who publishes which report, because the index is often wrongly credited to the United Nations.