What are the characteristics of news agencies?

Answer 1

1) To circulate information from one country to another.

2) To gather news all around the world that newspapers could not afford individually.

3) To work as a supplier of news (mainly foreign news) to media.

4) To be the first to report breaking news.

Answer 2

News agencies gather, verify, and distribute news content to various media outlets. They operate globally, have vast networks of reporters, and adhere to journalistic standards such as accuracy, objectivity, and impartiality. News agencies play a crucial role in informing the public and shaping the news agenda.

Answer 3

A regional news agency has the role to provide local outlets (newspapers, magazines, brodcasters, websites) with international news from a regional perspective. This means that, while Reuters might cover an event abroad from a British point of view, or AP might privilege in their stories what interests mainly to American audiences, a regional news agency might look at news aiming at their regional public, chosing stories that either affect or concern their clients in a given manner. They can add context to their dispatches, find people from their own area which are somehow involved in that news (for example, a regional agency from Africa can find Africans in a war happening in Asia, what an European or US-based agency would unlikely do), or approach facts electing topics that have to do with their local reality. Many regional news agencies were founded in the 60s, 70s and 80s to meet demands calling for more balanced coverage of world news. Some of them are not exactly "regional agencies", but actually associations of agencies which do not sell news themselves, but rather act on their behalf in political forums like lobbying.

Answer 4

News agencies operate with a series of characteristics, both related to their contents (semantics) and their systemic functions or logistics (syntax) as classified by AGUIAR & REGO, 2009.

Their main syntactic aspects are:

• nonstop flow of information ("real time")
• centralizing structure (no local offices have any autonomy, but depend on the headquarters newsroom)
• mediation (they sell news to media, not directly to audiences)
• client-orientation (they model their services after what their subscribers expect, even when it means bias or bypassing journalistic values)
• textuality (or "monomodality", meaning that the vast majority of news agencies work only with text, not pictures nor sound)
• poliglossy (or translation, because news agencies translate news from other languages into their own clients' language all the time)

Now for their main semantic aspects:

• globality/anti-locality (most news agencies run only what they feel to have an interest to global audiences, not news concerning just local issues; they avoid sticking to neighbourhood topics)
• dependence on external sources (most correspondents for news agencies cannot manage to gather all news in the area they cover, so they regularly resort to news already carried by their local media, sometimes to the point of copying and pasting the original text)
• contents complementarity (news agencies provide not only 'news' per se, but also feature stories, interviews, background articles, opinion pieces, analysis, lists, tables, raw data, ratings, charts, transcriptions and many other material which might be useful for journalists in their respective newsrooms)

Answer 5

A news agency is often called "a wholesaler of news". It means that it does not sell small amounts of information to individual buyers, but massive quantities to a whole range of media outlets, who are in turn the "retailers" which pass them forward to the audience. Until the turn of the millennia, the public seldom had any access to the contents of the wire services, sent only to newspapers, magazines, TV stations and radio. But, when huge news portals such as AOL and Yahoo! began running everything they subscribed on their "Latest news" pages, then nearly all the services of the major news agencies began showing directly to the public, in full. This changed the way the wire services are ran.

Also, since their very beginning in the mid-19th century, news agencies have a political importance. They carry news about their own country to media abroad, which in turn publish them to their local audience. This means that the news agency could work as an informal 'spokesman' for its own government, even when owned by a private corporation. Many authors consider Reuters, for instance, to have been an auxiliary institution to the British Empire. Also, agencies work on the opposite direction, carrying news from abroad to media at home, then keeping their local clients satisfied with international contents. This has an economic function, mainly as agents of circulation of information, not production, mostly because a large fraction of dispatches provided by agencies are actually origined in news firstly produced by local outlets in other countries.