EOTO - Innovations in Global Journalism

 

    As an aspiring journalist and frequent consumer of the news, across many platforms, I see AP and Reuters content EVERYWHERE. These wire services have been a prominent source for many mainstream news outlets in their information sourcing, especially when it comes to photos. In my consumption of news, AP comes up a lot more than Reuters as a source for stories and has seemed like the more popular option for outlets to use.

    It was interesting to hear the innovation and trends that these wire services set when it came to technology. When Reuters first started in 1851 they used the telegraph to transmit stock market quotes from London to Paris, which was revolutionary at the time. Before the telegraph, and other devices like the wirephoto, a story that would take days to reach the other side of the world, could now be sent in a few minutes. The telegraph would send morse code messages from one device to another through a line. In a sense, it was a form of email before the internet because receivers of a message had to decipher morse code, with each code assigned to a letter of the alphabet. The telegraph transcended the news industry because it allowed for long messages to travel far in a short amount of time. Society has the telegraph to thank for pioneering global news delivery and consumption.

    Seeing photos in newspapers is no phenomenon to regular readers in modern times. Before 1935 it was rare that photos would appear in the paper, but that changed with the invention of the wirephoto. Just like code could be sent over a wire, photos could now be as well. This technology wasn't new as you could already send photos over a line, but the wirephoto sent and received them in higher quality. AP has been using the wirephoto for 87 years now and by using the technology they have literally and figuratively imprinted some of the most memorable photos into history. It seemed that they used the wirephoto to report on sports a lot as well, intending to capture the action of the moment to share with the world. Having now learned about the telegraph and wirephoto, it's interesting that these technologies have similar workings to that of the internet, but the thought of the internet was far from conceived but used similar technological methods to be invented.

Photo printed with wirephoto

    The business models incorporated by Reuters and AP at the time of their establishments have been revolutionary in the way that stories go from idea to print/air. AP has come a long way in that it now consists of six daily newspapers, including the New York Times, contributing to the wire. This method avoids losing wire-borne information to the highest bidder. It's interesting to see how the wire services can innovate from here and what they can be used for as the landscape of journalism changes. In the recent decades, excluding the one we're in, news organizations would usually rely on their own sources before confirming a story, whereas nowadays they rely on other news sources. The wire has played an important role in the innovation of global journalism, hopefully that will remain the case for the future of journalism.