The historical context

of international communication

Lecture one
Conti….
The Growth of the Telegraph and the
Era of News Agencies

 The second half of the nineteenth century

saw an expanding system of imperial
communications made possible by the
electric telegraph.

 Invented by Samuel Morse in 1837, the

telegraph enabled the rapid transmission of
information, as well as ensuring secrecy and
code protection.
 The business community was first to make
use of this new technology.
 offer opportunities for profit and
international expansion.
 The rapid development of the telegraph was a
crucial feature in the unification of the British
Empire.

 By the end of the century, the telegraph

allowed the Colonial Office and the India
Office to communicate directly with the
Empire within minutes when, previously, it
had taken months for post to come via sea.
 By providing spot prices for commodities like
cotton, the telegraph enabled British
merchants, exporting cotton from India or
Egypt to England, to easily beat their
competitors.
 The new technology also had significant
military implications.
 The overhead telegraph, installed in Algeria,

proved a decisive aid to the French during the

occupation and colonization of Algeria.
 During the Crimean War (1854-56), the rival

imperial powers, Britain and France, trying to

prevent Russian westward expansion that
threatened overland routes to their colonial
territories in Asia, exchanged military
intelligence through an underwater cable in
the Black Sea laid by the British during the
conflict.
Similarly, during the Civil War in the US
(1861-65) over 24000 kilometers of cable
was laid to send more than 6.5 million
telegrams.
 The American Civil War was not only one of

the earliest conflicts to be extensively

reported, but also the first example both of
co-operative news gathering among the
American and European journalists, and of
the use of photo-journalism.
 The new technology of 'wireless' telegraphy
(also called radiotelegraphy) promised to meet
imperial and trade needs.
 In 1901 Marconi harnessed the new discovery
of electromagnetism to make the first wireless
transatlantic telegraph transmission.
 The British Empire had a great technological
advantage since the Marconi Wireless Telegraph
Company of Great Britain dominated global
telegraph traffic and had a virtual monopoly on
international telegraph exchanges, as it refused
to communicate with any other system other
than its own.
 The operators of a Marconi apparatus were
prohibited from responding to radio signals
emanating from a non-Marconi transmitter, a
policy that had the effect of blocking the
exchange of critically important information
relating to the safe passage of ships.
 By 1907 Marconi's monopoly was being

challenged by other European countries as

well as the United States.
 US companies challenged Britain's supremacy
in the field of international cables and
telegraph traffic, which, they claimed, gave
unfair advantage to British trade, and that
now was the time to develop 'a new system
with the United States as a center'.
The USA proposed that the cables be held
jointly under international control or
trusteeship and that a world congress be
convened to consider international aspects of
telegraph, cable and radio communication.
 Unlike cables, the Americans dominated the

new technology of telephones.

 Following the patenting of the telephone by
the Bell Telephone Company, established by
the inventor of telephony Alexander Graham
Bell in 1877, telephone production increased
in the US. In 1885, American Telephone and
Telegraph (AT&T), later to become the head
office of Bell Systems, was founded and for
the next 80 years it succeeded in keeping a
near-monopoly over US telecommunications
networks.
The Era of News Agencies
 The establishment of the news agency was
the most important development in the
newspaper industry of the nineteenth
century, altering the process of news
dissemination, nationally and internationally.
 The increasing demand among business
clients for commercial information - on
businesses, stocks, currencies, commodities,
- ensured that news agencies grew in power
and reach.
 The French Havas Agency (ancestor of AFP)
was founded in 1835, the German agency
Wolff in 1849 and the British Reuters in 1851.
The US agency, Associated Press (AP) was
established in 1848, but only the three
European agencies began as international
ones; not until the turn of the century did an
American agency move in this direction.
 From the start, Reuters made commercial
and financial information its specialty, while
Havas was to combine information and
advertising.
 These three European news agencies, Havas,

Wolff and Reuters, all of which were

subsidized by their respective governments,
controlled information markets in Europe and
were looking beyond the continent to expand
their operations.
 In 1870 they signed a treaty to divide up the
world market between the three of them. The
resulting association of agencies (ultimately to
include about 30 members), became known
variously as the League of Allied Agencies (les
Agences Alliees), as the World League of Press
Associations, as the National Agencies
Alliances, and as the Grand Alliance of
Agencies. More commonly, it was referred to
simply as the 'Ring Combination'. In the view of
some it was a 'cartel', and its influence on world
opinion was used by governments to suit their
own purposes.
 In practice, Reuters, whose idea it was,
tended to dominate the Ring Combination. Its
influence was greatest because its reserved
territories were larger or of greater news
importance than most others. It also had
more staff and stringers throughout the
world and thus contributed more original
news to the pool.
 After the First World War, although Wolff
ceased to be a world agency, the cartel
continued to dominate international news
distribution.
 The first challenge to their monopoly came from
AP when it started supplying news to Latin
America.
 With the international news cartel broken by the
1930s, AP and other US agencies such as United
Press (UP), founded in 1907, (which later became
United Press International (UPI) in 1958 after
merger with Hearst's International News Service),
began to encroach on their terrain.
 AP began to expand internationally, paralleling
political changes in Europe with the weakening of
the European empires after the First World War.
The rise of Reuters

 The fortunes of Reuters, the most famous

international news agency, can be seen to run
in parallel with the growth of the British
Empire.
 The expansion of trade and investment
during the nineteenth century had led to a
huge growth in the demand for news and
contributed to the commercialization of news
and information services. Reuters astutely
exploited this demand, helped by the new
communication technologies, especially the
telegraph.
 For British and other European investors
Reuters telegrams were essential reading for
the latest news from various corners of the
British Empire.
 By the 1870s, Reuters had offices in all the

major strategic points of the empire -

Calcutta, Bombay and Point de Galle on the
southern tip of Sri Lanka, the end of the cable
connection with London, from where Reuters
supervised its services to Southeast Asia,
China, Japan and Australia.
 Reuters also enjoyed very close relationships
with the British foreign and colonial
administrations.
 Though it claimed to be an independent news

agency, Reuters was for the most part the

unofficial voice of the Empire, giving
prominence to British views, supported the
British cause and the British troops.
 In the same way Reuters news from India was
mostly related to economic and political
developments in the Empire and largely
ignored the anti-colonial movement.
 Defending the Empire came naturally to

Reuters
 During the First World War, Reuters launched
a wartime news service by arrangement with
the Foreign Office, which by 1917 was
circulating about one million words per
month throughout the Empire.
 Reuters' Managing Director during the war
years, George Jones, was also in charge of
cable and wireless propaganda for the British
Department of Information. Though this
service was separate from the main Reuters
wire service, whose support for the war was
more subtle, it rallied opinion within the
Empire and influenced the attitudes of the
neutral countries.
 However, apart from support from the
government the major reason for the
continued success of Reuters was the fact
that it 'sold useful information enabling
businesses to trade profitably'.
 New technology made it easier to send and

receive more international industrial and

financial information at a faster speed.
 As the globe was being connected through
trans-oceanic trade, such information - for
example, New York prices for Indian cotton -
had a high premium for traders who were
depending on the accuracy of Reuters
commodity prices and stock market news
from around the world.
 Reuters' domination of international
information remained the world news leader
between 1870 to 1914.
 But the weakening of the British Empire and
the ascendancy of the USA forced Reuters to
compete with the American news agencies,
especially Associated Press, with which it
signed, in 1942, a wartime news-sharing
agreement, effectively creating a new cartel
for news.
 In the post-war period, Reuters continued to focus
on commercial information, realizing that in order to
succeed in a free trade environment, it had to work
towards integration of commodity, currency, equity
and financial markets, 'around the clock and around
the world'.
 By 1999, Reuters was one of the world's biggest
multimedia corporations dealing 'in the business of
information', supplying global financial markets and
the news media with a range of information and
news products, including 'real-time financial data,
collective investment data, numerical, textual,
historical and graphical databases plus news,
graphics, news video, and news pictures'.
 In the past five years to 1998, financial
information products revenue accounted for 64
per cent of the total while media products
revenue accounted for less than 7 per cent of the
total revenue.
 By the end of the twentieth century, what had
been started in 1851 by entrepreneur Julius
Reuter, whom Karl Marx called 'a grammatically
illiterate Jew', had become the world's largest
provider of financial data, besides being the
largest news and television agency with nearly
2000 journalists in 183 bureaux, serving 157
countries.
 Its news was gathered and edited for both
business and media clients in 23 languages,
more than 3 million words were published
each day. With 1998 revenue of £3032
million, Reuters was one of the world's largest
media and information corporations, with
regional headquarters in London, New York,
Geneva and Hong Kong, and offices in 217
cities.
 One major growth area for the agency which
started sending news and commercial
information via pigeon in its early years, is
the Internet, given the steady growth in
online trading.
 By 1999, it was providing news and
information to over 225 Internet sites
reaching an estimated 12 million viewers per
month.