News wire services in the nineteenth-century United States

Journalism’s visual construction of place in environmental coverage

“…The low use of wire imagery is interesting, considering the geographic nature of environmental coverage, suggesting news outlets may be more interested in showing local and regional environmental topics (that their own staff can photograph) versus national or international topics provided by the wire services (Bissell, 2000;Brooker-Gross, 1981;Gürsel, 2015). It also supports prior work by Bissell (2000) in that environment was not even a topic included in her analysis of wire photos.…”

“…News photographers may work for a specific outlet, as freelancers, or for a wire service that syndicates the images to member organizations. These wire services seek to provide a broad range of applicable international, national and regional content that newspapers and other media outlets can purchase individually or as part of a membership (Bissell, 2000;Brooker-Gross, 1981;Gürsel, 2015). As Bissell (2000) found, newspapers and wire services have differing motivations and reasons for photo creation and selection.…”

Exclusivity and Cooperation in the Supply of News: The Example of the Associated Press, 1893–1945

“…Although the increase in competition telegraphy generated during the 1840s encouraged newspapers to form partnerships, the limited reach of the nascent communications network, and the consequent costs of coordination among a large group of publishers, kept participation in these early news organizations small, personal, and regional. 7 Aft er the Civil War, when the telegraph network rapidly expanded, there emerged a loose federation of news associations comprising organizations operating in different parts of the country, such as the Western Associated Press in the Midwest and the Southern Associated Press, all of which were largely subordinate to the New York Associated Press. 8 In 1875, this coalition of news associations served approximately 350 of the nation's daily newspapers out of a total population of 458, or 76 percent of the market, but recurrent disagreements over the manner in which the news was collected and distributed prohibited the federation from operating as a unifi ed body.…”