ABSTRACT
In 1835 Charles Havas founded the first modern news agency in Paris. Born in 1783 in Rouen, Havas could already look back on a tumultuous career when he first decided in 1832 to open a translation office in the French capital. The history of the formation of global news agencies is the story of a growing awareness that the provision of objective news was a much trickier problem than Charles Havas, Bernhard Wolff and Julius Reuters had ever imagined. These treaties divided the global news market along the lines of national borders. The constitution of a planetary news system was thus characterized by a tense relationship between diversely structured national zones of influence within a global communications network. The global news system which emerged on the basis of an expanding telegraph network fundamentally differed from its historic ancestors. One of its effects was that the political power of the press increased exponentially.
