ABSTRACT
Today just a few news agencies, such as Reuters, the Associated Press, and AFP, dominate the international supply of raw news.1 They make money from news even though it is protected rather imperfectly by intellectual property rights, even though it can be endlessly copied, and even though news gets old quickly. Despite these challenges, these news agencies have dominated the international news trade since the mid-nineteenth century. They survived the rise of mass-circulation newspapers that had their own correspondents, as well as the advent of radio, television, and the Internet. This paper examines how this handful of firms came to dominate the international
raw news supply, how these agencies have been able to make money from raw news, and what business models they developed to this end. We examine how these business models interacted with market structure, and how they held their ground during crises. To answer these questions we will examine especially the period in which these
business models emerged, and we will look at theory that can explain how news traders operated. Our method is historical, analytic, and economic. We restrict ourselves here to international news agencies that aim to offer their customers global coverage.2
