News

Gathering
and

NEWS FLOW
There are three main sources of news:

staff reporting
beat reporters
general assignment reporters

wire services
auxiliary sources (government reports, public relation
handouts, syndicates, columnists, news conferences etc.)

News Gathering Technology

ENG Electronic News Gathering allows portable
cameras to capture live images at the story scene and beam
them back to newsroom.

SNG Satellite News Gathering allows live satellite

feeds from anywhere on the planet to give local newsrooms
global coverage ability.
These technologies allow live coverage: but that news is also
shown raw, unedited and unfiltered, and therefore subject to
elements of trivia, irrelevance, and inaccuracies.

The Wire Services

The purpose of wire services is to provide newspapers with reporters and
geographical coverage that newspapers couldnt otherwise afford.
Wire correspondents cover stories, then file them with a local bureau; if
the story is important enough, it gets bumped up to the state level, then to
a regional bureau, or even to a national or global bureau level.
There are two primary U.S. wire services:

Associated Press (AP)

United Press International (UPI)

The Wire Services

In short, wire services work like this:
first a wire correspondent covers a story and sends it along to the
local bureau chief;
if the story is deemed to be important or appropriate enough, the
bureau chief forwards it to the state bureau.
The evaluation process is repeated again for the next higher
levels, regional, national, and global.
The purpose of a wire service is to provide newspapers with
correspondents and coverage that the papers couldnt otherwise
afford.
Newspapers pay for wire service news on a sliding scale: the
bigger the papers circulation, the more they pay.

The Wire Services

AP stands for the Associated Press wire service and UPI stands for United

Press International; they are Americas two biggest news wire services,
and, together, provide with most of the news.
The AP has about 145 domestic bureaus and about 95 foreign bureaus, and in
2000 the AP had about 15,000 customers worldwide, including about 1,700
newspapers, 5,000 radio and TV stations, and about 500 cable systems.
Because of continuing long-time financial problems, UPI has only six domestic
bureaus and now concentrates on providing news to Internet clients such as
Excite.
The AP and UPI do have other competition, most notably The New York Times
News Service and the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.
Some newspaper chains and a few international wire services (Britains
Reuters and Frances Agence-France) provide additional competition.
Finally, there are specialized information services now available on the
Internet, such as Internet Wire and CNet.