International News Service

Origins

In 1903, the Hearst publishing organization leased a telegraph line from San Francisco to New York, running through Chicago to allow its expanding newspapers in the three cities to share content. Some stories were also provided to other newspapers. This process of serving both Hearst and non-Hearst newspapers (no membership was required, as with Associated Press) became the Hearst News Service in 1904. Five years later, in May 1909 (by which time he published seven morning newspapers), Hearst established the American News Service with headquarters in New York. Just a few months later, this entity was divided into two separate entities serving morning and evening newspapers, with the International News Service furnishing overnight reports for morning newspapers seven days a week. Foreign news coverage was added in August 1909.

In 1911, the morning and evening services were recombined under the INS rubric. Further changes again focused INS on serving only evening papers from 1917 to 1928, after which time it always served morning and evening. While serving as a news agency, INS was also a “news marketing and distribution arm of the Hearst combination” and was widely perceived as such (Rosewater 1930/1970, 358). It carried many features and columns, which were later spun off to a separate Hearst features syndicate.

Heyday

In an attempt to gain attention (and ideally subscriptions) from the country's more than 2,000 dailies, INS emphasized colorful writing (and sometimes seamier news stories) over careful fact checking. Indeed, the agency was accused on the eve of World War I of inventing most of its foreign correspondents, its reportage striking some as just another example of Hearst fakery. The accusation—and numerous others of the same tone—hit INS personnel hard, and from all reports, morale plummeted. Finally, in 1916, British, French and Portuguese (and later Japanese) news services denied INS exchanges of news and access to their cable links, claiming Hearst (and thus his INS) favored Germany and were distorting war news. This lockout may have been one factor that led to a landmark court case concerning news piracy.

In 1916–17, the Associated Press accused INS of stealing its early reports, rewriting them, and delivering the result to INS subscribers with no attribution to their AP origin. INS obtained the reports either by bribing AP newspaper employees for access (though some Hearst papers were AP members and therefore received AP feeds), or by simply copying early East Coast published versions. After losing at the lower court level, AP appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court which in December 1918 largely upheld AP's complaint. The court (though with three dissenting votes) concluded that while actual news events themselves could not be copyrighted, specific stories about those events most certainly could be. Put another way, there was a legal property right to news. It took INS years to recover its image.

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