News Syndication

Early Development

While today's new syndicates are institutionally rooted in three distinct branches of the nineteenth-century news business—the wire services, stereotype-plate sales firms, and feature syndicates—the general idea of sharing news content goes back to the start of periodical publishing in seventeenth-century Europe. Throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, newspaper publishers shared stories by mailing issues to one another. One of the Post office's founding mandates was to facilitate this practice through subsidies and extensive network of routes. The Postal Act of 1792 set newspaper mailing rates at a fraction of what it cost to send personal correspondence.

The 1840s were a pivotal decade in the development of news sharing practices. Heightened competition among the “penny press” dailies spurred publishers to seek out faster ways of procuring more news. They commissioned pony and railroad express services to rush home the European intelligence washing into Northeastern ports, plus political news from Washington, D.C. These businessmen almost immediately recognized the utility of the telegraph for sending news at lightning [Page 999]speeds. As wires were strung across the eastern states in the mid-1840s, a group of New York papers consolidated their express and telegraph activities as a cost-saving measure. This group, dubbed the Associated Press (AP), soon realized that the same wires that brought the news to New York could also be used to disseminate news back out into the hinterlands. The AP began packaging news from abroad with rewritten items from newspapers across the United States and selling it as a package to clients.

The cooperative's power grew over the next three decades as it forged a close partnership with telegraph giant Western Union and monopolized journalistic use of the new transatlantic cables. Similar agencies emerged overseas, as Reuters (Britain), Havas (France), and Wolff (Germany) formed a cartel to control news-gathering activities across Europe and colonial Asia and Africa. While the wire services would become their own industry, they sped the move toward newspaper content as a commodity that could be formulaically packaged and distributed.

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