Wolff

Origins

Bernhard Wolff (1811–79) originally studied medicine. In 1847 and 1848 he served as a translator of medical and also financial news for the developing Havas Agency in Paris. After returning to Berlin and acting as editor of a newspaper, Wolff formed his own financial news cooperative in 1849. The Berlin Telegraphische Anstaltt made early use of the spreading network of electric telegraph lines. Most of Wolff's initial clients were banks and other businesses, not newspapers.

Taking over several smaller competitors, he broadened his operation to cover general news in 1855 and took on newspaper clients. By 1859, Wolff was exchanging news with both Havas and Reuters. The operation underwent several name changes, finally becoming the Wolff'sche Telegraphische Büro. The Prussian government began contributing some financial support (and indirect control) by 1865.

A secret 1869 agreement between the government and the news agency gave the latter priority use of the expanding network of German telegraph cables in return for which Prussia gained some degree of control over the political news transmitted and even the hiring of staff. With this, the news agency became effectively an instrument of Prussian official policy (but it also achieved primacy in issuing official news), and Dr. Wolff retired as managing director in 1871.

News Cartel

As early as 1856, Wolff, along with Havas in France and Reuters in Britain, signed an exchange agreement to share financial news from their own countries. It soon expanded to more general news, and in 1859 to agreement to create joint offices in different cities, subject at different times to the imperialist moves by the countries' respective governments.

By 1870, the three agencies established a cooperative news cartel, soon dubbed “The Ring,” each agency taking responsibility for part of the world (Wolff covered Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Scandinavia) and thus eliminating overlapping reporting and their related costs. For many years, Wolff controlled the national news bureaus in Sweden and Norway. Being the smallest of the three, Wolff was subject to its partner's agreement to any expansion of its services—for which it paid a premium. All three made effective use of the growing web of undersea cables as well as land telegraphy and were accordingly often called “wire” services. With some changes, the cartel agreement was renewed in 1890 and again in 1914.

Decline

Increasingly by the turn of the twentieth century, Wolff was seen as an agency of the Prussian, and later German, governments. With the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the agency was cut off from its usual news sources and many of its clients when all German undersea cables were cut by the allies. Further weakening its once strong national role, the German government set up a separate wireless news bureau, Transocean, in 1915. Wolff came under full government control in 1917 to 1919. The loss of the war a year later, and Germany's subsequent occupation and economic [Page 1461]turmoil (and growing news competition) greatly weakened the Wolff agency during the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, and Reuters and Havas now served many of its non-German territories.

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