Abstract
This chapter looks at the role of the ‘Big three’ global agencies – Reuters, Agence France-Presse and Associated Press – as providers and translators of foreign news information. It discusses three factors contributing to the widespread reproduction of agency news content: the ready-to-publish nature of agency news; a lack of original foreign reporting; and news aggregators republishing agency content for a growing online audience. A reliance on agency content among the mainstream British press is seen in reproductions of Reuters news reports in the Mail Online, Telegraph Online and Daily Telegraph. The importance and predominance of quotation in written news is discussed and examined in the top stories published on Reuters’ website. The chapter underlines that quotations in foreign news reporting are very often agency-authored translations.
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Notes
- 1.
The scale of the global agencies’ networks can be most clearly seen in the information AFP presents on its website: “AFP’s 200 bureaus cover 150 countries across the world, with 80 nationalities represented among its 2,260 collaborators. The Agency operates regional hubs in five geographical zones”.
- 2.
There are multiple accounts of the BBC’s dominance as a source for online news in recent years. On February 9, 2016, the Guardian reported the results of a survey by SimilarWeb which found that the BBC had a 30 percent market share in the UK in 2015.
- 3.
There is no revision date on the page at the time of writing, however, a more recent version of the policy is found in a PDF version of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism downloaded October 2 2014. The relevant page (‘Reporting from the Internet and Using Social Media’) is marked as last modified 16:26, August 11 2011. It does not include the instruction referred to in the Mashable.com article.
- 4.
Alexa, ‘The top 500 sites on the web’ in the category ‘News’. Accessed July 28 2015. http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/News.
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Scammell, C. (2018). The Global News Agencies. In: Translation Strategies in Global News. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74024-9_2
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