At the end of the twentieth century, news was readily available from a variety of competing sources: newspapers and magazines, radio, television, and the Internet. Yet a given story, no matter where it ran, often would contain much of the same material, word for word, owing to the heavy dependence of all news media on wire services, which collected reporters' stories and pictures, edited them to a standard style, and distributed them to individual broadcast stations and print media.

Organizations such as the Associated Press and Reuters are called wire services because of their early connection with the telegraph. In fact, Reuters was originally a bird service: In 1849 Paul Julius Reuter, a former bookseller, saw an opportunity to exploit a gap in the telegraph lines between Aachen and Brussels and used carrier pigeons to transmit stock quotes until the telegraph finally connected the two cities in...