THE PECULIARITIES OF INFORMATION AGENCIES

By Rupert Murdoch[41]

News agency, also called press agency, information agencies, wire service, or news service, organization that gathers, writes, and distributes news from around a nation or the world to newspapers, periodicals, radio and television broadcasters, government agencies, and other users. It does not generally publish news itself but supplies news to its subscribers, who, by sharing costs, obtain services they could not otherwise afford. All the mass media depend upon the agencies for the bulk of the news, even including those few that have extensive news-gathering resources of their own.

The news agency has a variety of forms. In some large cities, newspapers and radio and television stations have joined forces to obtain routine coverage of news about the police, courts, government offices, and the like. National agencies have extended the area of such coverage by gathering and distributing stock-market quotations, sports results, and election reports. A few agencies have extended their service to include worldwide news. The service has grown to include news interpretation, special columns, news photographs, audiotape recordings for radio broadcast, and often videotape or motion-picture film for television news reports. Many agencies are cooperatives, and the trend has been in that direction since World War II. Under this form of organization, individual members provide news from their own circulation areas to an agency pool for general use. In major news centres the national and worldwide agencies have their own reporters to cover important events, and they maintain offices to facilitate distribution of their service.

The major press associations in the United States have expanded their service to include entertainment features, and some feature syndicates provide straight news coverage as a part of their service. The Newspaper Enterprise Association distributes both news and features in the United States.

The world agencies have established a variety of relationships with other agencies and with individual news media. Most of them purchase the news services of national or local agencies to supplement news gathered by their own staff representatives at key points. Reuters, like the Agence France-Presse, supplies a worldwide news file to be distributed by some national agencies along with their domestic news reports. The American services more often contract to deliver their service directly to individual users abroad.

News agencies in communist countries had close ties to their national governments. Each major communist country had its own national news service, and each news service was officially controlled, usually by the minister of information. TASS, the Soviet news agency, was the principal source of world news for the Soviet Union and its allies; it also made Soviet Communist Party policy known. Communist states outside the Soviet sphere, e.g., China and Yugoslavia, had their own state news services, which were controlled in similar fashion. China’s Hsinhua, or New China News Agency, was the largest remaining news agency in a communist country by the late 20th century.

Most other countries have one or more national news agencies. Some depend on a common service, such as the Arab News Agency, which provides news for several states in the Middle East. Others are national newspaper cooperatives, such as the Ritzaus Bureau of Denmark, founded in 1866. A few, like the Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata of Italy, have expanded coverage abroad in a limited degree to supplement their domestic service but still depend on Reuters and Agence France-Presse for much of their foreign news. Germany since 1949 has built Deutsche-Presse Agentur into one of the more important news agencies in Europe, including extensive exchange with other national services. In Canada the Canadian Press is a cooperative news agency with headquarters in Toronto. The oldest and largest news agency operating exclusively in Britain is the Press Association, founded by provincial newspapers on a cooperative basis in 1868. It began active work on February 5, 1870, when the postal service took over the private telegraph companies that had previously supplied the provincial papers with news. It supplies news to all the London daily and Sunday newspapers, provincial papers, and trade journals and other periodicals. The ability to transmit news rapidly greatly increased during the 20th century. Radioteleprinters that make possible fast automatic transmission of news messages linked all major areas. Picture transmission by radio and high-fidelity wires became well developed. From the major agencies, teletype setter service, pioneered by the Associated Press in 1951, was available to newspapers wishing to have computerized typesetting done directly from news-service transmissions. By the 21st century, most news agencies had moved the bulk of their operations and transmission to computers.

ADVERTISING AGENCIES – MEANINGS, ROLE AND TYPES

By Greg Lipscomb[42]

Advertising Agency is just like a tailor. It creates the ads, plans how, when and where it should be delivered and hands it over to the client. Advertising agencies are mostly not dependent on any organizations. These agencies take all the efforts for selling the product of the clients. They have a group of people expert in their particular fields, thus helping the companies or organizations to reach their target customer in an easy and simple way.

The first Advertising Agency was William Taylor in 1786 followed by James “Jem” White in 1800 in London and Reynell & Son in 1812.

Role of Advertising Agencies

1) Creating an advertise on the basis of information gathered about product

2) Doing research on the company and the product and reactions of the customers.

3) Planning for type of media to be used, when and where to be used, and for how much time to be used.

4) Taking the feedbacks from the clients as well as the customers and then deciding the further line of action

All companies can do this work by themselves. They can make ads, print or advertise them on televisions or other media places; they can manage the accounts also. Then why do they need advertising agencies? The reasons behind hiring the advertising agencies by the companies are:

1) The agencies are expert in this field. They have a team of different people for different functions like copywriters, art directors, planners, etc.

2) The agencies make optimum use of these people, their experience and their knowledge.

3) They work with an objective and are very professionals.

4) Hiring them leads in saving the costs up to some extent.

There are basically 5 types of advertising agencies.

Full service Agencies

- Large size agencies.

- Deals with all stages of advertisement.

- Different expert people for different departments.

- Starts work from gathering data and analyzing and ends on payment of bills to the media people.

Interactive Agencies

- Modernized modes of communication are used.

- Uses online advertisements, sending personal messages on mobile phones, etc.

- The ads produced are very interactive, having very new concepts, and very innovative.

Creative Boutiques

- Very creative and innovative ads.

- No other function is performed other than creating actual ads.

- Small sized agencies with their own copywriters, directors, and creative people.

Media Buying Agencies

- Buys place for advertise and sells it to the advertisers.

- Sells time in which advertisement will be placed.

- Schedules slots at different television channels and radio stations.

- Finally supervises or checks whether the ad has been telecasted at opted time and place or not.

In-House Agencies

- As good as the full service agencies.

- Big organization prefers these type of agencies which are in built and work only for them.

- These agencies work as per the requirements of the organizations.

There are some specialized agencies which work for some special advertisements. These types of agencies need people of special knowledge in that field. For example, advertisements showing social messages, finance advertisements, medicine related ads, etc.