News agency copy

News agency is an organization of journalists established to supply news reports to organizations in the news trade: newspapers, magazines, and radio and television broadcasters. They are also known as wire services or news services. News agencies can be corporations that sell news (e.g. Reuters and All Headline News (AHN)), cooperatives composed of newspapers that share their articles with each other (e.g. AP), commercial newswire services which charge organizations to distribute their news (e.g. Market Wire, Business Wire and PR Newswire).Governments may also control "news agencies," particularly in authoritarian states, like China and the former Soviet Union or non-profit organizations operated by both professionals and volunteers. News agencies generally prepare hard news stories and feature articles that can be used by other news organizations with little or no modification, and then sell them to other news organizations. They provide these articles in bulk electronically through wire services. The bulk of copy, which comes to the news desk, is from wire agencies.

The tele-printer keeps on creeping information almost all the time during peak news hours of the afternoon and evening. This copy comes in takes-the unit of news agency transmission or unit of news writing. Foreign news items have their own serial numbers, FG, FS, FES, FTF, PAS and POOL. Whereas FG, FS and FES files carry news items received from Reuters, AFP and UPI and are credited to those agencies, the PTF file is made up of reports received from PTI’s own correspondents and stringers abroad. The POOL file is devoted to agencies participating with PTI in the Press Agencies Pool of Non-Aligned countries. Every news agency copy news story must carry at the top a suitable slug. Generally the slug is one word, which is often the key work in the story. Thus a story about rain would have a key word, which is often the key word for reporting about rain. Slugs are nouns and not adjectives and a master slug should be used with sub-slugs for individual story. In the news agency copy, the agency is not supposed to give headlines but now to lighten the burden of newspaper sub- editor the news agencies have started to put up headlines. If the sub-editor at the newspaper desk likes it he can indicate the type size for the headline.
Source: Internet