The Power of News: The History of Reuters

I grew up closely following, and at times getting involved in, the professional life of my father, a foreign correspondent for one of the world's four major news agencies, including at one time Reuters, the focus of this particular book. I was therefore excited to find and read this history of a major player in one of the most competitive businesses in the world - providing the world's newspapers, TV and radio stations, and the general public with comprehensive up-to-minute news from all corners of the globe 24 hours a day.Reuters is a British news agency named after the German who opened an office in London in 1851 after several false starts in continental Europe to provide a news service using telegraph. From these modest beginnings, the author traces the growth of Reuters through 140 years of major events and major technological changes which fundamentally transformed the way news became reported around the world. The book is however much more than a corporate history of Reuters and is full of fascinating anecdotes of how various historical events got sent over the wires. If you have an interest in the history of global news media, you will enjoy this book. My only regret is that the book does not convey a strong sense of how this inherently global business - and not just a single player - evolved. It would be a much more ambitious, but certainly greatly fascinating undertaking, to analyze the growth of the global news agency industry and the forces and stories which shaped it, including equally fasinating stories from the American and French equivalents of Reuters which are also major players - and globally known by their acronyms such as AP, AFP, and UPI.