A news agency is a company that gathers news, photos and video and sells them by subscription to newspapers, TV channels and websites, which publish them under the agency's name. It is also called a wire service, or simply a wire. In India, the best-known agencies are Press Trust of India (PTI), ANI and IANS. Reuters and Bloomberg are the largest international ones.
A newspaper cannot keep a reporter in every district, every court and every stadium. An agency can, because it shares the cost of those reporters among hundreds of subscribers. So the same agency story often appears, word for word, in many newspapers and apps. Each one carries a credit such as "(PTI)" at the end.
Take, for example, a monetary policy announcement by the RBI in Mumbai. At 10 am, the governor announces whether the repo rate will change. The repo rate is the interest rate at which the RBI lends money to banks. Within seconds, the agency's reporter sends a one-line flash, such as "RBI keeps repo rate unchanged". A few minutes later, the agency sends a story of 300 words. Within an hour, it sends a longer story, with quotes from economists, photos of the governor and a video clip.
Every subscriber receives these items in its own newsroom CMS at the same moment. A news website can publish the flash as a headline at once, and replace it with the full story later. A television network runs the video clip in its next bulletin. Traders read the same flash on a financial data terminal, where a few seconds can change a trade.
Each item comes with labels that software can read: the topic, the place, the companies named and the time. These labels let a digital news publisher place a story on the right page automatically.
Agencies earn mainly from subscriptions. A large newspaper pays more than a small website, and a terminal company pays for the fastest feed. Some agencies also sell legal and tax news to professionals, through services such as a legal research database.
AI is changing the agency's work in two ways. Agencies have used software to write simple results reports, such as a company's quarterly earnings, for about ten years. AI models now also summarise, translate and draft longer stories, which editors check. Second, agencies now sell AI companies the right to use their archives. This is called AI content licensing. An archive of checked, dated news has value because so much AI-generated content cannot be trusted.