News agencies were created to provide newspapers with information about a wide variety of newsevents happening around the world. Initially the agencies were meant to provide the news items only to newspapers, but with the passage of time the rapidly developing modern mediums such as radio, television and Internet too adapted the services of news agencies.
Founded in 1835 as Agence Havas, and changing its name in 1944, Agence France-Presse (AFP) is the world's oldest news agency, and is the third largest news agency in the modern world after the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters.[1]
Political change in the Third World resulted in a new wave of information dissemination and a series of news agencies were born out of it. These agencies later formed their own Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (NANAP), which served as a premiere information service in the Third World.
EFE, a Spanish organization, is the biggest Spanish-language news agency, and the fourth largest worldwide. It was founded in 1939.
The largest German-language news agency is Hamburg's DPA. The oldest German news agency still in operation is the Protestant News Agency EPD, tracing back to 1876.
