Do most news companies just copy the same source? Yes

Summary: A news wire service sells one reporter's story to many newsrooms. The same wire story on ten sites is still a single report, unlike a story that several newsrooms each reported and corroborated through their own newsgathering.

Why does the same story show up everywhere?

A story on many sites at once feels credible to us as readers because we assume each outlet's editors verified it. But often those editors didn't verify it themselves. Sometimes ten editors run the same article, written once and licensed to all of them, and their repetition says nothing about whether anyone checked it a second time.

Comparing a story across outlets is the usual way to check it, and the check works only when each outlet did its own reporting. When ten outlets carry one underlying report, you're comparing a report to its copies. The reason traces to a business arrangement that's 180 years old.

What's a news wire service?

A wire service is a company that gathers news and sells it to other news organizations, rather than publishing mainly for the public. Britannica lists the same thing under several names: News agency, news service, press agency, wire service. Its customers include newspapers, broadcasters, and government agencies.

The model began as cost sharing. In May 1846, five daily newspapers (The Sun, New York Herald, New York Courier and Enquirer, The Journal of Commerce, and New York Evening Express) in New York formed the Associated Press to split the cost of covering the Mexican-American War. The Library of Congress calls it the first cooperative newsgathering organization in U.S. history. Reuters followed in 1851, founded by Paul Julius Reuter, a former bank clerk, as a commercial news service in Great Britain, according to Britannica.

The logic hasn't changed today: One reporter files, many subscribers pay, and each subscriber's cost per story drops below what covering it alone would cost. A newspaper that can't afford its own correspondent somewhere buys the wire's account of it. Since the wire sells identical text to every subscriber, two subscribers can print the same sentences.

How much of the news is wire copy?

In one Pew Research Center sample, wire services supplied 1,595 of the 2,794 national government stories that eight U.S. newspapers printed over four months in 2015, nearly six in ten. Pew notes that in many cases the same stories, or close versions of them, ran in multiple newspapers. Papers with their own Washington correspondent got 52% of those stories from wire services. Papers without one got 62%. Most of that copy came from one agency, the Associated Press, which accounts for 121 of the 1,782 reporters accredited to cover Congress. The wire stories also looked less local than the staff stories. Just 2% of wire stories referenced the impact on the local community, against 40% of stories by staff reporters.

Pew's analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows U.S. newsroom employment fell 26% from 2008 to 2020, from about 114,000 to about 85,000, and at newspapers it fell 57%, from about 71,000 to about 31,000. Fewer staff means each newsroom can report less on its own, but Pew's figures don't show whether shrinking newsrooms rely more on wire copy. How news gets chosen walks through the checklist editors apply before any story runs, wire or staff.

The pattern shows up outside the United States too. A Cardiff University report on 2,207 items from five UK publications in 2006 found that 60% of press stories relied wholly or mainly on pre-packaged information, and only 12% had no discernible pre-packaged content. Its researchers describe the dependence as reliance on public relations and other media, especially wire services, and say papers rarely credited where it came from. Chris Paterson's 2007 paper on news agencies and online news from 2001 to 2006 found that international news online derives from just two major news agencies.

Each study covers a different place, period, and kind of story: U.S. newspapers in 2015, UK newspapers in 2006, online news sites from 2001 to 2006. No figure here gives the wire share of the news you read today.

Isn't wire copy just good reporting, shared?

It can be, and the case for wires is strong. Pooling is why the Associated Press exists: Five New York papers split the cost of covering a war instead of each paying for it alone. A small paper that can't staff a foreign bureau still carries reporting from one. In Pew's sample, wire stories spread across more areas of government than the Washington staff reporters' stories did, since 52% of those staff stories were tied to Congress.

Nothing in the studies above compares accuracy, so we can't say wire stories are worse than staff stories. Some editors also add reporting to wire copy, and the figures don't measure how often.

The problem is arithmetic: Ten sites carrying one report supply one report's worth of checking. Corroboration needs a second reporter with a different source, and the Cardiff report found that borrowed material was rarely attributed to its source, which leaves a reader unable to tell from the page whether ten stories are actually ten reports.

How do you trace a story back to its first report?

The test is one question: Which of these outlets sent its own reporter to talk to a source? A browser is enough to find out.

1. Follow the links. Check what the first report cites, such as a court filing, an official statement, a dataset, or a recording. Read that instead.

2. Search for a sentence. Search one distinctive sentence from the story in quotation marks. Identical sentences on other sites show shared copy.

3. Sort by time. Sort the matches by publication time. The earliest is the best candidate for the first report, though timestamps can be edited, so treat them as a clue.

4. Check the credit line. Read the byline and credit line for an agency name such as the Associated Press, Reuters, or AFP. A story with no agency name can still be agency copy, since the Cardiff report found borrowed material rarely attributed.

Count independent reports, not pages. A report is independent when an outlet's own reporter names a source the others don't. One report with a primary source behind it can hold up better than ten rewrites of it.

How does informed.now handle it?

At informed.now, we research down to primary sources, which is possible in roughly 80% of our coverage, and we cite the strongest source for readers even when we reference hundreds, as our methodology page spells out. A story earns a place in our brief by how many lives it changes and how much, never by how many outlets carried it. A reader can follow the cited source and check it against our text.

Count reports, not pages

A story on ten sites still feels confirmed, and the feeling is earned when each site sends its own reporter. When one wire reporter supplies all ten, you've learned how far the story travels, and nothing yet about how well it holds up.