“This Is a Bulletin!”

NO MATTER what we are doing, the words “This is a bulletin” grip our attention. Everyone’s routine suddenly halts at those urgent words. Motorists turn up their car radios. Housewives stop their work. Conversations abruptly cease. The announcer’s next words could be anything—a disaster in your own community, the assassination of a world leader.

Such scenes are repeated somewhere in the world almost every day. But what we do not see is what happens behind the scenes in the few moments before “This is a bulletin” shatters the normal routine of broadcasting. We can find out by stepping inside the nerve center of a national news agency, the newsroom.

One of our first impressions is the quiet. Newsrooms have an almost traditional reputation for noisy, but organized, “confusion”—dozens of teletypes loudly banging out news and sports stories from all over the world, the clickety-clack of many typewriters as reporters and editors work on stories, and the copyboys rushing completed stories to and from the editors. And, indeed, for many decades this description was accurate.

But in this computer age the news agency has also kept up with the advance of science. Noisy teletypes are gone. In their place are modern machines with special electronic heads that slide noiselessly back and forth across the teletype paper. Some high-speed machines produce material at the rate of twelve hundred words per minute—entire paragraphs of six lines in only three seconds!

Gone, too, are the typewriters. Instead, newsmen sit at computer terminals resembling television sets with a keyboard. As a writer strikes the keys, letters appear on the screen and the story takes shape. With such equipment, the newsman can make changes on the spot. He can rephrase statements, take out sentences or entire paragraphs and reinsert them somewhere else in the story, or simply delete them entirely.

The only noise now is conversation, an occasional telephone ringing, and, of course—the bells. Bells signal the editor that an urgent story is coming in. They are not heard often, and a visitor may not even notice the quick series of quiet rings. But the machine that sounds the alarm gets prompt attention from at least one of the newsmen on duty.

How It All Began

In Paris, in 1835, a man named Charles Havas decided to go into a new business for himself. He subscribed to a number of foreign newspapers, and as they arrived, he had the financial information translated and printed. He sold this to businessmen in the city. Newspapers also became interested. So Havas expanded his operation, translating and selling news stories, as well as financial information.

Soon Havas was collecting news from across France—by messenger, carrier pigeon, and later by the telegraph. Thus Agence France-Presse, the news agency of France, was born. Meanwhile, in New York city, six publishers formed a news-gathering agency that later became known as the Associated Press (AP). Soon others were springing up all over the world—Reuters in London, the Canadian Press in Toronto.

Hundreds of newspapers were finding that their readers wanted to be informed of events happening throughout the world, not just in their own communities. It was out of the question for newspapers to provide such broad coverage on their own. But by pooling resources to operate a news agency, this kind of coverage became possible.

Yet, how do these agencies get all their news?

Agencies in Operation

There are two kinds of news agencies—national and international. A national agency disseminates information within a particular country. It sets up a series of bureaus, usually one in each state or province. The agency may sell its service to hundreds, even thousands of newspapers, radio and television stations across the nation. The cost generally depends on the size of a particular station or paper.

Each newspaper and radio or television station has its own news staff to handle local news in that area. But when a story breaks that may be of interest to people outside their own community, they send it to the national news-agency bureau for that region. The bureau, in turn, transmits news of regional interest to all clients in the area it covers.

Meanwhile, the agency’s head office monitors all the regional news items from its bureaus nation wide. When items of broad interest appear, they are picked up and sent out nationally. In addition, the national news agency has its own staff of reporters and editors who gather news and cover major stories.

To get information on world events, national news agencies subscribe to one or more international news agencies. These cover several countries, selling their service to national agencies and sometimes larger newspapers and radio and television stations. In turn, international agencies monitor each of the national services. When a story with an international flavor appears, the international service picks it up and the incident becomes an international story.

Agencies monitoring one another have their computers interconnected. That is, once a story moves on the wire of one agency, it automatically goes also into the computer of each agency that has bought that service. Consider what happens when a major story breaks:

Assume it happens in San Francisco. The Associated Press could be the first to have the story and a reporter there may prepare a bulletin of four or five lines in just a few seconds on his computer terminal. His editor checks it for accuracy and moves it immediately. Seconds later the item has been picked up and relayed nationally by editors at the head office in New York, to appear on teletypes in newspaper, radio and television newsrooms across the United States.

Meanwhile, an editor at the Canadian Press in Toronto, alerted by the bulletin bells, calls the story up on his computer terminal, checks it and moves it across Canada. By now AP has also moved the story on its international wire, and its affiliated national news services are transmitting the story within their own countries. Within four or five minutes of the time that the San Francisco reporter completed his bulletin, the story—never retyped or rewritten by anyone—could be appearing on the teletype of a radio station in Newfoundland, or of a newspaper in Rome.

While all of this is going on, different news agencies Reuters, United Press International and others—also are picking up the story.

Television and Satellites

Television news has similar information sources. Local stations get much of their programming from a television network that provides both news and entertainment. Though usually joining the network at least once a day for a national newscast, local stations often subscribe to one or more news agencies and provide news programs of their own.

Networks and some larger television stations are equipped with mobile studios that can drive to the scene of a breaking story and broadcast developments live. The story can either be carried on the one station or broadcast over an entire network of stations. Thus, in 1970, several million Canadians watched as kidnappers of British diplomat James Cross drove their bomb-laden car through Montreal streets after negotiating an agreement that allowed them to fly out of the country.

Affiliated networks in other countries may also pick up major stories and carry them live or broadcast them later. This is often done by means of a complicated system of space satellites and microwave relay stations.

For example, if a Canadian television network wanted film of a serious air crash in Australia, the local television station would transmit it through a series of microwave systems to the nearest earth station of a satellite system. From there it would be broadcast to an Intelsat satellite somewhere over the Pacific. This satellite would rebroadcast it to an earth station in British Columbia. From there it would be sent to a Telesat (Canadian communications satellite system) earth station and relayed to another satellite over western Canada. The signal then would be broadcast to an earth station at Rivière-Rouge, Quebec, and sent by microwave to Montreal or Toronto.

All of this takes place in just a fraction of a second. Of course, it is quite expensive—costing several thousand dollars for just a few minutes. Since satellite time is sold for a minimum of ten minutes, networks often bring in material “piggyback.” Two or three together may rent a certain period of time to transmit films that they want for later use on a newscast.

News Affects You

With all this technology, do we get all the news? No. News agencies receive far, far more information than they can possibly use. Many use only about 5 to 7 percent of their total material. In turn, the subscribers to the wire services use only a part of the information they receive. So no matter where we live or what we read, likely there is far more going on in the world than we realize.

What people living in smaller cities and communities learn about world events may depend on the decisions of just half a dozen men and women a thousand miles away. But even in major cities where the media have access to several agencies, the number of people who ultimately decide what to use is relatively small. And since any newsman is going to use the most important stories of the hour, much of the news appearing on wire services is the same, shaping your view of the world according to those particular stories.

When a government changes hands, whether by election, revolution or war, it is front-page news. But, ironically, news agencies are completely unaware of impending greatest news story of all time. For today we are at the threshold of a worldwide change in government, the end of this entire global system.

An it is only unknowingly that, by means of their fast and often thorough coverage of certain world events, news agencies make Christians ever more aware of the evidence that we are deep into the “last days” of this world’s system