WAM (Emirates News Agency)

WAM (Wakalat Anba'a al Emarat) or also known as Emirates News Agency is the official news agency of the United Arab Emirates.

History and profile

The WAM was launched in November 1976. It started Arabic broadcast on 18 June 1977 and English broadcast in December 1978. The agency which is headquartered in Abu Dhabi is part of National Media Council.

The agency has Arabic and English news services and has a website in both languages. In addition to its national offices, it has offices in Cairo, Beirut, Washington, Sanaa, Brussels and Islamabad. It is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council news agencies, the Federation of Arab News Agencies, the International Islamic News Agency, the Pool of Non-Aligned News agencies and of the Organization of Asia-Pacific News Agencies (OANA).

The agency has cooperation and news exchange agreements with various news agencies, including the Sudan News Agency, the Malaysian National News Agency, the Russian News Agency, the Chinese News Agency, Xinhua, the Kuwait News Agency, the Jordanian News Agency, the Indonesian News Agency, and the Yemeni News Agency. Since 2012 the agency has also been in cooperation with the official Turkish news agency, Anadolu Agency.

News agency

A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and radio and television broadcasters. A news agency may also be referred to as a wire service, newswire, or news service.

There are many news agencies around the world, but there are global news agencies with offices in most countries of the world and cover all areas of information: Agence France-Presse, Associated Press and Reuters. All three began with and continue to operate on a basic philosophy of providing a single objective news feed to all subscribers; they do not provide separate feeds for conservative or liberal newspapers. Jonathan Fenby explains the philosophy:

History

Only a few large newspapers could afford bureaus outside their home city. They relied instead on news agencies, especially Havas in France and the Associated Press in the United States. Former Havas employees founded Reuters in Britain and Wolff in Germany; Havas is now Agence France-Presse (AFP). For international news, the agencies pooled their resources, so that Havas, for example, covered the French Empire, South America and the Balkans and shared the news with the other national agencies. In France the typical contract with Havas provided a provincial newspaper with 1800 lines of telegraphed text daily, for an annual subscription rate of 10,000 francs. Other agencies provided features and fiction for their subscribers.

Alternative news agency

An alternative news agency (or alternative news service) operates in a similar fashion to a commercial news agency, but defines itself as an alternative to commercial or "mainstream" operations. They span the political spectrum, but most frequently are progressive or radical left. Sometimes they combine the services of a news agency and a news syndicate. Among the primary clients are alternative weekly newspapers.

Examples

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