Mehr News Agency

The Mehr News Agency (MNA; Persian pronunciation: [خبرگزاری مهر] Xabâr-gozâri Mehr; "Friendship News Agency") is an Iranian news agency headquartered in Tehran, owned by the Islamic Ideology Dissemination Organization (IIDO).

History and profile

Established on 22 June 2003, MNA is the most multilingual (transmitting news and photos in six languages) news agency in the Islamic Republic of Iran and its CEO and Director General is Ali Asgari (since April 2014).

Culture and Art (cinema, theater, music, visual arts); Culture and Literature (poetry, stories, books); Religion and Thought; Seminary and University; Modern Technology; Social; Economic; Political; International; Sports; Nuclear Energy; Sacred Defense, as well as Photos, and Provinces are the 14 news fields covered by MNA.

MNA has five regional centers inside the country—northern, southern, central, eastern, and western Iran—and one regional office outside the country in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

It has also stringers and correspondents in Europe, South America, Turkey, East Asia, and some Persian Gulf littoral states and CIS countries for the time–being and is extending them across the world.

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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Defunct