Press Agencies

The dpa is Germany's largest wholesale dealer in news. Founded in 1949, it began by supplying German newspapers and public broadcasting services with news. Today the dpa is a multimedia agency which sources its news from correspondents all over the world.

Anyone who surfs through the online pages of all manner of regional newspapers on any given day will be struck immediately by the mass of dpa news items, reports and photographs to be found there, relating to every conceivable topical issue. The domains covered include sport and entertainment, politics and business, science and the media, and culture and the colourful people pages. Behind the abbreviation dpa is a German joint media enterprise comprising 190 shareholders from newspaper and magazine publishers, publishing houses and public and private broadcasters. Its goal is to collect, process and distribute all types of news, archive and photographic material. The company's articles of association insist on impartiality and independence from political parties, ideological, economic and financial groups, and from governments.

Wide-area news coverage

The dpa group of companies is made up of a number of subsidiaries with main offices in Hamburg, Berlin and Frankfurt; the company also has holdings in agencies in Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, where the dpa "product" – i.e. news in text, audio and picture form – is generated by a variety of local services.

The dpa operates services entitled Basic, National, Thematic and News in Brief, all of which produce text-based news, while its photographic division comprises an international picture service, digital archives, photographic archives, photographic reports, sports reports and archive reports. To highlight just how important the dpa's role is, around ten books containing dpa pictures were published every day in 2005, and the Brockhaus encyclopaedia [Germany's leading reference work] obtains 75 percent of its photographic material from the dpa. Spoken news, short pieces and interviews are provided by the rufa Audio Service, the rufa Radio Service, the dpa Radio News and the dpa Online Radio; the services dpa Graphics, dpa InfoActive and Global Graphics present a visual take on complex issues, while the dpa Webline and dpa Mobile supply text, visual and audio news for online providers. Finally, dpa Business provides business enterprises with all kinds of "competition-relevant information".

Global information

Information about global events is fed to the dpa services from a worldwide reporting network of around 800 permanent staff – 600 of them journalists – plus several thousand freelance journalists and photographers. The dpa also cooperates with other providers and uses a wide variety of sources in institutions, authorities and the press departments of political and economic organs. Until 1970/71, the dpa sourced its global news together with the English news agency Reuters, and then with the American agency United Press International (upi); in 1988, the dpa was finally able to stand on its own two feet and act independently. With international services in English, Spanish and Arabic, the dpa now supplies media to over 100 countries. The international services are produced in Washington D.C., Cork, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Nicosia and Bangkok.

From Hellschreiber to Internet

The dpa is technology history in the making, and has undergone some very exciting phases: from the first Germany-wide dpa teleprinter network in 1949 to terrestrial long-wave radio and satellite networks; from photographs of events sent by rail to long-wave facsimile transmission and virtually real-time transmission by Internet, from the Hellschreiber with its strip paper texts to radio tubes and video text to the dpa MediaServer (MeS), which allows customers to access pictures, sound and graphics from the Intranet. This could make the odd editor here or there surplus to requirements, yet the employees of the dpa are likewise not immune to the effects of rationalization. Even though the company has traditionally valued reporters and photographers, researchers and editors as its most important resource ("people make news") – with 784 employees in 2005 (generating revenues of €94.67 million) as compared to 752 employees in 1950 (and revenues of €11 million), the figures speak for themselves.

Infotext and cross-media infotainment

Nonetheless, the development of the dpa's news product has shown amazing results. The dpa news in brief, which appear in the side columns of newspapers, are merely the company's best-known product. Entire pages devoted to a particular theme, audio contributions and the conveniently laid-out computer graphics are also among the journalistic offerings. Nowadays, the dpa produces news for mobile phone use, in text message or podcast form, and as multimedia packages for online publications. The latest development to be launched is a Children's Service, providing cross-media "infotainment" to readers and early readers between the ages of six and ten. The service delivers news, explanations and key words in child-friendly language. The children are also sent interactive multimedia offerings via the Internet, and can vote for new topics using their mobile phones or text messaging. This augurs well for a discerning target audience some time in the future which hopefully will not lose the skill of how to read well-researched articles, however old-fashioned this may seem.