- published: 24 Aug 2015
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Yonhap News Agency is South Korea's largest news agency. It is a publicly funded company, and headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. Yonhap provides news articles, pictures, other information to newspapers, TV networks and other media in South Korea.
Yonhap (meaning "associated" in Korean) was established on December 19, 1980, through the merger of Hapdong News Agency and Orient Press. It maintains various agreements with 65 non-Korean news agencies, and also has a services-exchange agreement with North Korea's KCNA agency, signed in 2002. It is the only Korean wire service that works with foreign news agencies, and provides a limited but freely available selection of news on its Internet website in Korean, English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic and French.
Yonhap was the host news agency of the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics, and was elected twice to the board of OANA.
Yonhap is South Korea's only news agency large enough to have 41 correspondents abroad and 110 reporters across the nation. Its largest shareholder is the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), South Korea's largest public broadcaster.
A news agency is an organization of journalists established to supply news reports to news organizations: newspapers, magazines, and radio and television broadcasters. Such an agency may also be referred to as a wire service, newswire, or news service.
The oldest news agency is Agence France-Presse (AFP). It was founded in 1835 by a Parisian translator and advertising agent, Charles-Louis Havas as Agence Havas. Two of his employees, Paul Julius Reuter and Bernhard Wolff, later set up rival news agencies in London and Berlin respectively. In 1853, in Turin, Guglielmo Stefani founded the Agenzia Stefani, that became the most important agency in the Kingdom of Italy, and took international relevance with Manlio Morgagni.
In order to reduce overhead and develop the lucrative advertising side of the business, Havas's sons, who had succeeded him in 1852, signed agreements with Reuter and Wolff, giving each news agency an exclusive reporting zone in different parts of Europe.
News agencies can be corporations that sell news (e.g. Press Association, Thomson Reuters and United Press International). Other agencies work cooperatively with large media companies, generating their news centrally and sharing local news stories the major news agencies may chose to pick up and redistribute (i.e. AP, Agence France-Presse (AFP) or American Press Agency (APA)). Commercial newswire services charge businesses to distribute their news (e.g. Business Wire, the Hugin Group, GlobeNewswire, Marketwire, PR Newswire, CisionWire, and ABN Newswire). Governments may also control news agencies: China (Xinhua), Canada[citation needed], Russia (ITAR-TASS) and other countries also have government-funded news agencies which also use information from other agencies as well.