What is a wire service and why do outlets run identical stories?
A wire service or news agency is an organisation that gathers news and sells it to other outlets. The major international ones are Reuters, the Associated Press (AP) and Agence France-Presse (AFP), alongside national agencies such as the Press Association in the UK.
Subscribing outlets can publish agency copy directly, edit it, or use it as raw material. This is why you will read what appears to be the same article on a dozen different sites, sometimes word for word — because it is the same article.
Why the model exists. Maintaining correspondents in every country is extraordinarily expensive, and no single outlet could cover the world alone. Agencies spread that cost across hundreds of subscribers. They are the reason a local paper can report on a foreign election at all.
Their editorial character. Because agencies sell to outlets across the political spectrum and across countries, they have strong commercial reasons to be factual and restrained. Agency copy tends to be plain, heavily sourced and light on interpretation. That makes it a reasonable baseline for what is being reported before an outlet's framing is applied.
What has changed. As newsroom budgets shrank, the proportion of coverage that is unedited agency copy rose substantially. Research on this has found a large share of published news derives from agency material or press releases with limited additional reporting — a pattern sometimes called churnalism.
Why it matters to a reader:
Apparent corroboration is often illusory. Seeing a story on ten sites feels like ten confirmations. If all ten are running the same wire copy, it is one source.
Look for the credit line. "Reporting by Reuters" or an agency byline tells you where it came from.
An error propagates instantly across every subscriber, and corrections do not always follow.