When we lived in San Francisco in the 1970s there were two big news services offices there, the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International(UPI). I sold some of my news photos to them, and those were then distributed internationally. The UPI began a steep decline in the 1980s along with newspapers in general, and sold its broadcast services to the AP.
The news services were originally called "wire services" because their news
accumulation and distribution were over telegraph wires. Telephone
wires and transatlantic cables then took over the job until everything
moved to the Internet.
Now, the remaining big players are AP, Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP). The AFP requires a subscription, but AP and Reuters are free and good general news sources. Google News accumulates stories from all over, but the sources vary widely in quality and objectivity. A lot of people these days -- perhaps a majority -- look to social media like Facebook for their news, and that, unfortunately. is pretty much the bottom of the news barrel.
Given the ongoing decline of newspapers everywhere, journalists have struggled to keep their profession viable, in part by founding state-level cooperative news agencies. In New Mexico that includes Source New Mexico and Searchlight New Mexico.
