International News Service
Overview
The International News Service (INS) was a United States news agency founded by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst in 1909. Headquartered in New York City, it supplied wire reports, pictures and features to Hearst newspapers and to outside client papers that bought its service. For most of its life INS ranked as the third-largest news agency in the United States, behind the Associated Press and United Press, despite considerable Hearst investment. At its peak in 1948 it served about 19 percent of American daily newspapers. In May 1958 INS merged with United Press to form United Press International, ending its independent existence after nearly half a century.
Origins in the Hearst News Service
The precursor of INS was the Hearst News Service, established in 1904. In 1903 the Hearst organization leased a telegraph line from San Francisco to New York by way of Chicago so that its expanding chain of newspapers in those cities could share reporting. The arrangement also supplied news items to other newspapers, and from that exchange grew a formal service. Hearst was following, and competing with, the example of E. W. Scripps, who two years before INS was founded had combined three smaller syndicates into United Press Associations. The pattern of the era was consolidation: publishers who owned papers in several cities found it cheaper to pool their reporting and sell the surplus to others than to let each paper gather national and foreign news alone.
American News Service and the INS Name
In May 1909 the Hearst organization established the American News Service (ANS), headquartered in New York, to sell Hearst wire reports to outside morning newspapers in the United States. Curtis J. Mar was appointed its first president and general manager and was succeeded the same year by Richard A. Farrelly. From August 1909 the service was expanded to include foreign news reporting. Soon afterward ANS was split into two divisions to serve morning and evening newspapers. To reflect a widened field covering both domestic and foreign news, the service was renamed the International News Service in January 1910. INS provided overnight reports to morning newspapers seven days a week, while a companion organization, the National News Association, provided a six-day-a-week report for evening papers. In 1911 the National News Association was dissolved and the morning and evening services were integrated under the INS banner.
Competition with AP and United Press
INS spent its entire life as the challenger in a three-wire contest. The Associated Press was a publishers' cooperative with the largest membership, and United Press, backed by Scripps, sold aggressively to papers the AP would not serve. INS battled both, adding services as they did. It created a picture service, International News Photos (INP). The Hearst newsreel series was released as International Newsreel from January 1919 to July 1929, tying the INS name to cinema news as well as print. Another Hearst agency, Universal Service, operated alongside INS before being merged into it in 1937, giving INS a consolidated operation. Yet the ranking never changed: INS remained a distant third. Its position illustrates a structural feature of the wire business — once a paper subscribed to AP or UP for its basic report, a third service had to sell distinction, speed or features rather than necessity, and Hearst's money could not fully overcome that disadvantage.
Leadership: Koenigsberg and Faris
Two executives shaped INS over decades. Moses Koenigsberg, the Hearst executive who ran King Features Syndicate and wrote a memoir of the Hearst news empire, was a central figure in the organization listed among its key people. On the editorial side, E. Barry Faris joined INS in 1916 as a correspondent and news manager in Washington, D.C., and stayed for forty years. He served as an assistant to editorial managers Marlen E. Pew and George G. Shor, was promoted to general news manager in 1927, and in 1932 became editor of INS, a position he held until the merger in 1958. Such continuity was characteristic of the wire services, where senior editors spent entire careers inside one organization and embodied its news judgment. Faris's tenure alone spanned the First World War's aftermath, the Depression, the Second World War and the early Cold War.
Notable Journalists
INS employed or published many journalists who became famous in other settings. Future broadcasters William Shirer, Edwin Newman and Irving R. Levine worked for the service; Levine covered the outbreak of the Korean War for INS in 1950. Bob Clark and Freeman Fulbright also passed through its ranks. Marion Carpenter, described as the first woman national press photographer to cover Washington and the White House and to travel with a president, worked for INS. Its wider circle of noted names included Jack Lait, Damon Runyon, Karl Henry von Wiegand, Otto D. Tolischus, Dorothy Thompson, Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker, Pierre J. Huss, Richard Tregaskis and Max Jordan. Columnists whose work was associated with INS, including Bob Considine, Louella Parsons and Ruth Montgomery, were among the few INS features carried over into UPI after the merger. The roster shows INS functioning, like its rivals, as a training ground for American journalism: young reporters learned speed and compression on the wire, then moved to newspapers, networks and magazines.
International News Service v. Associated Press
The agency's most lasting legal legacy came from the First World War. During the early war years INS was barred from using Allied telegraph lines because of its reporting of British losses. It allegedly made do by taking news stories from AP bulletin boards, rewriting them and selling them to other outlets. The AP sued, and the case reached the United States Supreme Court. In International News Service v. Associated Press (1918), Justice Mahlon Pitney wrote for the majority that INS was infringing on the AP's lead-time protection and defined the practice as unfair competition under the misappropriation doctrine, while narrowing the new right to the period necessary to prevent a competitor from reaping the fruits of another's efforts and expenditure. Justice Louis D. Brandeis dissented, objecting to the creation of a new private property right. The decision remains a foundational case in American law on the tension between the principle that there is no copyright in facts and the protection of the commercial value of timely news — a tension that still shapes disputes over digital news aggregation.
Radio, Television and the INS Poll
The INS name reached audiences beyond newspapers. New York's all-news radio station WINS, then under Hearst ownership, took its call letters from INS. The short-lived DuMont Television Network nightly newscast of 1948-49 was titled I.N.S. Telenews. Between 1952 and 1957 INS also conducted an annual college football poll, similar to the AP Poll and the United Press Coaches Poll, in which a panel of experts and writers ranked the top ten teams weekly and named a national champion at the end of the season before the bowl games. Its champions were Georgia Tech (1952), Maryland (1953), Ohio State (1954), Oklahoma (1955 and 1956) and Ohio State again (1957). The poll ceased when INS merged with UP in 1958.
The 1958 Merger and Legacy
United Press president Frank Bartholomew, who took over UP in 1955, pursued a merger with INS for three years through secret negotiations. Fearing antitrust scrutiny from the Eisenhower administration's Justice Department, Scripps and Hearst rushed the deal through with unusual speed and secrecy. UP and INS announced the birth of United Press International at noon on May 24, 1958. The combined agency had about 6,000 employees and 5,000 subscribers, roughly a thousand of them newspapers, and was intended to create a stronger competitor to the AP. The human cost fell on INS: all UP employees were retained, while most INS employees lost their jobs with practically no warning, and only a relative few joined the new UPI. INS thus ended not with a collapse but with absorption — its contracts, picture obligations and a handful of famous columns passing to UPI. Its historical significance endures in three forms: as Hearst's half-century attempt to build a wire to rival the AP, as the defendant in the Supreme Court case that defined misappropriation of news, and as one of the two parents of UPI, for decades the world's second great wire service.
