Who gets to tell the world’s news?

Daya Thussu was still a student when he landed a subediting desk job at the Press Trust of India (PTI), then India’s largest news agency. It was the early 1980s, and the newsroom in New Delhi was alive with the clatter of telex machines delivering dispatches from across the world. At his desk, Thussu, then in his mid-20s, worked through two very different streams of international news.

One came from established Western agencies, including Reuters. The other arrived through a little-known network connecting newsrooms across Asia, Africa and Latin America. “We would check the ticker to see what the story was and where it had come from,” Thussu says of his work with the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (NANAP).

“It could be from anywhere - the Philippines, Iraq or across Africa. My job was to select stories that we would then send out to the PTI wires.” The two streams of news offered different windows on the world. One came from established international agencies, largely based in Western capitals.