SYMHC Classics: Paul Julius Reuter

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. This week's episode on Joseph Medill made me think about another figure from the history of journalism, although with a very very different claim to fame. That was Paul Julius Reuter, who used telegraphs and trains and boats and pigeons to deliver the news. This episode originally came out February thirteenth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We have kind of an accidental theme in the episode that I've researched lately inspired by things I read on Twitter, which makes it sound like I'm reading Twitter a lot, which is the opposite of true. It's whenever I open Twitter, I just kind of zoom up to the top and look at the three most recent things and then go away from that. So I just coincidentally have caught various interesting tweets lately. This time it was author and science communicator Rosemary Moscow, who had a Twitter thread about pigeons and how cool they are and how they are all over cities because humans put them there, so don't be mad at them for it. The pigeons didn't do it themselves. And in this thread, one of the things she said was Paul Julius Reuter of Reuters used them to carry stock prices. And I replied and said, well, now I have to do a podcast on Paul Julius Reuter, which is where we are. The man who would later become known as Julius Reuter was born Israel Beier Yosaphat on July twenty first, eighteen sixteen. He was born near Kassel, in the Electorate of Hesse Cassel, which would later become Prussia and is now Germany. His father was Rabbi Samuel Levi Josaphat, and he was the third of four children. When the young Israel was about sixteen, his father died and he was sent to live with an uncle in Gertengen, Germany. His uncle ran a bank, and the plan was for Israel to train there and then to enter the finance industry. At about the same time, physicist and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was also in Gertengen, experimenting with electrical signals and telegraph technology. It is not entirely clear how these two met Israel would have been running errands and making deliveries for his uncle, so it's possible that he delivered something to Gaus and they struck up an acquaintance. Regardless, though Israel was fascinated by these experiments, which started in eighteen thirty In eighteen thirty three, Gaus successfully sent a message over a wire from his lab to an observatory a mile away. In eighteen forty one, when he was about twenty five, Israel started going by a new name, which was Julius. It was probably after his birth month of July, and in the early eighteen forties he also left the world of banking and started working at a publishing house in Berlin called Reuter's Publishing Company. In those same years, he also met a woman named Ida Maria Elizabeth Clementina Magnus. Some sources call her Ida, while others call her Clementina. It took me a long time to find her entire name written out and figure out what in the world was going on with that. Clementina was the daughter of a Lutheran pastor.

00:03:21
Speaker 2: There are some sources that describe the Magnus family as Jewish, but that seems to be an incorrect assumption based on the fact that their home was in Berlin's Jewish Quarter. That would have been a logical place for Julius to stay after arriving in Berlin, though so he and Clementina probably meant simply because they were living in the same neighborhood at the timeline on in all of this is a little bit fuzzy. It's not clear precisely when Julius started going by that name or when he met Clementina. But in eighteen forty five, Reuter's publishing house sent Julius to London to try to establish a branch there. London had a large enough German speaking population that it seemed like there might be a demand for German language books. So Julius and Clementina left Germany for England by ship. Then they departed from Hamburg, but before they left they got married in a civil ceremony. They arrived in London on October twenty ninth, eighteen forty five, and they were listed in the passenger manifest as mister and Mistress josephat and they got a room at a boarding house and started planning another wedding, this one at a Lutheran church officiated by a pastor, and their reasons for doing this are not documented anywhere, but most historians conclude that Clementina had gone through the civil wedding back in Hamburg so she could travel with Julius without it being scandalous or for the sake of her own conscience, but that she didn't consider herself really married without that.

00:04:48
Speaker 1: Big church wedding. On November sixth, eighteen forty five, shortly before this second wedding, Julius was baptized as a Lutheran and at his baptism he took another name, which was Paul, and he also changed his surname from Josaphat to Reuter. Once again, there's no documentation of what led him to this name change, but it did mean that he was harr Reuter of Reuter's publishing company as he was trying to set up this London based branch of that company. Don't really know what his employer thought about the fact that he decided to do that. I imagine that opened some doors for him that he might not have had access to. Otherwise, one would think maybe he was just being really, really wily in that move. We don't know, but the Sunday after the baptism, Julius and Clementina got married in the church ceremony. It still actually wasn't a very big affair. I referred to it as a big church wedding before, but it really wasn't. It was just the two of them with witnesses that were provided by the church, and then they started trying to build up their business and trying to start a family. In eighteen forty six they had a daughter named Julie, although unfortunately she died while she was still a baby. By all accounts, Julius and Clementina were a really striking couple. He was short and had had very dark hair, and she was very tall and blonde, and their marriage wasn't entirely conventional by the standards of the day. Clementina was intelligent and educated and really dedicated to her husband's success, so rather than being mostly a homemaker and a helpmate, she took a really active part in all of his various business ventures. Essentially, she worked as anything from an unpaid assistant to an unpaid partner, depended on exactly what was needed. But in spite of Clementina's help, Julius wasn't able to get the London branch of Ruter's publishing company off the ground. It seems like there just was not as much demand for German books as they had anticipated, so soon the couple was back in Germany, living in Berlin, where Julius partnered with Joseph Stargart to form another publishing house called Stargart and Reuter. This was once again not one of Julius's more successful ventures. Years later, Stargart accused Reuter of disappearing from the eighteen forty eight Leipzig book Fair, taking all of the money from their sales with him. Reuter didn't admit any guilt in all this, but he did offer to repay the money, which some people interpreted as basically admitting he had done it, while others interpreted it as just him wanting the issue to be over with and having the money to do it that way.

00:07:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I call a buy your freedom situation. Yeah, I want you to leave me alone about this.

00:07:22
Speaker 1: Here is some dollars.

00:07:24
Speaker 2: Additionally, Reuter was publishing pamphlets that were for the time quite radical. They advocated democracy and progressive policies. This might not seem at all radical by today's standards, but A revolution swept through Germany in eighteen forty eight and eighteen forty nine. It was driven by an economic depression that included high unemployment and food shortages. Peaceful protests failed to bring about any kind of change, and after King Louis Philippe was deposed in France, the situation in Germany progressed to food riots and other violence. Reuter's pamphlets and the demonstrators were on the same side.

00:08:01
Speaker 1: At first, it seemed as though this revolution was going to be successful, especially after a number of progressives were installed in the German government, but these changes did not last and soon the progressives were once again out of favor. By eighteen forty nine, conservatives would be back in control, and all of this together led the Reuter's family to leave Germany again. They settled, this time in Paris. In Paris, Reuter got a job at Avas News Agency, working as a translator. Avas News Agency was founded by char Luis Avas, who was from a Sephardic Jewish family, and the agency translated and distributed news articles. They mainly used pigeons to distribute their work, although the agency was also starting to experiment with the telegraph This combination of news and pigeons and the telegraph would set the stage for Reuter becoming a household name in the world of international news, and we will get to that. After a sponsor break. In eighteen forty nine, Julius and Clementina Reuter combined all their experience so far to try producing and distributing their own publication. It was essentially a newsletter. It combined stock prices and news and political goings on, sometimes a little bit gossip. But they were once again not really able to get this off the ground. They just couldn't get enough subscribers to turn a profit. So when collectors came to seize their assets in eighteen forty nine, they decided it was time to leave Paris. The next stop was Achen, which is near the current border between Germany and Belgium. Achen had come to prominence in the eighth and ninth centuries as the home of the Emperor Charlemagne. Later, it had become a thriving center of manuscript creation and publishing, and it was well situated to be an information hub in the geography of the day. It was adjacent to Prussia, Holland, France, and Belgium. And that made it an easy connecting point for travel, trade, and information. This trend in being sort of a connecting point for all these things continued into the nineteenth century as an international railway line made its way through Auchen. But then on October first, eighteen forty nine, a new telegraph line opened which connected Achen to Berlin. There was a separate line across the border in Belgium, and that line was a French Belgian line that ran from Paris to Brussels, so Achen was on one side of this gap in the line. The gap stretched about ninety miles or one hundred and forty four kilometers between Brussels and Achen. So if somebody bridged that gap, they could connect Paris to Berlin along the telegraph line. And that's someone or really those someone's were Julius and Clementina Reuter who bridged the gap in the line with pigeons. To be clear, they definitely were not the first people ever to send messages using pigeons. Pigeons are the oldest domesticated birds, and people have been using them for food, companionship, entertainment, and carrying messages all over the world for thousands of years. Pigeons and doves are in the same family, so some people note the first documented message sent by pigeon has that moment in the biblical Book of Genesis, when the dove returns to Noah carrying an olive branch after the Great Flood. Pigeons were used in ancient Rome to carry the results of chariot races, and Genghis Khan had a whole network of messenger pigeons. People have been doing this for an extremely long time.

00:11:23
Speaker 2: Yes, pigeons were well established as a way to send messages by this point. Reuter was just at an ideal spot to make particularly good use of them. He established the Institute for the Transmission of Telegraph Messages in Achen, and on April twenty fourth, eighteen fifty he signed an agreement with pigeon breeder Heinrich Geller for twenty five pigeons. Geller is also who they rented rooms from when they first arrived in Achen, and he may have also invested in their business. So homing pigeons only fly one route, they fly back home, and in this case home was Achen. So this whole setup required there to be some in Brussels to get the news from Paris by telegraph and then transcribe it, load it up on the pigeon, and let the pigeon go to fly back to Achen. Then in Achen somebody had to collect the pigeon, retrieve the message, transmit it by telegraph, and then load the pigeon up into a special crate and take it to the train station to send it back to Brussels. So running this operation in Achen required both Clementina and Julius, one to run the office while the other ran all of the errands, including running those pigeons to the train station. It also required an office in Brussels with pigeons whose home was there to receive messages from Achen. That side of things was run by Prussian Army officer Lieutenant Wilhelm Stephen. The train trip between Achen and Brussels took about ten hours. By comparison, the average flying speed for a homing pigeons roughly sixty miles an hour or nine to six kilometers an hour, so a pigeon could fly between Brussels and Achen in about an hour and a half.

00:12:58
Speaker 1: That meant news carried by pigeon was much much faster than news that was put on the train and sent that way. The train, though, was still necessary to get the birds back to their starting point. Julius Reuter was thirty four when he started this venture, which focused on sending stock prices and other financial information. It was known as mister Reuter's Prices, and the birds were called the Pigeon Post. It was his first overall successful business, although it was really built on knowledge he'd been gathering since his teens. He had learned about banking from his uncle, about the telegraph from Karl Gauss, about pigeons from his work with the Avis News Agency, and about writing and publishing from various other jobs along the way. Reuter's new business grew pretty quickly. On July twenty sixth, eighteen fifty, a little more than three months after they signed their first agreement, another agreement transferred all of Hergeller's two hundred pigeons over to Reuter.

00:13:54
Speaker 2: Reuter's success with the Pigeon Post wasn't just because of the ingenuity and hard work that he and Clementina put into all of this. Reuter was also starting to show some business savvy. In April of eighteen fifty, he got in touch with Rothschilds in London to sign an exclusive business deal in which Reuter agreed to get London financial information only from Rothschilds, while Rothschilds got the Berlin and Vienna prices only from Reuter, with Reuter otherwise staying off of the London market. Today this sort of collusion would be somewhere between frowned upon and outright illegal, depending on the industry and the location. But at the time it was actually pretty normal.

00:14:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, it wouldn't necessarily be illegal to have the exclusive agreement about who was providing stock prices and stuff. But when it came to the and I also will not do business in London, I will protect your monopoly there. Like that's the part that today not so much of a good business strategy in terms of ethics or the law. Depending Reuter only ran this pigeon post for about a year. A new branch of the telegraph line opened on October second, eighteen fifty, connecting Achen to the Belgian city of Vervier. The following March, another branch of the line connected Vervier to Ostend, and then Ostend connected to a Prussian telegraph network that ultimately got back to Berlin. So as of March fifteenth, eighteen fifty one, there was no longer a gap that needed to be closed in the telegraph network. Later that same month, the Reuters closed up shop in Achen and they left. And this move was another major change for the Reuters. So we're going to take another pause here for a quick sponsor break. After leaving Achen, Julius and Clementina Reuter went to London, and they had been advised to do so by Werner von Siemens, founder of the telecommunication company Siemens, who had worked on that new telegraph line that ran from Achen to Vervier.

00:15:57
Speaker 2: Siemens later wrote of meeting them in Achen. Quote, in the course of the construction of that line, I made the acquaintance of the owner of the Pigeon post between Cologne and Brussels, a mister Reuter, whose useful and lucrative business was relentlessly ruined by the new electric telegraph. When Missus Reuter, who accompanied her husband on the trip, complained to me about this destruction of their business, I advised the payer to go to London and to open a telegram agency there, similar to that just formed in Berlin by a mister Volfe, and we're going to get back to this mister Volfe a little bit later. The Reuters arrived in London in October of eighteen fifty one. They got rooms near the London Stock Exchange and they lodged there with a doctor named Herbert Davies. Reuter's Telegraphic Dispatch Office.

00:16:42
Speaker 1: Opened its doors on October fourteenth at the Royal Exchange Buildings, and they advertised their service this way quote Messages to any part of the continent may be sent to this office and will be immediately forwarded. Communications from the continent to England may be addressed to mister Julius Reuter at Kelly or ost.

00:17:00
Speaker 2: At first, this business in London was really about sending telegrams for business and personal use, as well as stock prices and financial news. It wasn't a traditional news service yet, and they weren't at all the only telegram service in the area. A lot of telegram and message services were all springing up, hoping to make money off the ever increasing telegraph lines connecting various parts of Europe. One of the articles that I read describing this whole thing talked about how before the telegraph made the use of pigeons totally unnecessary, and there was still a lot of like pigeon use connecting various people, like connecting London to the smaller.

00:17:38
Speaker 1: Towns and stuff. This part of town that they were in. You needed an umbrella because there were so many pigeons dropping so many droppings. Reuter didn't own any of telegraph lines. He knew a lot about them, though, and he was very good at prioritizing telegraph traffic and building relationships and negotiating terms for the transmissions that he needed to send and receive. Clementina continued to work really closely with him in this business. She transcribed, She translated messages coming into and leaving the office. Eventually they were making enough money to hire a messenger boy, which was eleven year old Fred Griffiths, who would eventually work his way up to becoming a director in the company. Not long after their move to London, Clementina got pregnant for the first time that we know about since the death of their first child, their daughter, Julie. A son, Herbert Reuter, was born on March tenth, eighteen fifty two, and the Reuters went on to have five more children, three daughters and two sons at the rate of about one baby every other year. So there's been some speculation that Clementina had trouble getting pregnant or carrying her pregnancies to term, and that doctor Davies had helped resolve that problem, and that may be true.

00:18:49
Speaker 2: He did for sure deliver at least some of the children, but he didn't specialize in obstetrics, which was still a relatively new field at the time. As the telegraph system became in racingly prolific, there were more ways for people and businesses to send their own telegrams. You didn't have to write your letter and mail it to the care of a particular person in another city in order for it than to be transmitted from a loan telegraph office that was out there. So over time Reuter's service forwarding messages to and from the continent was not really as necessary anymore. People did, however, want the news, and in places that weren't yet connected by telegraph, whoever got a story out first was at a huge advantage. As more and more of Europe was connected by wire, it leveled the playing field. But before the first transatlantic telegraph cable was completed in August of eighteen fifty eight. Speed was still key to making money from news coming into Europe from North America.

00:19:47
Speaker 1: The only way for news to make its way between North America and Europe before that line was complete, which we have a whole episode on in the archive, the only way to do that was by ship. Most of these ships arriving in Europe doted Cork, but the first place that they spotted land was in Crookhaven, about seventy five miles or one hundred and twenty kilometers southwest. So it took about eight hours for ships to make this last leg of the journey from Crookhaven to Cork and then dock and then deliver the news that they had on board. So Reuter employed small fast boats at crook Haven. Once the incoming vessel carrying the news caught sight of shore, somewhat aboard, would chuck a dispatch off the side in a sealed container. Reuter's smaller ship would retrieve it, take it back to shore, and telegraph the dispatch back to London. And there were ships doing this same thing on the other end of the journey at Nova Scotia. It cracks me up that this is how people were trying to get the story out first was just by hucking containers off the sides of boats.

00:20:47
Speaker 2: I mean they were sending pigeons with trust.

00:20:50
Speaker 1: So yeah, so Reuter did know that eventually there would be an underwater cable connecting Europe to North America. So it's just like the telegraph had closed the gap and made his pigeon post obsolete. At some point, this same exact thing was going to happen to his whole Krickhaven message chucking operation. The same was true anywhere else that he was able to get an edge by being faster than his competition, So he increasingly turned his eye to actually reporting the news instead of just collecting and distributing it. He started hiring journalists and editors and started what we'd recognize today as a wire service, a service that gathered and reported news and sold it to multiple newspapers. His first subscriber was The Morning Advertiser in October eighteen fifty eight. By that point, Reuter had been in London for seven years and had been naturalized as a British citizen the year before. Reuter's big break came in eighteen fifty nine with a speech made by Napoleon the third, Napoleon had been overheard talking to the Austrian ambassador at a New Year's reception, saying something along the lines of saying he was sorry. The two nations didn't have quite the friendly relationship they used to. This made international news because it implied that France might be headed toward a war with Austria. The following February seventh, Napoleon the Third was scheduled to make a speech before the French Parliament, one that world leaders suspected would confirm France's intent to go to war. Reuter took full advantage of this. He had some of his best staff on hand in Paris, and he reserved time on a telegraph line to coincide with the scheduled speech, and his agent even managed to get a copy of the speech ahead of time, under the condition that it not be opened until the speech began. Very curious about how he did that, but I do not know the answer. It's basically like embargoes that still happened today. Yes, of you can have this information, but you can't publish your article until a certain time. However, though regardless of by what means, they had a copy of the speech when Napoleon did start giving it. The French agent started transmitting the speech word for word to London, where it appeared in a special edition of The Times just a couple of hours after it had been delivered. The speech did indeed confirm that Napoleon would be going to war. This was part of what would come to be known as the Second Italian War of Independence. Plenty of other papers would report on this speech later, but the Times reported it first. This also meant that the newspapers that had been like, ah, I don't really know why I should sign up for this whole Reuter news service, a bunch of them now got on board. And then once the war actually started, Reuter also had reporters embedded with the troops in Austria, France, and Italy. In eighteen sixty five, Reuter was also the first in Europe to report the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. That same year, he established a news office in Alexandria. In eighteen sixty eight, Britain started nationalizing the telegraph service, which really affected Reuter's business and the news industry as a whole. Reuter's, the London newspapers and the regional newspapers known as the provincial press were out kind of a complicated pricing scheme among themselves to make up for these changes in the telegraph system. In the process, the provincial papers formed the Press Association to give themselves collective bargaining power with Reuter. They also negotiated a whole deal in which Reuter had control of the London news market, but the Press Association had exclusive rights to Reuter's news outside of London. The Press Association also agreed not to do international reporting, leaving that to Reuter's agency, and this also contributed to Reuter tried to really diversify the businesses that he was in in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties because the nationalization of the telegraph and all the changes that then trickled down with all of this were eating into his profit margin.

00:24:46
Speaker 2: These kinds of negotiations were also happening internationally. By eighteen seventy, three primary wire services were reporting the news from three different parts of Europe. Reuter was in England, Avas was in France, and Vote, who we mentioned earlier was in Germany, and rather than compete with each other, these three businesses got together to protect each other's monopolies. In different parts of the world. On January seventeenth, eighteen seventy, they agreed that vof would be in Germany, AVUS would be in France, and Reuter would have the entire British Empire, and this agreement was in place until nineteen thirty four.

00:25:24
Speaker 1: Once again, this arrangement today would probably run a foul of anti trust laws and a lot of places, but at the time this was not an uncommon way of doing business, and it also had parallels to things happening at the same time in the more political arena, like the Scramble for Africa, where countries were basically dividing Africa up amongst themselves. Also, these three services were intrinsically connected to each other. Julius Reuter and Bernhard Wolf had both worked as translators for the of US agency, which was known in French as Agents of Us.

00:25:56
Speaker 2: In eighteen seventy one, the Duke of Saxe Coburg Gotta made Reuter a baron, and Queen Victoria later recognized his rank in Britain. In eighteen seventy two, Reuters expanded into East Asia.

00:26:09
Speaker 1: That same year, Julius Reuter was also temporarily given huge control over multiple industries in Iran, which at the time was often also known as Persia. Reuter had become friends with the Persian minister in London, and at the same time the Shah Naser Aldin Shah Kajar was making a series of concessions to British interests. He signed what was known as the Reuter Concession, which gave Reuter the rights to railways, factories, mining, irrigation and telegraphs in Iran.

00:26:40
Speaker 2: This went really badly. Reuter got into this without really going through any British diplomatic channels, and British politicians all over the political spectrum tried to distance themselves from it. An editorial in The Times of London said, in part quote, there has been nothing like it before. The King of King's Amba decated the functions, if not the splendor of royalty, and though still gorgeous and glittering, is unable to make a road, explore a mine, or irrigate the lands under his dominion. So he calls in an enterprising financier of the West and offers him many and precious advantages if he will relieve the shaw in Shaw of the real duties of royalty.

00:27:22
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, Russia, which had been expanding into neighboring parts of the world, saw this whole thing as a huge threat and suspected that all those British officials who were distancing themselves from what Reuter had done were really just trying to cover up their own involvement in a British power grab. And the people of Iran were outraged the Shaw was making such huge concessions to British interests. The Shaw reversed the concession after about a year, but Reuter still had interests in Iran. This revised agreement with the Shaw established an Imperial Bank, and his son George became its president. The whole thing also set the stage for another concession of tobacco interests from Iran to Britain twenty years later, and that led to a huge uprising in Iran.

00:28:07
Speaker 2: The Reuters News organization kept expanding over the next decade, becoming known as the largest international news service in the world, although it was also criticized for unnecessarily graphic coverage, especially during wartime. Here's an example from an eighteen eighty three memo to correspondence written after Julius Reuter's retirement. Quote in consequence of the increased attention paid by press to disaster et cetera of all kinds. Agents and correspondents are requested to be good enough in future to notice all occurrences of the sort. The following are events that should be comprised on the service. Fires, explosions, floods, inundations, railway accidents, destructive storms, earthquakes, shipwrecks attended with loss of life, accidents to war vessels and to mail steamers, street ryoce of a grave character, disturbances arising from strikes, duels between and suicides of persons of note, social or political, and murders of a sensational or atrocious character. It is requested that the bare facts be first telegraphed with the utmost promptitude, and as soon as possible afterwards, a descriptive account proportionate to the gravity of the incident. So very long way of saying, if it bleeds, it leads, yes, one hundred percent. Reuter retired in eighteen seventy eight, and his son took over the agency, although Julius continued to be involved in the business for some time afterward, and by this point the Reuter family had become really wealthy. The business also continued to try to stay ahead of new technologies that became sort of part of its pattern of business. It kept adopting faster and better ways of distributing the news as these ways were invented, including using column printers, teletypes, radio, and satellites. Julius Reuter died at his mansion of Villa Reuter in Nice, France, on February twenty fifth, eighteen ninety nine. It came across the Reuter's wire quote. Baron de Ruter, the founder of Reuter's agency, died at Nice this morning in his eighty third year. His wife, Clementina, died on August fifth, nineteen eleven, in London, and not much is known about her life between her husband's death and hers, except that she had an active social life and was very good at poker. These are things we know from her obituary at this point. They also have no living descendants. The fourth Baron de Ruter died in nineteen fifty eight and his widow died in two thousand and nine. But it's clear that Reuter's could not have become the company that it did without her, and without her mostly unpaid work, there aren't even any pictures of Clementina in the Reuter's archive. We do know that she sat for a formal portrait at one point, but that portrait now cannot be found. I kind of wanted to name this episode after both of them, but there just wasn't enough information about her, and then that seemed disingenuous. It would be impossible to tell the entire history of Reuters as a business between then and now, but Reuters still exists as an international news organization and is a division of Thompson Reuters after being acquired by Thompson in two thousand and eight. Ajen Avas also became a Gen's France Press or AFP.

00:31:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, so two of the three places that had that sort of divvying up monopoly still exist in some form today as far as I know. Wolf did not, it was taken over by Nazis, and Is I think was later has its own decides. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

00:31:38
Speaker 2: It's one of those things where you think about, uh Reuter, the man touched so many things that continued to have echoing after effects. I mean, he basically like destabilized huge parts of Iran. In addition to his savvy in the business world, creating news agencies. Yeah, and we really didn't get into it here, but I read an interesting article preparing for the that was about how not just international news agencies, but domestic news agencies have a huge effect on culture and on language because, like I mean, you and I for years have used the Associated Press style guide as like that was has been like the go to style guide at how stuff works, even though how stuff Works has never been strictly a news reporting thing, And like how these style guides affect what is considered to be correct usage and all kinds of contexts even when they're not strictly journalism contexts. It was super interesting, but also not totally related to Reuter himself. Yeah, yeah, yeah, He's at the center of a lot of developments that continue to reverberate.

00:32:50
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can ribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.