In the age of “fake news” and virtual “shitstorms” the struggle over news has become a common issue in political debates. For historians, and especially for business history, however, the topic remains neglected. This book by Heidi J. S. Tworek, assistant professor of international history at the University of British Columbia, thus deals with a topic that is both of huge contemporary political interest and innovative in the scholarly debate in historical research.

Tworek starts from the perspective that the organization of the dissemination of news does not simply follow technological opportunities or political institutions but is a historical evolution in its own right, in that elites, states, and consumers participate. In the book she studies the history of news agencies operating in Germany during the most turbulent half century of the country's history. The story starts at the turn of the century, when Wolff's Telegraph Bureau was part of an international cartel originally formed in the 1860s together with the French Havas and the British Reuters. With Germany's aspiration to become a “Great power” in economic but also in political terms, the country's elite was increasingly critical of Britain's supremacy in submarine telegraph cables. Britain was thought to be equipped with an “invisible weapon,” as Daniel Headrick once accurately named it (The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851–1945 [1991]). As Tworek convincingly shows and fascinatingly tells, the German industrial and political elite pushed for the evolution of a global wireless network, giving German news the opportunity to be disseminated worldwide without being filtered by British opposition. As can be seen from this vital starting point, it was economic interests in the support of German exports as well as political interests in controlling news from Germany that collaborated to establish new technology and organization of the news business.

The following chapters show how the coalition continued over the Weimar Republic—now, however, involving a broader range of political interests. While industrialists in Imperial Germany cooperated with the monarchy's administration, they started to engage in their own projects. The result was competition between different news agencies, partly using wireless technology, with different political and economic goals. Besides Wolff, which had been frequently subsidized by the state, the Swift Service (Eildienst) in particular became important for economic news. This company, an initiative of the Foreign Trade Office, was founded as a public-private partnership and could make quasi-monopoly use of the wireless infrastructure, now in the hands of the Post Office. The Telegraph Union, in contrast, was funded by the right-wing industrialist Alfred Hugenberg, who openly aimed at strengthening opposition against the democratic government with increasing success in the late years of the Weimar Republic. The increasing tendency to control information flows by state takeover of news agencies under the chancellorship of Heinrich Brüning eventually delivered a powerful instrument to the Nazi Party after it had taken power in Germany. The new government had only to merge the news agencies and fire Jewish and politically unreliable directors to be able to control news dissemination in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. Furthermore, with the Transocean News Service, it established an organization to influence global news along the lines of Nazi ideology.

Tworek's book is clearly a political rather than a business history of German news agencies. Many pathbreaking events in German and European history that are widely known and researched—including the emperor's abdication, the announcement of the republic, the Austrian turmoil of 1927, and D-day—are retold in the book alongside the story of how the particular organization of news agencies changed public perception and individual decision-making. In contrast to older literature, Tworek here makes use of an impressive academic literature as well as archival material comprising American, British, French, German, and Polish sources. Germany's aim to influence or even control the news about the country was from the very beginning a real global history, as the book is able to show.

But the book also contains many worthwhile lessons for business historians. One interesting aspect is the fact that in most cases the news agencies were not profitable, which was one reason to become dependent on the state or political entrepreneurs like Hugenberg. Since corporate archives of the numerous (and often quite small) organizations apparently did not survive, Tworek could provide only scattered statistical material. A robust check of the companies’ profitability is seemingly not feasible. Another interesting aspect is the continuous interference of political and economic interests. One important motive for the industrialists to engage in the dissemination of news was, from the very beginning, the support of German exports. This started in the late nineteenth century, with countervailing negative information by foreign news agencies about German product quality, and continued in the 1920s with the open struggle for export markets, when German industry increasingly promoted its goods especially in eastern Europe.

Tworek's book gives new and interesting insight into the process of organizing and disseminating news through the example of German history in the first half of the twentieth century. Business historians who agree that the field has in the past neglected corporate strategies to accelerate and control the dissemination of economic news will find many connecting points in this book.