Global — news channels live

Agence France-Presse traces its roots to the Havas agency founded in 1835 and was reconstituted under its present name in 1944. It is one of the three major international agencies and has a particularly strong correspondent network in Africa and the Middle East, regions where the English-language agencies are thinner. It files in six languages.

AFP's corporate structure rests on a special statute that guarantees its independence from the state in law, regulating its relationship with the French government while protecting editorial independence. In recent years the agency has built a dedicated verification unit and now produces a large body of fact-checking output.

Like the other agencies, its YouTube channel is event-driven rather than continuous.

Al Jazeera English is the English-language channel of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera Media Network and launched in 2006. It is known for having shifted the geographic centre of gravity of international news: rather than concentrating on Western capitals in the conventional pattern, it built broadcast centres in Doha, Kuala Lumpur, London and Washington and weighted its correspondent network towards the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Latin America.

The channel's most distinctive strength is sustained live coverage from conflict zones; it has maintained long-running field operations on Gaza, Syria, Ukraine and Sudan. Its documentary strand and discussion programmes such as Inside Story and The Stream are as prominent as its bulletins.

Its funding relationship with the Qatari state has been a persistent subject of debate about its editorial line, and readers are better placed to weigh its reporting on Gulf politics and regional rivalries knowing it. Against that, the channel sustains a field presence in places where local broadcasters cannot operate, which is a genuine and distinctive contribution to international reporting.

The Associated Press was founded in New York in 1846 as a joint newsgathering venture by five newspapers and has remained a not-for-profit cooperative ever since. That structure defines its character: it is owned by the newspapers and broadcasters that buy its copy. The AP Stylebook has become the de facto standard for English-language news writing and is used as a reference in newsrooms worldwide.

The agency is also known for collecting and publishing vote-count data on election nights; many American outlets base their results coverage on AP's tabulation. Its photographic archive forms a significant part of the visual record of the twentieth century.

Its YouTube channel does not carry regular bulletins; it goes live for major events.

Reuters was founded in London in 1851 and is today one of the largest news agencies in the world. Its origin story is a story about the infrastructure of news: Paul Julius Reuter used carrier pigeons and then telegraph lines to move stock prices faster than his competitors, and the agency has been shaped from the beginning as an institution selling speed and accuracy together.

Reuters now maintains correspondents in more than two hundred countries and produces text, photography, video and financial data under one roof. Its independence rules, known as the Trust Principles, are protected at corporate level and are one of the rare instances of editorial independence written into binding constitutional documents.

Its YouTube channel does not run as a continuous news network; it goes live for major events, press conferences and international summits. The channel will therefore often show as off air — that is not a fault but the nature of agency journalism.