In 1835 Charles-Louis Havas founded the worldwide first news agency in Paris: the "Agence Havas". Demand for news increased rapidly all around the world and around the year 1850, additional offices were founded, which specialized in dealing with the product news: the Associated Press in New York (1848), the "Wolff'sches Telegraphische Bureau" in Berlin (1849) and "Mr. Reuter's Cabled Messages" in London (1851). Joseph Tuvora founded the "Österreichische Correspondenz" in Vienna in 1849, APA's oldest forerunner.
The "Österreichische Correspondenz" was founded as a counter-revolutionary instrument in Vienna one year after the Revolution of 1848, and was a private company subsidised by the state. After a false report had been published on the outcome of the Battle of Magenta/Upper Italy in 1859, the council of ministers decided that the telegraphic news business must be more stringently controlled and therefore decided to nationalise the "Österreichische Correspondenz". In January 1860, the "k.k. Telegraphen-Korrespondenz-Bureau" took over the agenda of the "Österreichische Correspondenz". In 1922 the agency was renamed to "Amtliche Nachrichtenstelle" (ANA) and in 1938, was succeeded by the National Socialistic "Deutsche Nachrichten Büro" (DNB).
ANA was reinstated as the official national news agency after Austria's liberation in May 1945. Following the example of AP's and Reuter's policy programme dating from 1942, and with the support of the American allies, Alfred Geiringer, the European Reuters editor who had been sent to Vienna, successfully founded APA as an association of Austrian newspapers on 01 September 1946. Its independence was defined in the statutes of the agency: APA was to guarantee an "independent news service for Austrian newspapers, regardless of their political or ideological orientation". In the first decades after the war, APA was caught up in the party political grip of the grand coalition. Only in the 1970s, when the number of party newspapers declined and the so-called "second net" was founded, was the agency able to free itself step by step from the clutches of political influence.
Today APA is a successful, and in every respect independent company. Consequent customer and market orientation, consistent openness towards innovations and the implementation of a sustainable growth strategy have made APA to a high-yield enterprise, whose journalistic products are subject to the precept of balance, reliability, speed, and independence. Between the year 2000 and 2002 some APA business areas were reorganised to increase their flexibility: at first the division "press releases" was outsourced and the APA-OTS Originaltext-Service GmbH was founded as a 100 percent subsidiary of APA. The division APA-DeFacto Datenbank and Contentmanagement GmbH now represents the former "data base" and "profile services" divisions, as well as the APA-IT Informations Technologie GmbH (formerly the technology centre) followed later.
On the one hand, APA's expansion strategy is being realised through generic development and on the other, through acquisitions and shareholding. Since 2001, APA holds more than 90 percent of MediaWatch - Institute for Media Analysis. At the beginning of 2006, the Tourism Press GmbH, Austria's leading distributor of specialized tourist press information with its headquarters in Innsbruck, was taken over by APA. In the same year, the Austria Press Agency took over 69.3 percent of the Polish News Bulletin and entered the Polish market. Following the takeover of Austria's largest photo agency ‘Contrast' in November 2006 it was fully integrated - together with the already existent APA photo agency - into the APA-PictureDesk GmbH. In 2007, APA took over 60 percent of the shares of the leading Swiss photo agency and one of the largest European photo agencies, Keystone AG, in Zurich.
As a reliable provider of both information and content, the APA-Group has developed into a market leader in nearly all of its business divisions and is considered an indispensable pillar within the Austrian media and information system.
A detailed description of the history of the Austria Press Agency is published in the book: "Die Macht der Nachricht: Die Geschichte der Nachrichtenagenturen in Österreich" ("The power of news: The history of press agencies in Austria"), by Edith Dörfler and Wolfgang Pensold, Vienna 1999, Molden Verlag.
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