SDA celebrates 120th birthday

As a news wholesaler, SDA today works behind the scenes of the media business. This was not always the case during the 120 years of its existence. From 1931, the SDA was a fixed part of the daily lunch ritual in Swiss parlors for many years. "You are listening to the news of the Swiss Dispatch Agency," it sounded - exactly after the 12:30 p.m. time signal - from the nation's radio receivers. Like the Beromünster station, the SDA news is history. Since 1971, SRG broadcasters have been organizing their own information. As co-owners, however, they still obtain their basic news requirements from the agency. The same is true for the newspapers.

Against foreign dominance

It was also Swiss publishers and journalists who, dissatisfied with the press' dependence on foreign countries, resorted to self-help in 1894. They founded the "Syndicate of Swiss Newspapers" to "elevate their news service. The goal was to establish a national news agency. At that time, the large foreign "telegraph bureaux" had divided the market among themselves. They dictated prices at will, and often their telegrams were colored according to national interests. Local readers even had to learn about events within Switzerland from Paris or Berlin. Accuracy sometimes fell by the wayside. "Don't tell a Havas story," was a saying - the name of the French agency became the epitome of fairy tales and untruth in the vernacular.

On September 25, 1894, the constituent general meeting of the Schweizerische Depeschenagentur AG took place in the Bern Casino, and on January 1, 1895, the SDA was able to begin operations - initially with ten employees in the "Hauptbureau" on Bern's Spitalgasse as well as in Basel, Zurich and Geneva. The Bernese newspaper Bund commented on the event with the words: "No country has such a widespread press as Switzerland. We owed it to our dignity and our independence to create our own telegraphic service for our papers, a Swiss control."

Trilingual basic service as core business

For the domestic market, a network of permanent and freelance correspondents was gradually built up. News from the rest of the world was and is sourced by sda from its foreign partners. At the beginning, there was a German- and a French-language service; the Italian editorial office was added in 1915. In times of war, sda became the hub of European news exchange. From 1939 to 1945, its reports were among the most listened to radio news in Europe. In the 1950s, the telephone news service followed. With the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, it evolved into the multimedia online service. Over time, other special services were added, such as the regional services, the people service with soft news and the sda-direct archive service. However, the core business of sda is still the basic service with the domestic, foreign, business and culture sections.

At the headquarters in Bern and at the other twelve locations, around 160 journalists write about 170,000 reports a year in German, French and Italian. What their predecessors produced in text during SDA's first year of operation in 1895 now leaves the "conveyor belt of reality" (former Federal Councilor Kaspar Villiger) in about two days.

Shareholdings of SDA

Sports events are covered by Sportinformation (Si), a wholly owned subsidiary of sda. The sda Group also includes news aktuell (50 percent), the financial news agency AWP (50 percent) and the photo agency Keystone (40 percent). In total, the group has a good 300 full-time positions. (SDA)