When several unrelated outlets carry the same story with the same details within minutes, they are usually not competing. They are all working from the same agency feed.
Agencies exist to be resold
News agencies employ correspondents and sell their output to subscribing outlets rather than to the public. Their customers are newsrooms, and the product is raw, verified copy.
A subscription grants the right to publish that copy directly or to rewrite it. Small outlets take it nearly unchanged, while larger ones use it as a starting point.
The economics are straightforward. Maintaining a correspondent in every capital is impossible for most publications, and an agency spreads that cost across hundreds of subscribers.
The alert comes before the article
Agencies publish in stages, beginning with a single-line alert confirming that something has happened, followed by a short snap and then progressively fuller versions.
Newsrooms react to the alert by preparing, not publishing, because a one-line confirmation carries little detail and can still be withdrawn if the source proves unreliable.
Each subsequent version adds sourcing, context and reaction. An outlet chooses which stage to publish from, which is the first point at which coverage begins to differ.
The desk decides what survives
Incoming wire copy arrives in far greater volume than any publication can carry, so a desk selects, cuts and reorders according to what its audience is assumed to want.
That selection is the main editorial act in wire-based coverage. The words may be the agency's, but the decision to run the story at all belongs to the outlet.
Headlines and framing are written locally, which is why identical copy can appear under headlines implying quite different emphases across two publications.
Verification happens upstream
Agencies operate rules about how many independent sources a claim requires and how attribution must be phrased. Subscribers inherit that verification without repeating it.
The efficiency is real and so is the risk, since an error in the agency copy propagates simultaneously to every outlet that carried it, arriving everywhere as apparent confirmation.
Corrections propagate the same way, and an agency withdrawal obliges subscribers to act. How quickly they do so varies considerably.
Front-page selection follows different rules
Getting onto a front page or a homepage lead requires more than accuracy, since that position is contested by stories with local significance and by the outlet's own reporting.
Original work is usually favoured for the lead precisely because it distinguishes the publication. Wire copy fills the surrounding space and keeps the record complete.
Understanding that hierarchy explains the texture of a news page: one or two pieces reflecting the outlet's own judgement, surrounded by material that everyone else is carrying too.