A news bureau is an office for gathering or distributing news. Similar terms are used for specialized bureaus, often to indicate a geographic location or scope of coverage: a 'Tokyo bureau' refers to a given news operation's office in Tokyo; 'foreign bureau' is a generic term for a news office set up in a country other than the primary operations center; a ‘Washington bureau’ is an office, typically located in Washington, D.C., that covers news related to national politics in the United States. The person in charge of a news bureau is often called the bureau chief.
The term is distinct from a news desk, which refers to the editorial function of assigning reporters and other staff, and otherwise coordinating, news stories, and sometimes the physical desk where that occurs, but without regard to the geographic location or overall operation of the news organization. For example, a foreign bureau is located in a foreign country and refers to all creative and administrative operations that take place there, whereas a foreign desk describes only editorial functions and may be located anywhere, possibly as an organizational unit within the news organization's home office.
A news bureau is traditionally operated out of an office by a single news outlet such as a radio, television, or newspaper news program. A single news company such as CNN or NPR may use a single bureau and office staff for all of its programs, and even those of subsidiary or other affiliated companies. For convenience, to save money and space, and to ensure the availability of necessary services (such as video feeds and studios), different companies may share an office space or co-locate at a single office building. News agencies may also operate news bureaus, and major public relations sources (such as governments, large companies, or advocacy groups) may operate news bureaus of their own to create, rather than simply report, news stories.
Traditional news media, particularly television news and newspapers, have cut the number and size of news bureaus in recent decades for several reasons. They face declining profitability due to increasing competition from Internet news sources, and therefore have less money to spend on news-gathering.[1]
Newspapers rely increasingly on cooperative arrangements with counterparts elsewhere and often will accept stories from their sister organizations rather than investigating stories themselves. Similarly, smaller newspapers may formally affiliate to sponsor cooperative bureaus that operate as press pools to serve more than one news organization (and sometimes a large number of organizations) from a single office. When news sources combine operations following a merger or other business consolidation, the surviving company often combines or eliminates redundant bureaus. Growing multiculturalism has facilitated this process: rather than demanding a reporter from their own country or locale who has been sent on assignment, news audiences have come to tolerate or even expect to see stories in remote locations covered by people who live locally; this empowers the audience to make their own judgments about any apparent cultural difference between themselves and the news subjects, rather than leaving the function of cultural interpretation entirely up to the reporter.