Federal News Service

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Federal News Service (FNS) is a privately-held company based in Washington, DC with bureaus in Moscow and Jerusalem, providing timely verbatim English-language transcription of U.S., Russian and Middle East government press briefings, speeches, and conferences. FNS also transcribes and translates broadcast interviews on official policy covering a broad range of national and international issues. In certain cases, Federal News Service is the sole source for information discussed at government briefings that are not covered by the media. Transcripts contain the actual words spoken, and are neither condensed nor abstracted. Other services provided by FNS include a Washington Daybook, translation services and media monitoring services including the monitoring of broadcast, print and online media sources.

[edit] History

Federal News Service was founded in 1985 to provide transcription of government briefings, speeches, press conferences and other newsmaker events to the many domestic and international news bureaus in Washington, DC. Shortly thereafter, FNS also began to transcribe Congressional hearings, National Press Club speeches, and significant events such as conferences at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, Georgetown University, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and broadcast interviews with opinion leaders.

FNS later introduced its Washington Daybook, a schedule of government events occurring in Washington DC for the day, week, or month ahead, as well as other events of interest, such as lectures. FNS set up its first international office in Moscow in 1991 to offer foreign embassies, news media and foreign business interests verbatim transcript services similar to those offered by FNS in the U.S. A Middle East bureau was established in Jerusalem in 2002 to provide transcripts in English of press conferences, briefings, statements and news interviews of Israeli and Middle Eastern political leaders and spokespersons, major political interviews on Reshet Bet (Network B), Galei Tzahal (Israeli Army Radio), Al Jazeera, Iranian Television, Al Manar and many other key sources throughout the Middle East.

The FNS Translation Department started in Moscow, translating Russian to English and vice versa. Today, the department offers translation services for many languages including Ukrainian, Georgian, Polish, Korean, Slovak, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Malay, Indonesian, Farsi, Arabic, Hebrew, French, German and Spanish.

To provide PR and media relations clients with access to their news media coverage FNS has added media monitoring services, including a national Broadcast News Monitoring Service and an electronic print media monitoring service called NewsClips Online. The FNS Broadcast News Monitoring Service can provide clients with up-to-the-minute reports of broadcast news stories aired on network, cable and local news shows in more than 150 markets, and provides the videotape or DVD dubs of the news stories. FNS NewsClips Online scans and indexes more than 7,000 U.S. media websites and more than 2,000 International media websites multiple times per day, and posts relevant stories to clients’ accounts as stories appear.