Open almost any foreign news article and the first line, right before the actual story starts, carries a small piece of formatting most learners read past without a second thought: a city name, a set of capital letters in parentheses, and then the article itself begins. "PARIS (AFP)" or "MADRID (EFE)" isn't decoration and it isn't part of the headline. It's a dateline, and once you know what the two pieces inside it mean, it tells you something concrete about where a story came from and why the same sentence sometimes shows up, word for word, in three different newspapers.
The two things packed into three words at the top of a story
The city name is where the story was reported from, not necessarily where the news outlet publishing it is based, and the capitalized abbreviation after it names the wire service, a news agency that reports a story once and licenses it to many outlets at once rather than each newspaper sending its own reporter to cover the same event independently. A story datelined "BERLIN (Reuters)" means a Reuters correspondent in Berlin filed the report, and the paper you're reading licensed and ran it, possibly alongside dozens of other outlets running the identical text.
The wire services whose names you'll see constantly
AFP (Agence France-Presse) is the dominant wire service across French-language and much of European news, covering international stories with a French institutional home base. Reuters, headquartered in the UK, appears constantly across English and translated coverage worldwide. EFE is Spain's major wire service and the standard credit across Spanish-language news for both domestic and international stories. ANSA plays the equivalent role in Italian news. Lusa is Portugal's national wire service, credited constantly in Portuguese-language coverage of domestic stories. Recognizing these five names on sight covers the large majority of wire credits you'll meet across French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese news.
Why the same story appears word for word across outlets
Because a wire service story is licensed rather than independently reported by each paper running it, it's completely normal to read the identical sentence, sometimes the identical full article, in two or three different outlets on the same day, each one simply crediting the same agency in its dateline. This isn't plagiarism or laziness on any outlet's part, it's the entire economic model wire services exist to provide: most newspapers can't afford a correspondent in every city where news happens, so they pay for access to a shared pool of reporting instead, and the dateline is the built-in disclosure of exactly that arrangement.
When a dateline names a smaller, national agency instead
Not every dateline credits one of the handful of major international agencies. Domestic stories, especially routine local coverage, frequently credit a country's own national agency instead: Portugal's Lusa covers overwhelmingly domestic Portuguese stories rather than international ones, while a French regional paper might run an AFP-credited international story alongside a locally reported piece with no wire credit at all, simply the paper's own byline. Learning to notice the difference, a wire credit versus a named local reporter, is itself a small but useful signal about whether a story is likely to appear identically elsewhere or is genuinely unique to the outlet you're reading it in.
Datelines on stories that have moved on from where they started
A dateline reflects where a correspondent physically filed the report from, not necessarily where the news itself is happening right now, which occasionally produces a dateline that looks mismatched to the story until you know the convention. An article datelined "BRUSSELS (Reuters)" covering a summit's aftermath might describe events unfolding across several countries; the correspondent was in Brussels when they filed, which is what the dateline records, not a claim that every fact in the piece happened there. Reading the dateline as "this is where the story was written from" rather than "this is where the story is about" avoids a small but recurring source of confusion, especially in coverage of international summits, court rulings with effects beyond one country, or multi-city events.
What this means for you as a reader building vocabulary
A wire-service story is written in a deliberately neutral, widely portable register, since it's designed to be picked up by outlets with very different editorial styles, which tends to make wire-credited articles some of the most straightforward, jargon-light real news writing available in a given language, a genuinely good entry point compared to a heavily opinionated domestic op-ed. It also means that once you've read one wire-service story on a topic, encountering the same story reprinted elsewhere isn't wasted repetition, it's a second, often identical pass at the same vocabulary and sentence structure, which is exactly the kind of repeated exposure that makes unfamiliar words start to stick.