What is Zenger?
Owned and operated by journalists, Zenger is the world’s first digitally native wire service.
Zenger is dedicated to bringing high-quality news content to overlooked communities and promoting the broadest possible variety of voices and subjects.
Zenger’s stories are created by its more than 5,000 correspondents across 120 countries, as well as dozens of independent news rooms, including AccuWeather, Benzinga, and Jewish News Syndicate.
Zenger is a wire service that distributes news stories and images to online and traditional news outlets that collectively serve more than 1 billion readers across the United States and the world.
Zenger supplies print and video stories to hundreds of news outlets including Forbes, Newsweek, The New York Post, The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Kansas City Star, The Charlotte Observer, The Wichita Eagle, The Lexington Herald Leader, The Beaufort Gazette, as well as Apple News, Google News, Yahoo! News, AOL, SmartNews, Dailymotion, many black-owned and Latino newspapers, and the websites of many radio and television stations.
Zenger can fill your news gaps.
Zenger provides a subscription-based news feed that fills in news gaps – from minority business success stories to archaeological digs from the Middle East and viral videos of wild animals, natural disasters, silly pets, and daredevil feats. Our beats include urban news, science, politics, tech, business, world, as well as video.
Ownership & Editorial Independence
Zenger is a product of Z News Service, Inc., a Delaware corporation, domiciled in Austin, Texas. The majority of shares are held by journalists who work for Zenger. The minority shareholders include tech investors in Paris, London, Dallas, and Salt Lake City. No shareholder is involved in campaigns, lobbying, politics, public relations, or government. In no case are investors, advertisers, or non-editorial employees involved in editorial decisions.
What does the name “Zenger” mean?
Zenger takes its name from John Peter Zenger, an 18th-century German immigrant who survived by printing a small New York newspaper that exposed misconduct by the royal governor. Zenger was jailed for eight months (while his wife bravely published the paper) and then prosecuted in 1735 for libel, which at the time was defined as any criticism of the crown.
He freely admitted to publishing the scathing newspaper pieces, but a jury of his peers acquitted him—declaring, for the first time in the English-speaking world, that truth is an absolute defense to libel. No longer could the powerful use ruinous lawsuits to silence the press, when it printed inconvenient truths.
It would be another half-century until James Madison wrote the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, building on a free-speech tradition established by Zenger.
We stand on John Peter Zenger’s shoulders. So does every other journalist.
