Website wenn.com | Founded 1989 | |
Type of business News, online, wire service | ||
World Entertainment News Network (commonly known as WENN) is an entertainment text, photo, and video wire-service provider headquartered in London with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas and Berlin.
Contents
WENN provides breaking entertainment news, images and text features to newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television networks, mobile phone company and websites including Yahoo UK Entertainment News and IMDb.com
History
WENN was launched as an entertainment news wire service in London in 1989 by UK newspaper journalist and ABC Radio News correspondent Jonathan Ashby. It began as the World Rock News Network (WRNN) and the company soon established a niche for itself, providing music news to subscribers including MTV, BBC, ABC and Russia's daily youth newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda. In 1991 the company name was changed to the World Entertainment News Network (WENN) to reflect its focus on celebrity news and photos. Its picture desk opened in 1993, and a Los Angeles bureau was added in 1994.
A year later, WENN opened a TV operation and spent 18 months interviewing international celebrities for global clients throughout Europe and in Japan and South Africa. Satellite offices followed in Eastern Europe, Japan, Australia and South America.
In 2000, WENN sales director Lloyd Beiny became CEO after Ashby retired. Under Beiny's, WENN opened bureaus hubs in New York City and Berlin, Germany
Former employees
Amy Winehouse and DJ Yoda reported on celebrities in the early 2000s. Other former employees include Matthew Wright, and James Desborough. NME journalist Alan Woodhouse also had a stint at WENN in the late 1990s. Raymond Brown, now Crime reporter for Cambridge News, also worked at WENN.
Photographers
WENN relies on a team of professional photographers including: