Sweat and Ink in the Vekllei News Agency

Tanny was twenty-five and as colourful as her flaming red hair implied. She was a once-in-a-generation editor, the kind of person who absorbed grammar rules on magical wavelengths beyond mortal comprehension and proceeded to violently enforce them. This was compounded by the Vekllei language, with its sublanguages and logography, leading to daily shouting matches in The Atlantic’s newsroom over sentence structure and colour as language. Although only a copy editor, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she would be head honcho one day. Already, in her youth, she wilted senior correspondents — middle-aged men — with her expressions of contempt as she thumbed her way through their drafts, licking her finger on every other page.

The Vekllei News Agency is the bureau of the nation’s premier broadcaster and newspaper of record, and includes several companies you may already be familiar with, like the Vekllei Broadcasting Company and The Atlantic daily broadsheet. In Vekllei, a bureau is an organisation made up of the largest trade unions of the country, and is usually somewhat beholden to national direction and public interest. Many different companies can operate under a bureau, but at least outwardly the Agency is Vekllei’s singular national “public broadcaster and press”.

The Agency is one of Vekllei’s largest institutions and operates as a core pillar of Vekllei culture, as it publishes all matter of media material, from magazines to children’s programming. Television is popular in Vekllei, but as a particularly social country cinemas remain the most popular places to find newsreels, and documentaries are shown nationwide daily at six in the evening.

Vekllei has an endless supply of eager journalism students looking to report from abroad, and has consolidated news bureaus in almost every major city across the world, from Brisbane to Bogota. A special few go on to become war correspondents and foreign investigators, usually after receiving military training in mandatory service. Vekllei’s largest camera manufacturer, FilmFoto, produces specialised equipment for her news services that include gyroscope-mounted film cameras and portable audio equipment. Every Vekllei journalist carries a card guaranteeing them medical care across the globe.

The Agency’s iconic “children’s blocks” logo has been in use since 2030, and is often simplified into three red squares without Vekllei characters. It is animated playfully to suit programming.

Vekllei is also home to the International Federation of Journalists, who maintain a headquarters in her Publishing District.

With nearly two dozen daily broadsheets, six news studios and countless independent rags, Vekllei enjoys a colourful and noisy media landscape that is suspended between the worlds of old and new, in a way that reflects the Vekllei as a whole.