Paul Reuter starts a messenger service using homing pigeons to fill a gap in the telegraph network spanning Europe, but he faces difficulty attracting subscribers.

With some hot news about Russia's invasion of Hungary, which would depress the stock market, Reuter convinces bankers that he can provide them with financial information much more quickly than by any other means.

He encounters resistance, particularly from John Delane, the influential editor of The Times, but persuades Louis Napoleon III to allow him to disseminate the text of an important speech while it is presented.

A rival company secretly builds a telegraph line in Ireland that provides it with a two-hour lead in receiving news from ships sailing from North America.

[1] In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Thomas M. Pryor called A Dispatch from Reuters "a slow-paced drama of mixed values" and wrote: "Though generally interesting, the new film ... is only occasionally stimulating, and there are instances when the biography of the journalist is more apocryphal than factual.

Further in its favor is a stepping-up of the tempo above that of earlier scientific studies, as befits a saga of those swift heralds who bear the tidings of good or evil impartially to the corners of the earth.