World News Wire: Changes since 2049/10/06

World News Wire (WNW) was a multichannel news and research organisation that specialised mainly in deep investigative journalism inspired by slow media, and documentaries often delivered in audio or video formats with high production values.

Founded as a think tank in Malaysia in 2022, WNW transitioned to a public news model in 2025 and grew in both scope and revenue, peaking at a global audience of over 53 million subscribers across its various channels. In 2039, WNW ran a series of award-winning reports that exposed Lassgard Bioteknik’s role in causing the CMD pandemic, based on data leaked to WNW reporter Anse Daems by an anonymous source.

In 2041, WNW was acquired and dissolved by the Senanayake Group following the release of a final documentary on G6.

HistoryPermalink

FoundingPermalink

World News Wire (WNW) was founded by Adam bin Amir and Veronica Weill on November 22nd 2022 as a think tank based in George Town, Malaysia. In its first year, WNW developed a reputation as a reliable watchdog on various state interests, corporations, and multinational political strategies around China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In this capacity, WNW often supplied proprietary data and analysis to various governments affected by the BRI, most prominently Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Singapore.

According to Weill, WNW‘s work on the BRI made her “truly understand just how much information asymmetry there is between the people making decisions and the people voting them in.” Citing her desire to create “a better public media source for everyone,” Weill started exploring various models, eventually buying out bin Amir’s stake in 2025 and raising over ¥190 million to pivot WNW to a news organisation.

Transition to public newsPermalink

As a public news organisation, WNW focused heavily on events in the Asia-Pacific region, especially around China and India. As a result, WNW developed an international reputation for its oft-cited coverage of the 2028-2031 Sino-Indian War. Two weeks after the war’s conclusion in January 2031, WNW released Post-Modern Warfare to critical acclaim. ^[1]

The long-form documentary explored different facets of the conflict, including the lack of troop-against-troop clashes in favour of remote technologies such as drones and UAVs, the vastly underreported civilian casualties, and a resolution which focused less on territorial control and more on broadcasting rights in key areas.

The high quality and quick turnaround of Post-Modern Warfare were the result of a tight collaboration between human and artificial intelligence AI editors. This production process was refined and repeated for all of WNW’s long-form documentaries, with the addition of a proprietary knowledge graphing tool called Pipeline in 2034.

In 2032, Weill transitioned to the role of WNW chair to focus on business growth and elevated Emad Sajjadi to the position of WNW’s editor-in-chief. Under Sajjadi, WNW tripled in size, aiming to cover all 143 countries that were signatories of the BRI and boasting a staff of some 2,000 journalists, investigators, videographers, and editors. Between 2032 and 2041, WNW released close to 600 documentaries, including:

• The Trillionaire Raj (February 2034), a look at wealth inequality in India inspired by The Billionaire Raj.
• Broken Record (July 2034), an investigation of medical experiments conducted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Huawei on detainees in the Xinjiang concentration camps.
• Kings of the New Silk Road (May 2035), which examined the BRI’s movers and shakers, both corporate and government.
• Predictive Behaviour (November 2036), a roadmap of the DISCO algorithm and its international spread through the BRI.
• The Ninth Immortal (February 2037), a comprehensive overview of Xi Jinping’s tenure as Chinese President.
• Elite Panic (April 2041), a look at the CMD pandemic and how it led to the international adoption of G6.

Lassgard Bioteknik revelationsPermalink

Image

In October 2039, WNW reporter Anse Daems was contacted by an anonymous source inside Lassgard Bioteknik who wanted to leak sensitive information about the company and its involvement in causing the outbreak of Cariappa-Muren disease (CMD).

WNW was able to establish a timeline of Lassgard Bioteknik’s malfeasance and began to publish a series of reports on October 23rd 2039, accusing the company of orchestrating “the most heinous disinformation campaign since climate change denial.” ^[2]

The revelations prompted the World Health Organisation (WHO) to declare the outbreak of CMD a pandemic on October 25th 2039, which greatly amplified WNW’s international profile and increased its audience to over 53 million subscribers.

DissolutionPermalink

In November 2040, WNW began to struggle financially, resulting in Weill selling her majority stake in WNW to a Sri Lankan venture capital firm owned by the Senanayake Group. On November 13th 2040, Sebastian Rummens took over from Sajjadi as editor-in-chief and immediately launched a significant restructuring of WNW, laying off over 1,300 staff and moving the company from long-form documentaries and public funding to shorter opinion pieces from notable contributors and an advertiser-led model. ^[3]

Image

In May 2041, Rummens resigned as editor-in-chief due to the fallout from WNW’s Vessel project and its perceived role in the spread of CMD phobia, and appointed Hasashi Desai as his successor. Desai realised he was only offered the position to “keep up an orderly facade while WNW was being stripped for parts” and decided to focus his remaining time and resources on a pet project.

Dubbed WNW’s “swan song,” the project involved the creation of a final long-form documentary on G6. With full access to WNW’s AI-powered authoring tools, Desai and five of his colleagues worked on the documentary in secret, planning interviews and organising field work while doctoring the records of these activities to keep them hidden from WNW’s new shareholders.

In June 2041, Desai abruptly left WNW after travelling to Brazil, forcing his colleagues to complete the G6 documentary without the cover of his position as editor-in-chief. When their efforts were subsequently discovered by enforcement officers from the Senanayake Group on June 14th 2041, they published the largely unedited five-hour documentary under the title The State of G6 to a selection of open streams and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, resulting in over 500 million downloads within 24 hours of release.

On June 16th 2041, the Senanayake Group initiated liquidation proceedings and sold off WNW‘s remaining assets to cover its outstanding costs and honour the staff’s redundancy packages.

See alsoPermalink

• Anse Daems
• Hasashi Desai

ReferencesPermalink