Belarusian Telegraph Agency Belarusian Telegraph Agency The Belarusian Telegraph Agency or BelTA (, , БелТА) is the state-owned national news agency of the Republic of Belarus. It operates in Russian, Belarusian, English, German and Spanish languages. The agency was founded on December 23, 1918. During the Soviet times BelTA cooperated with the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), although it was legally independent of it. After the USSR seized to exist in 1991, BelTA has been the national news agency of Belarus. It transmits over a hundred daily reports, and provides information to other news agencies of Commonwealth of Independent States members
TASS TV and radio stations and over a thousand foreign media outlets. The news agency ran one of the biggest networks of correspondents in the world – 682 offices in the country and 94 bureaus abroad, with reporters in 110 countries. At its peak it employed nearly 5000 people including close to 2,000 journalists and photo correspondents. TASS was organized with five Main Editorial Boards for Union Information, Foreign Information, Socialist Countries, Information for Foreign Countries, Photo information, supplemented by a Main Directorate of Communications. In 1961 Ria Novosti was created to supplement TASS, mainly in foreign reporting and human-interest stories.