Barnaul in Siberia is a city where there are no secrets. So in November 2004 when local papers published unattributable articles that smeared the independent Deputy of the State Duma, Vladimir Ryzhkov, a rumour immediately spread among journalists that a public relations agency had come from Moscow to put pressure on the Barnaul deputy.

It was 8.45 in the morning on Tuesday 24 June, 2003. José Rubén Zamora, the publisher of the Guatemalan newspaper elPeriódico and a fierce critic of the government of Alfonso Portillo, was at home.

Noseweek was founded in 1993 – after the release from jail of Nelson Mandela, but before the first democratic elections in South Africa – by an investigative journalist with no capital whose dream was to earn a living from selling news, rather than advertising.

Vijesti is a daily newspaper that started and survived despite all the laws of economic science and, one could say, even contrary to logic and common sense.

When it was set up seven years ago, KBR 68H was not conceived as a grand idea. We had no real blueprint for a news agency, we just jumped in with both feet.