Editing TASS (section)

=== 1902: TTA, SPTA, PTA, ROSTA ===
The origin of TASS dates back to December 1902 when it began operations as the Commercial Telegraph Agency (TTA, Torgovo-Telegrafnoe Agentstvo) under the Ministry of Finance, with Torgovo-Promyshlennaya Gazeta's staff being the main supplier of journalists. As the demand for non-business news began during the first battles of the [[Russo-Japanese War]] in February 1904, the agency changed its name to the St. Petersburg Telegraph Agency (SPTA). As there was no change of headquarters and almost no change in its staff and function, it was a mere rebranding.

In August 1914, one day after [[Saint Petersburg|St. Petersburg]] was renamed Petrograd, SPTA was renamed the Petrograd Telegraph Agency (PTA). It was seized by the [[Bolsheviks]] in November 1917 and by December was renamed as the Central Information Agency of the [[Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic|Soviet Russian]] [[Government of the Soviet Union|Council of People's Commissars]]. On 7 September 1918, the presidium renamed PTA and the Press bureau into the Russian Telegraph Agency ([[Russian Telegraph Agency|ROSTA]]), which became "the central information agency of the whole Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic".