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AAP is a vital supplier of Australian journalism

  • 13 March 2020
Most restaurants don’t grow all their own food. Of course, they can and may grow some produce, but their expertise is on the preparation, cooking and plating of the dish. They look to farmers to supply the raw ingredients. This is a pretty good analogy for the role of the national newswire, Australian Associated Press (AAP), which will be closing mid 2020.

Newswires — others you might have heard of include Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones — are wholesale providers of news. The vast majority of what they provide is fact-based, objective and filed extremely quickly, often in real-time.

Sometimes AAP news is run straight as its filed to the wire, either with an AAP credit or, more rarely, the name of the AAP journalist who wrote the story.

It is also used by journalists to glean context, background or facts to add to their stories, which is why you so often see ‘with AAP’ at the end of stories published by mainstream news outlets.

The financial noose has been tightening around the necks of news operations for the last two decades. Traditional sources of revenue such as classified advertising have moved online. In a worldwide trend, many news organisations have gone out of business, merged or sold up. Those that still operate are often in financially precarious positions, continually looking to cut costs.

And as journalist numbers across the sector have declined sharply, more than ever before we see a reliance on the national newswire to provide the ingredients for news desks to deliver a plate of news. Over 2500 jobs have been lost in the sector since 2011 and losses have continued unabated. The closure of AAP will mean another 180 job losses, though some new roles are expected at Nine and News Corp to fill the news space left by the wire’s loss.

 

'In the era of social media and "fake news", we need verified facts that form the basis of public interest journalism more than ever.'  

We know that the barometer of a healthy democracy is its quality journalism. In recent years, AAP has been particularly active in court and parliamentary coverage — coverage that comfortably meets the definition of public interest journalism defined by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission as ‘Journalism with the primary purpose of recording, investigating and explaining issues of public significance in order to engage citizens in public debate and inform democratic decision making at all levels of
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