Australian Associated Press

• 1. Introduction

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  Australian Associated Press, known as AAP, was reported to have been sold in 2020 for a single dollar. That price bought a news agency whose reports feed much of the Australian media. Today it employs around 90 journalists. They work from bureaus in every Australian state and territory except the Northern Territory. AAP also keeps correspondents in New Zealand and London, plus a network of contributors in the US, Europe, Asia and Africa. It is one of the few non-government newswires left in the world. How did a wire service that few readers have heard of become so central to Australian news? Why did the people who owned it decide to close it? And who stepped forward to keep it alive?

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• 2. Cables and Cartels

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  On the 18th of November 1871, a submarine cable linking Java to Darwin was completed. The British-Australian Telegraph Company had laid it, and it connected Australia to international telegraph services. In 1872 the Australian Overland Telegraph Line was finished, and the eastern states were linked through Adelaide. News from Europe that once took weeks or months to arrive by ship could now reach Australia in hours.

  Anticipating that sending messages would be costly, the Melbourne newspaper The Argus formed an association with The Sydney Morning Herald. Together they made an agreement with the Reuters news agency to transmit news to Australia. In 1871 the group successfully lobbied the Government of Victoria for a law that was the first of its kind in the world. It protected news material sent electronically for 24 hours from its first publication.

  For a decade before 1895, three suppliers brought overseas news to Australia. They were The Argus group, The Age group and the Reuters telegraph agency. In 1895 these services merged into the Australian Press Association, which held an exclusive contract with Reuters for its foreign newswire. A Senate inquiry in 1909 found the association to be a monopolistic cartel, and it financed a short-lived alternative service.

  A competitor called the United Cable Service appeared in 1911, fighting for exclusive access to the Reuters foreign newswire. It first served The Sun and The Herald, and it drew on the London newspaper The Times. Keith Murdoch headed it from 1915 to 1921. The two services agreed on shared access in 1926. In the early 1930s they set up an omnibus service that divided routine work such as court cases and ship movements.

  Several newspapers in the Australian Press Association folded, and the two services began to discuss a merger. The man who had once headed the challenger would be the one to bring them together.

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• 3. A Charter Against Bias

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  In 1935, Keith Murdoch brokered a merger between the two competing services in order to cut costs. The result was Australian Associated Press, set up as a not-for-profit cooperative with 14 newspaper shareholders. It began with a staff of 12 and bureaus in London and New York. Murdoch became its first chairman and served until 1940.

  The founding charter set a demanding standard. It said the service was to provide "the most accurate and most searching information of all the world’s activities and thought". It added that this must come "without any tendency toward or opportunity for the exercise of political partisanship or bias".

  The agency's first job was narrow. It supplied only overseas news to the Australian media, because the major newspapers of the day already had long-standing groups that syndicated local news. Its own supplier, Reuters, would soon become something more than a supplier.

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• 4. Reuters and Reach

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  In 1947, AAP became a shareholder in the Reuters telegraph agency. The stake brought windfall profits and representation on the Reuters board. Reuters then sent the British journalist Duncan Percy Hooper to AAP on secondment. After a year he was appointed AAP's first Editor, in September 1949, and he later became General Manager. He retired on the 31st of March 1977. Lee Casey, then Assistant General Manager, succeeded him.

  The 1950s saw AAP partner with Reuters to post AAP-Reuters correspondents in Asia, adding to its first bureaus in London and New York. By 1972 it had correspondents in Beijing, Los Angeles, Port Moresby, Saigon, Singapore, Suva and Wellington. Saigon is today called Ho Chi Minh City. Correspondents also worked in all the Australian states and territories. During the 1970s, AAP began offering federal parliamentary reporting from Canberra, along with court, sports, racing and stock market reporting.

  The newsroom grew from 40 journalists in 1970 to 120 in 1980. The environment was high-pressured, and around 1000 journalists passed through the agency in that period.

  In 1980, AAP launched a full domestic news service. During the 1980s it also gave up its not-for-profit model and became a commercial service. In 1988, News Corp, now led by Keith Murdoch's son Rupert Murdoch, tried to take over AAP by buying half the shares of Fairfax, then the other largest shareholder. The Trade Practices Commission did not allow it to proceed. The agency stayed independent, and a very different ownership question was waiting about three decades later.

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• 5. The Silent Partner

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  Court reporting, sport, political coverage, feature stories and photographs are all part of AAP's output. Its main focus, though, is breaking news, and it also produces video and visual explainers.

  Canberra's parliamentary press gallery once held reporters from all the major newspapers. In recent times, often only AAP and ABC reporters were present. Newspapers first sourced AAP material mainly for foreign news and war reporting. They came to rely on it for domestic and breaking news as well. That reliance has led to AAP being called the silent partner of Australian news outlets.

  By the 2010s, newspapers commonly republished AAP copy with minor edits, and sometimes word for word. Some ran an AAP byline and some left it off. Publishing newswire copy with little or no change has been called churnalism. Online news sites use AAP material especially heavily, as a way to cut costs.

  A 2009 study examined the online breaking news sections of The Daily Telegraph and The Age. It found them to be more than half unchanged AAP reports, with the rest mostly from international newswires. The study suggested that errors in AAP reporting could spread through a homogeneous news environment. A 2013 study found that when AAP reported on press releases, it usually changed very little. As a result, many newspapers were publishing media releases that had been recycled through AAP.

  AAP also operates FactCheck, a fact-checking service accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network of the Poynter Institute. FactCheck has a partnership with Facebook to verify material posted on the social media site.

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• 6. Retreat From Abroad

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  In 2014, AAP shut its bureau in Papua New Guinea after 60 years of continuous reporting there. Academics and members of the local media criticised the departure. They said it reduced the quality and quantity of news about Papua New Guinea reaching Australia.

  In September 2017, AAP closed its Jakarta office after 35 years. It chose to run its Asia desk from Australia, relying on international newswires and freelance journalists.

  The New Zealand Press Association closed on the 31st of August 2011. On the 5th of September 2011, AAP launched a New Zealand Newswire division with offices in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. It employed 14 journalists split across Auckland and Wellington. In September 2017 it closed its digital news video team. On the 27th of April 2018, AAP shut the division down. It was the final independent news agency in New Zealand to close, and AAP kept two full-time journalists there.

  In June 2018, AAP cut its editorial team by 25 staff. That was around 10 percent of an editorial workforce of about 220 people. The agency posted a loss of $10.45 million in 2018. In 2019 it recorded a profit of $929,000. That profit came a year before the biggest shock in the agency's history.

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• 7. Rescue and Relaunch

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  On the 20th of March 2020, AAP's shareholders announced that they would break up and shut down the newswire. They said it had become unsustainable in competition with free online material. In the year before the sale and restructure, AAP reported a loss of $10 million. Of that, $5.4 million came from the newswire service.

  From 2012, AAP had been jointly owned by twelve of the original newspaper shareholders, whose papers were now owned by various media conglomerates. Before the 2020 sale, Nine Entertainment held 45 percent and News Corp Australia held 45 percent. Seven West Media and Australian Community Media were minor shareholders. News Corp and Nine had formerly contributed more than $10 million annually, and the minor shareholders more than $1 million.

  Peter Tonagh, a former chief of News Corp and Foxtel, led a consortium of impact investors and philanthropists that bought AAP before the planned closure in June. The group said it was motivated by a desire to support media diversity. Members included Nick Harrington, the philanthropist John McKinnon, Fred Woollard of Samuel Terry Asset Management, and Kylie Charlton of Australian Impact Investments. In all, 35 investors from five states took part. The terms of the sale have not been released, so the exact ownership of the relaunched AAP is unclear.

  The service relaunched as a not-for-profit on the 1st of August 2020 under the same name. People sometimes call it AAP 2.0 to tell it apart from the earlier organisation. The newswire was bought by Acta Diurna AAP Limited, later renamed Australian Associated Press Limited. Editor Andrew Drummond stayed in his role. Emma Cowdroy, previously the senior legal counsel, became CEO, making her the only woman at the head of a news agency internationally. Jonty Low became chair of the board, the first woman to hold the role and the first chair without a media background. Tonagh joined the board. Nick Harrington joined the executive team as head of strategy and development, and he resigned from that position on the 21st of September 2020.

  The relaunched AAP had fewer staff and more infrequent coverage. It asked existing customers to move their contracts to the new company at the same rates. Its staff fell to around 80 editorial positions, with around 10 additional management, IT and support roles. On the 5th of September 2020, Cowdroy admitted that the company faced significant financial challenges. Clients were signing shorter contracts while they waited for NCA Newswire, a new competitor owned by News Corp Australia. A non-compete clause was due to end in February 2021. The company appealed to the public for crowd-funding donations and applied for a grant from the Public Interest News Gathering fund, which the federal government had started. On the 18th of September 2020, it was announced that AAP would receive $5 million from the federal government.

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• 8. Businesses Left Behind

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  In 1991, AAP established AAPT, a telecommunications division offering long-distance voice and data services. It was spun off and sold to Telecom New Zealand in 2000. It was sold again to TPG Telecom in 2013.

  The 1970s brought Formguide, a service that published horse racing information. The 1980s brought MediaNet, a service for distributing press releases among journalists. In 2002, AAP bought Pagemasters, a sub-editing business, from Bruce Davidson.

  When AAP was sold and relaunched in 2020, several divisions were spun off and kept by its prior owners. Those owners were Nine Entertainment, News Corp Australia, Seven West Media and Australian Community Media. Medianet became a media planning and public relations service, and Mediaverse handled research and analysis of media. ConnectWeb was a directory service for biographical data. Pagemasters became a digital publishing and design service, and Megaform provides information about horse racing.

  These services were gathered under a new company called Mediality. It employed 130 staff, 95 of them in full-time roles. Bruce Davidson, the former CEO of AAP, became its CEO. Its head office in Sydney was moving into the News Corp Australia Building.

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