Without the wire service it will be far more difficult for new players to grow big enough to have influence
Every morning the list of stories Guardian Australia should cover is far longer than the list of reporters I have to assign to them. Many mornings the AAP wire service helps make up some of the difference.
Holding politicians and powerful institutions to account requires sticking with things, sending a reporter to the months of trials and retrials of George Pell, for instance, or pursuing case after Kafkaesque robodebt case, or sitting through all the parliamentary committee hearings that help piece together the mounting evidence of the politicised grants process before the last election.
That’s easier to do, or at least slightly less impossible, when we can rely on the safety net of our AAP subscription. If we can’t get to the disability royal commission on a particular day, or commit to cover a court case, we know AAP will be there. If we miss a press conference, AAP will have the quotes. Except after June they won’t. They’ll be gone.
For the major shareholders of AAP, Nine Entertainment and News Corp, closing the wire service was a commercial decision. Facebook and Google have upended everyone’s business model. It will be cheaper for Nine and News to each hire their own team of breaking news reporters. As News Corp’s executive, Campbell Reid, told staff this week, Nine and News also felt they were propping up a newswire that helped their competitors. To an extent, they probably were.Holding politicians and powerful institutions to account requires sticking with things, sending a reporter to the months of trials and retrials of George Pell, for instance, or pursuing case after Kafkaesque robodebt case, or sitting through all the parliamentary committee hearings that help piece together the mounting evidence of the politicised grants process before the last election.
That’s easier to do, or at least slightly less impossible, when we can rely on the safety net of our AAP subscription. If we can’t get to the disability royal commission on a particular day, or commit to cover a court case, we know AAP will be there. If we miss a press conference, AAP will have the quotes. Except after June they won’t. They’ll be gone.
But this commercial decision by the biggest players has significant consequences for the industry as a whole.
Guardian Australia will certainly miss AAP, but with 6.5 million unique readers in January, we are now big enough to work around its demise. That assessment would have been quite different had the wire service folded when we were starting out almost seven years ago.
When the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission allowed the Nine Network to take over Fairfax in 2018, it conceded that the major sources of Australian news would shrink from five to four – Nine, News Corp, the ABC and Seven West Media – but said this reduction in competition was not enough to breach competition law because “other players, albeit smaller, now provide some degree of competitive constraint”, listing Guardian Australia as the first such “other player”. Without AAP, it will be far more difficult for any more “other players” to grow big enough to have influence – yet another blow for media diversity.
And, as Margaret Simons wrote for Guardian Australia this week, it’s unlikely any organisation will be able to take up the range of reliable, factual, Australia-wide reporting that AAP does, of courts and public events and inquiries. That foundation gives us more room to decide which stories we will stick with. The priorities of new breaking news teams at News and Nine are likely to be very different.
This impediment to media diversity, this diminution of comprehensive, factual reporting, comes at a time when we are already struggling to hold on to facts as the tools with which to hold politicians and the powerful to account. Social media is amplifying unfounded claims. Multiple news sites can copy and repeat false stories before someone points out that they’re wrong. The US president routinely disseminates false and misleading information.
When assembled by a credible body like, say, an audit office, facts are supposed to have consequences. When absent from an investigation into a potentially serious offence like, say, disseminating a falsified document, they are supposed to be insisted upon.
But Scott Morrison’s government seems to believe it can stare down the independent auditor’s damning findings about the sports rorts affair, using the complexity of the allegations and some carefully workshopped phrases to stonewall, apparently assuming that if they insist often enough there is nothing to see, then eventually we’ll all get distracted and look away.
Angus Taylor, similarly, has declared himself exonerated by a police investigation into the false document distributed by his office, despite never having explained where it came from, and the police never having asked him.
Guardian Australia’s business model also allows us to provide our factual, quality reporting free of charge to all, something more important than ever when much quality reporting now sits behind paywalls.
The former chair of the Global Health Council Jonathon D Quick went to this in a discussion about coronavirus and the possibility that some people could refuse a vaccine even when one was developed.
“I’ve written about a hypothetical situation in which a new and dangerous pathogen emerges, a vaccine is developed, and you still get a pandemic, because large numbers of millennials refuse the vaccine,” he said.
“In the US, 20% of millennials believe that vaccines cause autism. The problem is bad information. As my students often remind me, news tends to be behind paywalls, while fake news is free.”
In the latest edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, its editor-in-chief, Kyle Pope, wrote a disturbingly thought-provoking piece entitled Beyond Facts, suggesting that journalists and editors need to rethink how we tell stories, to provide more context, as we struggle through a time when facts are losing their potency as things that “spoke for themselves and could not be dismissed”.
“For journalism to confront this problem asks a lot of its business model, now in bottom-line crisis,” he writes. “More context, more connection, and more time mean more people, more experience, more money. But maybe fewer, deeper stories is where we should all be headed.
“We have no choice but to try. We’re dangerously close to a situation in which facts no longer function as a journalistic response. Then what?”
There’s no acceptable answer to that final rhetorical question. I refuse to countenance it. The only way forward is to keep reporting, as fairly and comprehensively and deeply as we are able, a task that will be a little bit harder without AAP; to stick with the stories that matter, and to refuse to look away.
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