For every breaking news story, big or small, the agency has been there. To me this is extraordinary and intrepid journalism
When the call came that a 39-year-old man had been critically injured in Barwon prison’s high-security Acacia unit in April 2010, journalists in Melbourne’s AAP bureau swung into action. We stood up at our desks, facing each other. We spoke fast and earnestly. We may have shouted. I entered an animated conversation with my news desk chief of staff. Tony Mokbel? No, I replied, he was 44. This guy was 39. It had to be Carl Williams.
At this stage, Carl was still being worked on by paramedics.
At this stage, Carl was still being worked on by paramedics.
I hit the phones while announcing I was ringing my source. My COS did the same. Within seconds of each other, we’d both confirmed it was Carl. By now, another call had come through to the news desk confirming that the patient being attended to at Barwon prison had died.
I banged out a one-liner announcing the gangland figure’s death, which was sent to subscribers indicating a breaking news story, with more lines to come. The radio station 3AW ran with the story, voicing a rare attribution, “AAP reports”, to its news bulletin – in case we were wrong, I guess. We weren’t. To my knowledge, we were first with this story.
The announcement this week that Australian Associated Press will close on 26 June after 85 years shocked me. I feel deeply aggrieved that an organisation I worked for so passionately for seven years will be no longer.
"I broke the story of Carl Williams’ death through speed, a knowledge of the underworld, and a rock-solid source"
Margaret Simons on Tuesday encapsulated well what the death of AAP means for public interest journalism and the significance of this event to our nation. “It affects us all, threatens our democracy and requires urgent and enlightened responses from our policymakers,” Simons wrote. “The AAP announcement is the latest, and one of the biggest, lurches down a slippery slope. If we reach the bottom of that slope, we will be a nation that doesn’t know itself, with citizens prey to fake news.”
AAP was credited with providing media outlets and their audiences with “basic, reliable reporting or courts, parliament and public events”, reporting that is “ordinary, routine” and “does not win Walkley awards but which, I think, is cumulatively even more important than the big investigative scoops”.
Sure, AAP does all this and no doubt many subscribers share this view. But from an insider’s perspective, it does so much more. With my former colleagues’ support, I broke the story of Williams’ death through speed, a knowledge of the underworld, and a rock-solid source. I covered the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday bushfires on the ground, and the subsequent royal commission in its entirety.
Other AAP Melbourne bureau colleagues traversed Victoria for up to a week after the Black Saturday bushfires, solo, no photographers or film crews for support, in their cars, reaching affected towns before any other media. One of those colleagues is now AAP’s Northern Territory correspondent, filing underreported stories on Indigenous Australia. September 11, the London terrorist attacks, the Bali bombings, the Boxing Day tsunami – AAP was there. Foreign bureaus have included London (the oldest, dating back to 1935) Auckland, Jakarta and Port Moresby. For me, this is far from ordinary but rather extraordinary and intrepid journalism.
While the outside view of AAP may be that it serves to provide routine and reliable content, filling a void while freeing up other media outlets’ journalists to do the important investigative work, that’s not how I, or colleagues I knew, operated. If we did, the copy would have been substandard and would not have adhered to the organisation’s and our own personal standards of speed, accuracy, quality and creativity.
We took immense pride in our work. In our minds, we weren’t filing stories to fill the gaps in newspapers or provide routine, basic content – we were striving for the highest quality journalism in the hope we might get a byline rather than our work ripped off. We wanted to write a good yarn, to expose corruption and inequality, to entertain, to make a difference. We worked just as hard – sometimes harder – than any other journalists.
The outpouring of support for AAP from different sections of the media this week is welcome and encouraging. In my experience, AAP journos could be looked down upon by our media colleagues and sometimes subject to treatment that would not have been afforded to other members of the media. If there was a pecking order, we were not at the top.
Ben Butler’s report that News Corp and Nine, AAP’s major shareholders, did not want to subsidise the news service for competitors is a brutal reality. It smacks of a lack of innovation and imagination in not allowing AAP to continue under a different model, but why would they want that? Because as a competitor, especially in the breaking news space, AAP would kick ass.
While the final bell may have tolled for AAP (and only AAP staff will understand this metaphor), I still hold out hope this is not the end of the newswire’s story. I’ve often wondered what a more independent future model of AAP could look like. Measures recommended by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to boost philanthropy and grants for journalism are reassuring. And there are 180 creative minds who will be out of a job after 26 June who I’m sure are willing to be part of an innovative solution – if they aren’t snapped up elsewhere first.
• Michelle Henderson is a Melbourne-based writer and former AAP journalist covering news, courts and the national medical round. She’s eternally grateful to AAP for giving her a go
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