Australian Associated Press
The Australian Associated Press (AAP) is Australia’s independent national newswire service. Founded in 1935, it was relaunched as a not-for-profit in 2020 after an attempted closure, and it now supplies wholesale text and images to hundreds of news outlets across the country. Its history underscores the vital role that telecommunications played in connecting Australia, a remote nation, with the rest of the world. AAP remains a major wholesale supplier of news and images to Australian media outlets, combining its own reporting with material gathered through international partnerships and contributors. Although many Australians may not notice its byline, AAP has long played a foundational role in Australia’s news ecosystem by supplying wholesale content used across a wide range of media outlets. This entry provides an overview of the AAP, including its origins and development, as well as challenges it faces in the digital age.
Origins
The origins of AAP can be traced back to the 19th century, where the trend towards economic consolidation among Australia’s metropolitan newspapers was already becoming evident. The construction of the Overland Telegraph Line, spanning the length of central Australia, formed the first telegraphic link between Australia and Britain (via the Darwin-Java submarine cable) in 1872. However, the speed with which news could now be received from London was offset by high telegraphic charges, which forced Australian newspapers to pool their resources and share the costs of using this now-indispensable service.
In 1871, The Sydney Morning Herald (1831–present) and the Melbourne Argus (1846–1957) formed the Australian Press Association (APA) to secure exclusive cable news updates from Reuters (est. 1851), which APA would sell to other Australian newspapers. The APA expanded further in 1895, following the admission of the Melbourne Age (1854–present) and The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, 1879–present), which had jointly operated a rival cable news service. In order to protect their respective business interests, APA’s member organizations had to reach unanimous agreement before admitting new members or deciding to sell their service to rival newspapers.
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The APA’s commercial dominance was challenged by the formation of the United Cable Service in 1912, which was co-managed by the Melbourne Herald (1840–1990) and The Sun (Sydney, 1910–1988), and syndicated overseas news by The Times (London, 1785–present) and the Exchange Telegraph news agency (est. 1872). While cable transmission costs between Britain and Australia steadily dropped throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the APA and the Sun Herald Cable Service (formerly United Cable Service) agreed to pool their resources and further reduce their operating costs. In May 1935, the rival news organizations formed AAP as a non-profit cooperative to supply their clients with accurate coverage of international events, ostensibly free from political partisanship or bias. AAP initially employed 12 journalists based in London and New York, but its expanding pool of international correspondents throughout Europe and Asia provided Australian readers with vital coverage of the early years of World War II.
Development
In 1947, AAP, together with the New Zealand Press Association, became a shareholder in Reuters. Under this new arrangement, AAP would provide coverage of Australian news for Reuters, while the latter would jointly field correspondents with AAP across the Asia-Pacific. The AAP Reuters byline became commonplace in dispatches from Southeast Asia, as journalists covered the Cold War tensions and postcolonial struggles for independence unfurling throughout the region during the 1950s. The agency’s tilt towards Asia reflected the region’s growing strategic and economic importance to Australia.
By the early 1960s, AAP Reuters drew on the additional resources of The New York Times, United Press (United States), and The Times (United Kingdom) and was transmitting 16 million words annually from its London and New York bureaus alone. AAP relocated from its original Melbourne headquarters to Sydney in 1964, after the completion of the trans-Pacific COMPAC cable (connecting Australia to North America) enhanced communication links with its international affiliates and facilitated reliable transmission of news wire photos. The 1970s heralded structural and technological changes which dramatically altered AAP’s editorial focus and set in motion the organization’s gradual transformation into a media-communications conglomerate. AAP acquired Australian United Press in 1971, which formed the basis for its Canberra bureau dedicated to covering federal politics from the national capital. The company diversified into packaging commercial information products, including a computerized stock exchange reporting system (1969) and a horse-racing results and formguide database (1976).
AAP’s domestic news coverage expanded as it gradually absorbed several state-based news agencies, beginning with Queensland Regional News in 1974. With bureaus established in all Australian capital cities, AAP’s domestic news coverage was taken up by regional newspapers and radio stations that could not sustain their own dedicated newsrooms.
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Neo-liberal economic reforms embraced by the Australian government provided AAP with new opportunities for expansion and diversification. The organization was restructured as a privately held, profit-driven entity in 1983 and subsequently formed AAP Reuters Communications to distribute information via Australia’s new domestic communications satellite, AUSSAT. After divesting its shareholding in Reuters in 1988, the company launched AAP Telecommunications as a rival to the government-owned carrier Telecom (later Telstra) in the domestic telephony market, which had been opened to private-sector investment as a result of government reforms. AAP also moved into commercial information services, including Medianet, a press-release distribution operation launched in the 1980s, and Newscentre, a media-monitoring business that was expanded by AAP’s 2007 acquisition of Media Research Group before later being sold in 2013. Before its 2020 restructuring, AAP had expanded beyond newswire journalism into adjacent media-services businesses such as press-release distribution, media monitoring, and editorial production. Those operations did not all remain part of the relaunched not-for-profit AAP.
Challenges Posed by the Digital Age
The crisis confronting Australian newspapers, bedeviled by declining circulations and loss of revenue to classified advertising websites, has proved opportune for AAP. In the 2000s and 2010s, AAP also expanded through Pagemasters, an editorial production service it acquired in 2002. In 2011, Fairfax Media outsourced subediting work for major mastheads including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age to Pagemasters, a move that contributed to significant newsroom job losses. Newsroom cutbacks at already overstretched media organizations have led to greater reliance on AAP’s local and international news coverage, particularly for content to be published in online newspapers and other digital media outlets.
AAP occupies a unique space in Australia’s media landscape. It fills the editorial vacuum left by its majority shareholders—Fairfax Media, News Corporation, and Seven West Media—who have shed editorial staff in a desperate effort to staunch the flow of sales and advertising revenues being lost to online media. After narrowly avoiding closure in 2020, it continues to operate as a not-for-profit national newswire supported by subscriptions, philanthropy, and government grants.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.