the sinking of the General Belgrano

Comrades,

The first time I ever wandered into a commercial radio newsroom in 1982, there it was. A telex machine with a continuous roll of paper constantly chuttering out of the thing, and then folding itself - flip flop flip flop - into a neat pile on the floor. It was the AAP news wire. It was the middle of the night, and I was pulling the weekend graveyard shift in my first real job as a DJ, presenting the popular Country Music Hour from midnight-1am, then five tracks in a row of easy listening interspersed with ads, then a station ID and a time call, repeat until dawn. You could walk away from the microphone for 20 minutes at the time and the station would play by itself after you'd set up the tape cartridge machines to trip themselves off. I soon worked out how to read the wire - in it's grey coloured Courier New font - rip the paper off for the latest news, then pick it up like a scroll, and sift through the dross until you find what you want. And believe me, there was so much dross. How many reams of paper that telex machine used every day is anyone's guess, but it was plenty.

The AAP wire was the news. The be all and end all. And it was endless. The telex never stopped, ever, even when there was no news. It was the rock solid foundation of every news bulletin I ever read for the next 19 years.

A few months after I started, the Falklands War blew up and as it was on the other side of world, it happened overnight on our island. Listeners demanded to know what the fuck was going on. The AAP wire delivered. It also carried the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence-France Presse wires, so it was calling all the shots as the battle went on, and it was full of it. Mobile phones, let alone lap tops or an internet of things were fantastical dreams of science fiction, still. So it was no get stretch to start off reading mid-dawn rip'n'read news bulletins on the hour every hour, using AAP copy as it was. I had zero training in this, so not a red pencil went through it. The sinking of the General Belgrano in May was big news, if memory serves - Exocet missiles were all the rage back then - and month later it was all over as the Poms liberated a tiny bunch of sheep farmers in Stanley. But I continued to plough on with the rip'n'read service as I'd got the bug. Just threw together overseas news as it happened on the AAP wire. The breakfast news team loved me for sorting the wheat from the chaff. In down town Medellin, rival drug lords were quietly setting off car bombs in the car park's of the opposition's supermarkets, where they laundered their money. Nice way to scare off customers. Good old fashioned terrorism made for good news copy back then, and they slaughtered hundreds of innocents. From that point on I was hooked on news and never looked back.

The AAP wire was always the go to for "breaking news". I vividly recall sitting at the slot in the 2UE newsroom in Sydney on a very slow news day - Sunday 28 April 1996 - when the AAP wire chattered through a single line "Tasmanian ambulance service report responding to shooting near Hobart. Possible casualties. Unconfirmed. More..." That turned out to be a day and half as the world as we knew it exploded, but without the AAP wire, we would never have known, and neither would you. They seemed to have freelance reporters called "stringers" everywhere, and indeed they had. When I found myself working as an on-the-road reporter for the best part of a decade, anywhere anything was happening, you would always run into an AAP reporter; the only one holding a microphone without any signage on it. In Canberra, AAP had the minutiae of politics nailed down flat, with the sole reporter snoozing through late night sitting sessions. No one would have noticed the Independent member for Oxley, Pauline Hanson, making her maiden speech to an empty chamber, also in '96, if it wasn't for AAP. One year I covered a Federal budget. Afterwards lobby groups of every description line up to have their say into a phalanx on microphones, but time was of the essence. The AAP reporter sat on the floor with a stop watch, and after 30 seconds called "Time!", and that spokesman for whatever organisation was hustled out the way mid-sentence by another reporter from AAP to make way for the next. If you didn't have your sound bite ready, you were gone.

The AAP wire didn't come cheap but it was worth it's weight in gold, and many times it was out there in platinum territory. When I fell into a job running a little newsroom in Newcastle broadcasting integrated local/state/national news bulletins, the station owner was always onto me about the cost of the wire; 25 grand in '92 would have easily employed another journo. "Do you really need that fucking telex machine, Craven? You know the newsroom is the only department in this radio station that doesn't bring a penny in through the front door!". "Of course I need the fucking wire, without the wire, there is no news, none, we don't go to air, OK? Now go away". He did. Only ever worried by money, he couldn't be bothered with "editorial interference". AAP was an institution that commanded great respect in the trade as a straight down the line no nonsense scrupulously by the book reporter of accurate news. They only dealt in the truth - here's what happened - you make head or tail of it. Delivered to your plate, it was up to you to decide what tasted the best in that fuzzy but at the same time precise umami known as "news value". It was only ever rarely wrong, and corrections were always issued post-haste. The one, and most times the only constant in the bustle and churn of an ol' style newsroom. You know, when Olivetti typewriters were the tool of trade. Surely I can't be so old as to remember such a thing?

The AAP wire loomed very large in my working life, so it was deeply saddening to hear yesterday that facing insurmountable competition from the ramshackle make it up as we go along Google/Facebook fake news peddling duopoly, they are going to close - with 180 journo's to be thrown out onto the ever increasing pile on the scrap heap, as well as a back office of 120. To say it's the end of an era understates it. As an old hack and "blowie", it was like hearing of the death of a long lost former loved one. Things change, nothing ever remains the same, but there's a big chunk of decades of me making a living out the game right there, now forever consigned to the lil' history books.

After 85 years, it's finally the end of real news, as I came to know and love it. End of an epoch more likely.