#3: What does ‘with wires’ mean?
If you’ve seen my Instagram Stories in the last month, you’ve likely seen a screenshot of one of my ABC News stories. A screenshot will show the headline, byline, photo or video, and at least part of a summary box. Sometimes, the byline will read ‘By Aoife Hilton with wires’.
This is one of my newest stories I wrote ‘with wires’, meaning with the use of information from news agencies or ‘wires services’ like Reuters, the Associated Press, the Australian Associated Press, or Agence France Presse.
If a byline reads ‘with wires’ or no byline is included on a story, you can check which wires service has been used down the bottom. At the very end of the story, Reuters might be written in bold, or the AP, AAP, or AFP acronyms representing the other services. ‘ABC/Reuters’ or an acronym will be written when the article is a mix of information from wires and original reporting, while the two will be switched around when most of the information came from the wires. ‘ABC/Wires’ will be written when information from multiple wires services is used.
I write breaking news for the National news desk in Brisbane, so I’m often reporting from the Brisbane office on events which impact people all over Australia and beyond. I can’t pop over to Bangladesh – for example – when internationally-significant news breaks there, and retrieve information as a primary source. A correspondent from the Asia-Pacific News team also can’t report on every aspect of a breaking story happening there. But a large group of journalists working for these highly credible wires services can quickly source and collate information that many news outlets can include in their own stories.
If the information came from someone else, why is my name on it?
I actually produce many stories which my name doesn’t appear on. These are sourced entirely by wires services, and will include the service at the end of the copy but no byline at the top. The production process on these stories can include grabbing the wires copy verbatim – only editing it for Australian spelling, ABC style and clarity, and adding multimedia. It can also include re-ordering the information so the story appears as an explainer rather than a hard news article. Or, it can include taking information from multiple wires files and collating them together; in this case the attribution at the bottom might read ‘AFP/AP’ or something similar.
When I add my name to a story, that means I’ve included information I didn’t find on a wires service. This might be a statement from an official which I’ve clipped from the News channel, a social media post, information from a report or press release I’ve read or press conference I’ve watched, or lines from an interview I’ve conducted with someone related to the story. In the story referenced above, I took information from a televised address and local media reports.
And not every story I write is written ‘with wires’. When you just see my name in the byline, that means I’ve written the story entirely by original reporting.
Does ‘with wires’ make sense to you, reader? Or is it journo jargon that needs to be reworked?
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