Wire copy, aggregation and AI drafts: three ways newsrooms fill the page

Three ways to fill a page

A newsroom that needs more copy than its reporters produce has three options. Buy a wire and print it. Aggregate: rewrite what other outlets reported, with a link. Or draft with a model from sources and have an editor approve. Each has a cost per article, a speed, and a characteristic way of being wrong.

The wire is the oldest and the most expensive per seat. Reuters and AP together supply copy to more than 4,000 news organisations, and a regional daily's wire subscription runs to the low tens of thousands of dollars a year^†, a figure one outlet in this set reports, so it is attributed. What the wire buys is a named organisation accountable for every sentence.

How each one sources and attributes

Wire copy attributes to the agency and the agency's reporters; the paper adds nothing and vouches for nothing. Aggregation attributes to the original outlet, usually with a link, and adds a rewrite the aggregator is accountable for, which is where errors enter: paraphrase drifts, context is lost, the link goes dead. AI drafting from sources sits between the two. The draft attributes each claim to the outlets that support it, the editor is accountable for the approved version, and the source list is published with the text.

Speed runs in the opposite order. One aggregation-heavy publisher told the Reuters Institute its writers produce eleven rewrites a day each^†; a wire story is instant; a sourced draft takes two to three minutes plus a review.

Who is accountable when a fact is wrong

With wire copy, the agency corrects and the paper reprints the correction. With aggregation, the original outlet may correct and the rewrite may not follow. With a sourced draft, the claim that was wrong has a source list attached, so the editor can see which outlet carried it and whether it was corroborated or flagged. That is not a guarantee of accuracy; it is a shorter path from the error to the decision that let it through.

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