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Ben Irving
reports on the anonymous world, yet swift global reach, of the television news agency
The audience rises to give a standing ovation. On stage, Madonna joins hands with her playmates, smiles and takes a bow. A single television camera, in the front row of the Royal Circle, exclusively records the moment for posterity.
But there’s no time to hang around for champagne and canapés. The tape is immediately in a taxi and whisked back to Camden Lock. Half an hour later, the Material Girl’s latest foray on to the London stage is being broadcast around the world.
You won’t tell anyone who shot the footage. After all, it’s supposed to be an exclusive to E! News Daily in America, or Sky News, or India’s Zee TV. And on each channel it’s shown, a differ- ent fluffy showbiz correspondent will probably introduce it.
Such is the lot of an entertain- ment news agency like Associated Press Television News (APTN) – the largest of its type and the company that scooped Madge’s curtain call. Like the SAS of journalism, it strikes, reports, then slips back into the night.
But while people rush to claim credit in the media, its anonymity is the most defining thing about the agency, which was set up in 1998, after a merger between Associated Press Television and Worldwide Television News. You might be surprised to learn that around ten to fifteen per cent of stories you see on-screen normal- ly come from APTN.
“When you’re trying to describe to people what you do, it’s difficult to explain the invisibili- ty,” says Deputy Entertainment Editor Katherine Smith. “But the whole point is that our clients want to be able to say that it was them that got the scoop.”
Combine all that with the fact that it has 180 clients (including BBC, Sky, RTL Germany, E! Entertainment in America) around the world, receiving three showbiz feeds a day and that’s a whole lot of responsibility. But the merry band of journos and stringers on each continent take it all in their stride.
Says Smith: “When it’s a big entertainment story, then it’s the biggest story in anybody’s news agenda. The whole focus of any newsroom shifts. When those events happen, then we come into our own.
“This was certainly the case with Paul McCartney’s wedding,” she remembers. “As soon as we knew he was getting married in Ireland, we were outside the hotel, at the airport, getting everything that there was to get. Something like that is a classic agency story. We’ve got to be the best with those stories, because that is what our clients really want.”
“And because we have a bureau in New York, we also had someone in the Hamptons, just in case,” adds Entertainment Editor Nick Thomas.
But with 180 bosses and no glory when it does something
right, the pressure is on an outfit like APTN who rely on their good name and sound stories to please clients.
“It’s more journalistically strin- gent,” admits Hollywood Correspondent, Sheila McClure. “In the States, AP is gospel. That’s the whole point – it’s a non- biased agency that reports facts. That holds you to a higher stan- dard. You want to be first and you want to be accurate.”
Argues Thomas: “One of the advantages of entertainment is that our big stories are truly glob- al. Premieres, the Grammys, fash- ion weeks, they are global events. The big names are universal stories and there’s not many things that are universal within a news agen- da, so we have that advantage.”
This is certainly the case with an event like the BAFTAs, which truly benefited from APTN’s world- wide reach.
“We put the pool footage from the Beeb together with our shots from outside,” remembers Thomas “and then patched it onto our evening feed. So if you were in Kazakhstan and you switched on the TV to see why Russell Crowe got angry, those pictures would have come from us. It’s our distribution network that gets the story out there.”
Despite this, things can still be difficult for a news agency in this era of celebrity spin, when publicists want to know exactly how and where their footage will be shown.
“The music industry love us,” says McClure. “They get it – the fact that if they give us the inter- view, then that’s another hundred and forty nine interviews that they don’t have to do. Movie studios are a little more sceptical.”
Nonetheless, APTN’s ubiquitous presence will continue thanks to an ever-expanding desire for show- biz news, a somewhat unexpected after-effect of September 11th.
So next time you sit down to watch the news, think of the agency correspondent who’s probably getting Tom Cruise to talk about turning forty. They could do with the credit.
invisible circus
behind tv
Photo: Katherine Smith and Nick Thomas at work
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