“Have ABC or the Courier-Mail run it yet?"

That was the standing order when I worked the CMS at 4BC radio.

No matter how solid the tip or tweet, nothing went live until a “bigger” outlet blessed it first. The policy didn’t just throttle scoops; it taught an entire shift of producers to become professional copy-pasters.

“Become a source for news lots of people want, and can’t find anywhere else.”
— Katie Drummond, Wired

Drummond’s line is a manifesto for a business model that most publishers have abandoned. Original digging is costly, slow, legally risky and—crucially—doesn’t scale with CPM ads. The result is churnalism: Google “DOGE agency” or “Siri delay” and you’ll find dozens of articles that quote one another, not the underlying documents.

Exhibit A — John Gruber’s Apple Intelligence mea culpa

“In the two decades I’ve been in this racket, I’ve never been angrier at myself for missing a story …”
— John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Every Apple Intelligence feature demoed at WWDC 2025 shipped; the ambitious, un-demoed “personalised Siri” suite didn’t. Gruber’s 6,000-word post—“Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” (12 Mar 2025)—was a public flogging of his own blind spot. Why did the wider tech press whiff too? Because they were busy quoting one another’s ecstatic AI takes instead of checking developer seeds or asking engineers whether the code existed.

Exhibit B — Patrick McGee’s Apple in China

Financial Times veteran Patrick McGee handed in his manuscript in September 2024. Over the next eight months Apple’s China exposure collided with a fresh round of Trump tariffs, yet tech desks were glued to OpenAI press releases. When Apple in China finally dropped (13 May 2025), reviewers called it “prophetic”, but the reporting had been finished for almost a year. The scoop potential was there; the ad-driven incentive was not.

Exhibit C — Wired’s 62,000-subscriber spike

When Elon Musk took charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in January, Wired went all-in—“several stories a day, seven days a week,” as Drummond puts it.

“After a week, I looked around and said, ‘Where is everyone else? Why aren’t other news organisations covering this?’” Business Insider

The vacuum was so obvious, Wired signed 62,500 paying subscribers in two weeks. Readers literally paid to reward reporting nobody else bothered to do.

Why This Keeps Happening?

Cost pressure: Shrinking head-counts, wages not meeting inflation, senior staff not staying on the beat, freelance rates that don’t cover FOI fees | No budget for research or visits.

Ad-first metrics: Speed beats depth; SEO beats shoe-leather. Hot takes out-rank deep stories.

Litigation risk: Australia’s defamation law / US SLAPP threats chill stories. Editors spike anything without a spare legal war-chest.

Platform algorithms: Virality skews towards the same “shiny object” (right now: AI). Homogenised front pages.

I’m sure there’s other factors not even on my radar today including audience care-factor.

The Fallout

  • Unsexy beats (local councils, supply chains) wither.
  • Corporations spin unchecked because no reporter wants to be the lone sceptic.
  • News ‘breaks’ via Police social media or emergency service press release.
  • Audiences see identical copy across 12 sites and decide the press is “lazy”.

How We Fix It (a non-complete list)

  1. Fund the digging. Subscriptions aren’t charity; they’re R&D for democracy.
  2. Celebrate articles that wreck your priors. Surprise is the price of learning.
  3. Demand receipts. If a story leans entirely on “sources familiar”, ask for the paper trail, The Verge does this well.
  4. Back legal defence funds. Lawsuits stop more stories than lack of curiosity.
  5. Publish your changelog. Post the list: people spoken to, documents read, and known unknowns.

“If everyone’s writing the same story, there’s a story missing.” — David Carr

Let’s go find the missing ones.