Is the ABC really spread too thinly?
After last week’s budget cut funding from the ABC Andrew Dodd of Swinburne University of Technology asks whether the corporation has overreached in recent years in an article which first appeared on The Conversation.
If you want to capture a lasting image of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation at the height of its powers, it might be a good idea to take a screen-shot of the homepage of the ABC’s website. But do it soon. If you wait a couple more months, or a year, or two, the odds are the site won’t be as rich and layered as it is now, given the hit the corporation took in last week’s budget.
With A$120 million sliced off its base funding over the next four years, the ABC won’t be able to do all the things it does now. The Australia Network – Australia’s international television service – will disappear with flow-on effects across news and current affairs and the ABC’s overseas bureau. An additional efficiency dividend of 1% means other services will go too.
Staff and programs will be cut. Some innovations will cease, while other initiatives won’t happen. And there’s the distinct possibility the cuts are just phase one of a grander scheme to diminish the national broadcaster.
Take a look at the website and you’ll see a showcase for managing director Mark Scott’s vision for the ABC. As well as the staples of news and radio and television, it’s a mix of new products, platforms and apps. There are the multi-channel television stations, News 24, ABC Two and ABC Kids. There are the digital radio services, such as ABC Country and Jazz – and the latest offering, Double J.
There are the websites catering for general audiences, such as The Drum and niche audiences such as the soon-to-be defunded Ramp Up. There are internet-based television offerings such as ABC iView and the regional video storytelling site, Open. There is so much available you can find yourself hovering over it all, perplexed about what to sample next.
This is what a digitally relevant ABC looks like. The site proves that the ABC is savvy about social media and understands the potential of new platforms. It understands new media consumption patterns, or at least it’s trying to. The ABC seems to get that the worst thing it can do is stand still and that its role must be to lead, innovate and experiment. It has taken its charter responsibilities to cater for all Australians headlong into the digital age.
Look at poor old Fairfax Media if you want to see an organisation that took way too long to embrace new forms of media, while letting entrepreneurs march in and steal its business. Of course, the ABC hasn’t got the same commercial imperatives and its funds are mostly derived from taxpayers.
But there is equally fierce competition in public broadcasting for audience share and the ABC stands to lose dearly if it allows others to entice listeners, viewers and, nowadays, readers away.
It’s in this context that ABC’s Radio National Breakfast host Ellen Fanning’s question to Mark Scott last week was so interesting. She asked the ABC managing director whether his drive to spread ABC services thinly had made the corporation more vulnerable. It was a legitimate line of inquiry, given some of those services will inevitably be terminated. Scott’s answer amounted to a self-appraisal of his tenure:
The ABC would be much weaker today if we weren’t leaders in innovation, if we hadn’t paved the way to catch up television with iView, if we hadn’t gone down the multichannel road. I think as a broadcaster you have no alternative but to invest in the digital future of the organisation.
I think we would have been more vulnerable if we had just been an old-fashioned radio and television network with one TV channel, with only a couple of radio channels with no online and mobile presence. Our audiences would be smaller, we would be less relevant. We are relevant and compelling to the Australian public today because of the investment we made in the new.
The criticism Scott was responding to is not new. It was a resounding theme during David Hill’s term as managing director, from 1987 to 1995. In the mid-1990s I asked Hill much the same question, although then it had a sting in the tail because the ABC was accused of outsourcing its programming as a result of diversification and consequently losing some of its editorial integrity to commercial interests.
Back then, Hill’s answer wasn’t convincing. In fact he didn’t last much longer in the job. But Scott’s answer now has credibility. The ABC has had no choice but to experiment and create and expand. It would have been easy not to but that would have been a reckless strategy.
In addition, as Scott will happily tell you, at least two of these innovations – iView and News24 – were largely built on efficiency savings, although this glosses over the frustration felt by program-makers in other parts of the ABC about the way their budgets were cut to build the TV news channel.
The downside of running so many things on wafer-thin resources is that when a 1% efficiency dividend is imposed the most likely result is the closure of entire services. So now the ABC has to decide what to cut. Many of the new products have proved to be winners and have filled a niche. Several have harnessed the potential of the new technology to create new purposes for the national broadcaster.
ABC Open has captured Australian stories in engaging and accessible ways and given remote communities a new voice. The Drum online created a new forum for informed opinion, breaking the near-monopoly and the closed-shop of the newspapers’ opinion pages. Double Jay refocused the output of Dig Radio, although bringing new broadcasters on staff just a month before the budget may not have been the brightest idea. It’s hard to imagine the ABC now retreating from these bold ventures.
Presumably the government has not forgotten that famous quote from within the federal Coalition that the ABC represents “our enemies talking to our friends”? It would be wise not to underestimate the affection held for the ABC as the most trusted and respected media organisation in the country.
I would suggest the public already senses that axing the Australia Network looks like a gift to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which lost its bid for the service under the Gillard Government. As Scott told Fanning:
We have the overwhelming support of the vast majority of the Australian public and when [the government] considers our funding future they should consider the very important role the ABC plays in the lives of millions of Australians every day.
Andrew Dodd is a former broadcaster with ABC Radio National and reporter with the 7.30 Report and does occasional freelance work for the ABC. He is program director – journalism at Swinburne University of Technology.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Steve Browning from News Corp here. Andrew has unfortunately got his ending wrong.
“axing the Australia Network looks like a gift to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which lost its bid for the service under the Gillard Government.”
News Corp did not bid for the service. Sky News Australia did. Sky News Australia is equally owned by Nine Entertainment, Seven Media Group and BSkyB. At the time of the bid, the old News Corp owned 39% of BSkyB. So the old News Corp had a 13% share of Sky News Australia. Nine and Seven each have 33%.
For the sake of completeness, the stake in BSkyB is now owned by 21st Century Fox. So the new News Corp has no investment in Sky News Australia.
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@Stephen Browning: thanks for that clarification. So we can assume that no News Corp publication will at any time promote the interests of Fox, despite the fact that Rupert Murdoch controls both? That will make a nice change.
@Andrew Dodd: while iView is essential (and could be better), ABC24 serves no purpose. It is a waste of money.
If Scott does his job, the ABC will innovate around content, not channels and so on. Mimicking in BBC is not a good strategy.
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Is not the ABC Digital Strategy a bad clone of the BBC ??
BBC Home Page > iPlayer / TV / Radio / Shop / More….
ABC Home Page > iView / TV / Radio / Kids / Shop / More….
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Knowing people who have moved from commercial broadcasters to the ABC, they to a man say that it is much harder to find any fat to trim in the ABC than at their previous employees.
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Anyone notice how News 24 has 4 times the audience of Sky News? The ABC channel is underestimated as the most popular rolling source of news – add up all the news channels listed on Foxtel and the COMBINED audience is less than News 24.
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It’s hard to feel sorry for the ABC suffering a one percent “efficiency dividend” (how Orwellian is that term?). Government departments have been copping the dividend for years and it currentl;y stands at 2.5% for them. If I were Mr Scott, I’d lie low and accept that the ABC has been dodging bullets for years.
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What I dont understand about ABC, is their digital television network where you have ABC3 broadcasting kids content yet they already have kids channels in ABC2 and ABC4. Also a lot of their programming consists of repeating old US shows on these channels. It seems a waste of resources.
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@Warren Jackson ABC News 24 serves plenty of purpose. Maybe you don’t watch it and feel it doesn’t have any purpose to you, but in the absence of a TV, how else are you going to stream news worth watching?
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@LastLineLenny: I suppose there are people who want 24/7 TV news “streamed”. But I think they are in the minority. A small minority. (When I need to know what’s happening I usually turn on radio national, which is the same but without the presenters’ faces.
My point is that there is a fairly large bucket of money involved and IMO the ABC audiences would be better served if the money went to original content.
I wish they had not cut the religion report and I would like more diversity – and preferably some surprising material. For example, I really would like a serious doco on the debate over climate change. As far as I can tell the science is plain enough, yet it’s somehow ignored. I really would value a very open exploration of why that is so.
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Double J is not a “new” station, it is simply the old Dig radio with different content. And the vast bulk of the ABC’s budget is spent on TV.
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The ABC has plenty of fat – look at the many layers of management within news. They make no stories, they coordinate no production. Most of their time is spent on ‘strategy’ and ‘style’ – you could axe 3/4 of them with no consequence (and by the way, they don’t come cheap!).
Speaking of not coming cheap – the recent salary leaks were informative. People like Tony Jones and Virginia Trioli (and many others) could NEVER work at any other media outlet … even if other outlets wanted the. So why are we paying so much to ‘keep’ them?
Plenty of fat. Call Jenny craig
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@Viewer “What I dont understand about ABC, is their digital television network where you have ABC3 broadcasting kids content yet they already have kids channels in ABC2 and ABC4. [sic]”
There’s no “ABC4”, just “ABC 2 for Kids”, which is just a content brand rather than a discreet channel since it runs on daytime ABC2. Both ABC3 and daytime ABC2 reflect different audiences, with different programming needs. A toddler and a tween have different content/learning/programming needs. Two of the ABC’s strongest performers is its children’s content on ABC3 and ABC4Kids – they can produce world-class content.
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