BOTW: A new low for Radio National ratings; Your part in the AI debate; Job cuts at The Market Herald
Welcome to Best of the Week, written at marvellously mild Sisters Beach, Tasmania, on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning.
Happy International Client’s Day for tomorrow. In adland, that’s every day.
Today: Digging deeper into the radio numbers, job cuts at The Market Herald, The great debAIt
Today’s writing soundtrack: The Cure: Disintegration
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Unmade Substack
Unmade Substack
The RN of 15-20 years ago often sounded to me like the sort of network where it would be more cost efficient to send recordings of the programmes directly to the listeners than broadcast them, so niche was the content. Now that Podcasting effectively does that, I’m not surprised that the broadcast audience figures are dropping. Who’s going to make an appointment to listen to their favourite/relevant shows (and then hang around for the flagship shows) when they can listen to what they actually want to hear whenever they like?
I’m also not sure about the comparisons of RN to the BBC, and Radio 4 in particular. The political federation of Australia, along with the geography and the history of broadcasting here, mean that you can’t do a direct comparison (just as you can’t between ABC Local Radio and BBC Local Radio in the UK, which is also going through a period of decline).
RN’s 2023 schedule change has accounted for your first point, by taking the niche programming out of drive. Most radio listenership is in the breakfast and drive dayparts, and RN is now all short general interest pieces at those times. I preferred the 5.30pm deep dives myself.
But then much of RNs schedule has long been stripped across weekdays, giving people something similar to hear at the same time each day. Much more so than the major metro community stations (like Triple R, PBS and 3CR in Melbourne). The “RN listener”, like the “community radio listener” is often someone who likes variety more than the average person, and is not just wanting to listen to their favourite things. They want to hear things they don’t know they like yet.
The UK has much more regional differentiation than Australia, even if it has a greater proportion of it’s population and wealth generation in a single city. But I don’t think that has a particularly strong effect on the differences between RN and Radio 4. Radio 4 differs mainly from RN in that it does comedy and drama, while RN does not.
Quite an interesting analysis Tim, particularly the data comparisons made.
In particular I found that “I’m going to stress that number – across the five capital cities 17m Australians are estimated to be tuning in to the radio at some point each week. And only 466,000 of them are listening to RN, even once, just for eight minutes.”
Now THAT is some achievement. The ABS has the sum of the five ‘Greater’ capital cities (e.g. Sydney includes Newcastle) as 16,179, 072 in the 2021 Census and their latest estimate is now 16,398,470. Close to your 17m, but no cigar.
In fact the GFK reports provide the ‘Potential’ for each of the five capital cities and in Survey 1 they total 14,861,000. That is the MAXIMUM if everyone in all markets listen to radio at least once for at least eight minutes in the survey period. They also report the Cume, and that totals across the five markets at 13,729 (92.4% of the Potential).
But why are the data much lower than the Census (your roughly “17m)?
Because CRA only measures 10+ and in the five capital cities ABS’ count is 3,049,955 are under 10.
How about we settle that it should read “across the five capital cities 14m Australians are estimated to be tuning in to the radio at some point each week.”?
JG
Hi JG,
Thanks for flagging that – your insights are, as usual very welcome. I’ve just repeated the process (4.5m + 4.6m + 2.1m + 1.1m + 1.7m, Monday to Sunday cume 10+) . I also make that 14m, not 17m. I’ve now corrected it. Thanks again!
All the best,
Tim
RN is much the same station it has been for the last 20 years at least, though now it’s content skews younger. Life Matters is an important live (Sydney-Melbourne-Hobart time) part of their mornings.
A big difference between before and now is the popularity of podcasts. Before, few radio stations broadcast the sorts of content now listened to in podcasts. There was RN, and some programs on community radio. Now, there are thousands of sources of similar programming, and people have worked out it suits them to listen to them.
It seems silly to judge RN without taking into account the people who listen to it via podcasts. Do many people listen to RN podcasts? We find out in May.
Another factor is the greater number of white colour workers working from home. If one of them usually only listens to RN as part of their commute, they will have become a lost listener.
(Also Newsradio is hardly all rip-and-read. They do a great job of doing their own interviews as well as using material from across the ABC.)
Hi mc,
Thanks for that comment. It’s a fair question regarding podcasts. However, it’s also worth beating in mind that it’s yet to become a mass medium in the general population, so for the most part we’re not talking about people switching from ABC radio to podcasts, but from ABC radio to commercial radio.
When the ABC finally joins the Podcast Ranker, it will be a player in the sector, but it won’t close the gap on the minutes of listening lost to the commercial sector.
(And fair point on Newsradio – they do an amazing job with very limited resource)
All the best – Tim
I think it’s quite unfair to compare Karvelas’ time on air to Kelly period from 2020 onwards. It’s well known that talk and harder news programs/stations’ audiences increased significantly during the first couple of covid years. Your analysis continues to also miss the key point, for RN it’s not about audience size but *who* the audience is. RN Breakfast will truly be on its knees when it’s no longer the show MPs, business leaders and other highly influential people turn into each day. I’ve seen nothing to suggest that’s no longer happening. I’d also wager that the people enticed to work in commercial radio could not me more different from those wanting to work at RN.
The main issues with RN are twofold, it is as you say, a Frankenstein of a channel with no-one really curating it. It should either be entirely handed over to ABC News (which under this news director would be a disaster) or a channel controller appointed with the resources to move it away from a cheap broadcast platform for podcasts already in the can.
RN also needs to be better promoted across ABC platforms and on billboards, papers, etc. There should be a strap to listen into RN Breakfast at the top of the ABC News homepage each morning. Its interviews and other content should be weaved into ABC News and other programming throughout the day with more of “as first heard on ABC Radio National” intros. There also needs to be a decent ad campaign put behind RN Breakfast and Drive as the two flagship programs. PK should be on the sides of trams and buses in Sydney in Melbourne.
RN’s content schedule/programs continues to lack energy and relevance. It is people in cardigans trying to be cool and making a real mess of it. They need to go back to their strengths – ie more things like the Health and Law Report which can then spread onto other ABC platforms and gives RN, and the ABC, a real point of difference. The Media Report should be brought back and there needs to be greater investment on programs like Blueprint for Living. R4 has had the Food Programme running for decades – nothing like it on RN. People are obsessed with food nowadays and it’s an easy and cheap way for the ABC to reach into the suburbs too.
Unfortunately, RN will always play second fiddle to ABC Local Radio, especially the breakfast, mornings and drive slots. It’s not a simple as R4 Today which gets the full resources of the beeb.
Hi (other) Tim,
Thanks very much for those comments.
I intentionally included the data for the first two surveys of 2020 in the table. They covered the period before Covid changed our lives (Friday March 13, 2020 was the day the Melbourne Grand Prix was cancelled)
In the first, pre-Covid survey of 2020, Fran Kelly averaged 112,000. In the corresponding survey of 2023, PK averaged 48,000. That’s worse than a halving of the audience in less than three years, and Covid is not the explanation.
Your comment of “Your analysis continues to also miss the key point, for RN it’s not about audience size but *who* the audience is. RN Breakfast will truly be on its knees when it’s no longer the show MPs, business leaders and other highly influential people turn into each day” makes me wonder whether you actually work there. Being the radio station for the elite classes is the opposite of public service broadcasting. (It reminds me of the notorious Peter Jay comment to a sub editor attempting to make his economics column more understandable for readers “That column is written for one person, and it’s not you”
If the ambition isn’t to provide accessible news and current affairs to the entire audience, then where are they supposed to find it, and why should their taxes fund something that isn’t for them?
Best wishes – Tim
Providing “accessible news and current affairs to the entire audience” is a suitable ambition for the ABC. It could try to do this with a single radio station, but instead it aims to do so over multiple separately-segmented services.
Local Radio, RN, Newsradio, Triple J and Kids Listen all have their specific target demographics for news and factual programming. RN is an “AB demographic” station, which includes all people with big budgets behind them, but also academic types without much power.
I completely agree that the ABC could do much more to promote it’s radio offerings. They have started doing more RN promotion on the ABC News channel, but it’s not in prime time.
I don’t personally agree that Breakfast and Drive are amazing (and worthy of trams and busses) and the rest of the programs “lack energy and relevance”. Is it the arts programming you don’t like? This said, I do like both the Health and Law reports. The Media Report has effectively become Download This Show, but I agree that there’s room for something more like R4’s The Media Show on RN as well.
I don’t get the impression that R4 Today benefits much (if at all) from having more production resources than RN Breakfast. ABC Local Radio’s metro breakfast shows do benefit from getting more TV (and other promotion) than RN Breakfast does. Presumably, the ABC believes that more of it’s TV viewers would like them if they gave it a listen. However, ABC News Breakfast is the ABC’s flagship breakfast program these days of course.
R4 Today isn’t the BBC’s top rating radio breakfast show either – that accolade goes to Radio 2. It’s host, Zoe Ball, is paid more than any other on-air talent at the corporation. So it’s not like the BBC is putting all it’s breakfast eggs in the one R4 basket.