Publishers can’t just be commentators in these times, they need to be advocates as well
Time Out Australia Managing Director Michael Rodrigues recently won Mumbrella Publish Awards for Publish Leader of the Year and Publishing Company of the Year, but his activities have gone well beyond the usual remit for a traditional “publisher”.
In 2014, in response to the deaths of two young men in Kings Cross, the NSW Government implemented a suite of measures that included no entry to venues after 1.30am, ID scanning and cessation of alcohol service at 3am.
Although enacted with the best intentions, “lockout” as it would come to be known – like weed killer sprayed indiscriminately in a garden – wreaked havoc on our city’s creative flora, impacting not only our bars and clubs and restaurants but our cultural and artistic institutions. We dimmed the lights. We made it terribly hard for our creatives to stay. We put Sydney’s beating heart on life support.
When I see a city like Sydney lose its way, that doesn’t sit well. And given my responsibility as custodian of the Time Out brand here in Australia – a masthead with a 52-year-old track record of helping people make the most of their cities – it’s my duty to do something about it.
Time Out’s role as a core campaigner was catalysed when, as part of an industry roundtable we coordinated in early 2018, we learnt that authorities had been banning mirrorballs. WTF? So was born “Right to Dance”, an industry awareness campaign that ran alongside a NSW Government upper house inquiry into the “Music and Arts Economy”.
In November 2018 I co-founded (and now am chair of) the Night Time Industries Association. The NTIA registered as a third-party election campaigner and ran a non-partisan campaign, “Unite for the Night”, in the lead-up to the NSW State Election in March 2019.
That campaign, alongside the work of Keep Sydney Open and live music advocates, would see the newly elected Berejiklian Government announce a further inquiry into “Sydney’s night-time economy and lockout” in May 2019. And with the NTIA now an established and respected industry voice with continued media and logistical support from Time Out, lockout was lifted in February 2020 (with the exception of Kings Cross, which remains under review until February 2021).
As history will show, three years active campaigning for nightlife was really just bootcamp. When Covid hit Australia in March 2020, to quote Kipling, we stooped down and grabbed the “worn-out tools” we had just put down and went to work again.
First of all we made a swift pivot to Time In back in March. Our editorial charter switched overnight from the “best of the city” to the “best of the city – from your lounge room”. We dedicated ourselves to keeping our readers informed of the latest government restrictions and safety advice, how to support restaurants and bars by ordering takeaway, and how to bolster arts organisations by live streaming.
We understood the perilous situation many businesses faced but simultaneously recognised the empathy in our million-plus readership who wanted to spend their dollars to help these businesses stay afloat. Thus was borne the Time In Awards – a broad-based campaign to spotlight community businesses and provide hope to an embattled sector.
Meanwhile the NTIA quickly launched Keep Our Venues Alive, which shone a light on the impact of the crisis on the hospitality industry and petitioned Federal Government for immediate relief which (along with a growing number of voices) would eventually crystallise JobKeeper.
For Time Out, the crisis has been a wake up call as to what we are, and what we are not. Lockout may have given us a sense of this, but lockdown has been categoric. We are for people coming together. We are not for isolation. We are for cities. We are not for the couch. And if the city is not there for you to discover, then the lights go out on us.
These insights now strongly shape how we think about things – how we want the world we want to be. Now we constantly ask ourselves how we can bend our publishing platform in a way that best shapes the cities for our audience and the things they tell us they care about: an inclusive city; a diversity of experience; engagement with our Indigenous heritage; a nightlife that is for everyone.
The difference between Time Out in Australia now to the business I founded here in 2007 is that we no longer restrict our participation to commentary. We campaign and we advocate. How? Through campaigns like Check.Check.Check, an initiative designed to help 18 to 35s adopt new CovidSafe going out rituals. Here Time Out For Business developed the strategy, Time Out Media has thrown in $200K of media support, and Time Out staffers have volunteered time to help deploy assets to venues. Another campaign, Xmas Time Out, is designed to help venues increase their business during the festive season before the market falls away in the early part of next year concurrent with JobKeeper and bank relief.
Elsewhere, publishers are taking similar initiatives. Our fellow urban publisher Broadsheet is helping get Victorians back out again (like they need an excuse!) using City of Melbourne dining vouchers, while Pedestrian TV have launched “Skilling it”, a campaign to help precariat workers build new skills thus increasing employment potential.
Modern publishing can’t simply be about “content production”. Any person and their four-legged pet can do that these days. Publishers are uniquely placed at this point in history to shape the world around them through advocacy and campaigning around issues that matter to their stakeholders, be they readers or advertisers.