As a bit of a sequel to Helen’s post on Radio National’s travails, I wanted to draw attention to the public consultation initiated by DBCDE on the government’s inquiry into the future of the ABC and SBS. For those who missed it, the discussion paper is here, and as Margaret Simons observes at Content Makers, the public submissions have now been published – and there are 2400 of them, which certainly suggests a lively interest in the direction of public broadcasting.
I was also interested to note that Derek Barry has written a post at Woolly Days on the submission from my QUT Creative Industries Faculty colleagues Terry Flew, Stuart Cunningham, Axel Bruns and Jason Wilson (now at Wollongong Uni). Drawing on some lessons from an ARC Linkage Project on citizen journalism (and folks might recall the YouDecide2007 site which was a centrepiece of the research), they argue that public broadcasting needs to be reframed as public service media.
Derek Barry sums up the submission in more depth, but the key idea is that social innovation is now more likely to arise at the margins than from centralised planning. Flew et al contend that the ABC and SBS could enhance the performance of their Charter goals through leveraging user-generated content. This direction would involve reconceptualising the traditional educational and citizenship functions of public broadcasting universality as an opportunity for citizens to negotiate that civic capacity with others via a universally accessible platform.
Most of the submission goes to the news and current affairs roles of the ABC and SBS, but there may also be implications for other areas of the corporations’ activities.
Disclosure: I was also involved in working on the ARC Project which has fed into this submission.
Update: Terry Flew posts about the submission on his blog.
Update: Margaret Simons has a long article on the review at Inside Story.
Glad to hear you played a role in that submission, Mark – I think it’s a powerful idea.
No, I didn’t play a role in the submission, Derek – I was involved in some capacities in the original ARC project with regard to YouDecide2007, etc.
apologies, Mark – misread that.
No probs, Derek.
A summary of the submission can be found at Linked text
Thanks, Terry, I’ll update the post with a link.
I had the fun of going along to a key stakeholder consultation run by SBS a month or so back, looking to drum up support for their new vision, including:
– moving eventually to 4 channels, but in the meantime using their second digital channel for international movies and in-depth content
– hugely expanding their radio language coverage, and moving eventually to 4 stations
-bringing in and subtitling foreign language childrens’ programs for the first time
– providing tv english classes / learning support
– putting all their programs free for viewing on the net, and creating 70 community internet ‘hubs’ for online language / ethnic communities, allowing upload of user content, and even thinking of bulk buying basic ‘citizen journalist’ equipment to facilitate this.
– generating more local content themselves, including looking to decentralise their production, and ensuring that plenty of local Australian stories get told.
there was more, but it was a fantastic vision and of course required some actually pretty modest in the scheme of things funding increase. It also involved ensuring that the ABC wasn’t allowed to pinch their digital channel (which they currently just run news on because of lack of funding, but wanted to stake a claim), and having their charter changed to recognise the internet too.
I really hope they get the support, and the ABC too, including funding increases from the current government. Increasing our cultural capital aside, it would create jobs, jobs, jobs.
The Charter issue is a key one, as at present – certainly for SBS – online is only funded through moneys taken from elsewhere. The online community language hubs are also a really interesting initiative, although it remains to be seen the extent to which power will be devolved away from ethnic community leaders who like to manage content on such sites. Local content production is also critical to SBS, especially as its surprise ratings successes of recent years (South Park, Top Gear) are increasingly accessed directly through Internet download, without requiring an Australian broadcaster as intermediary.
Yeah, all true Terry. What I was really impressed with at the briefing & subsequent discussion with Shaun Brown was how much thought and analysis they had done re: Australia’s various ethnic communities.
So for eg, they were already putting forward examples such as that the internet support for the Indian community would be very strong, as a trade-off to providing more tv/radio language support for African language groups. This would recognise that the Indian community are very early adopters of new technologies, whereas a lot of our African communities are largely derived from refugee entrants, so they’ve in the main got a-ways to go before their fully utilising internet opportunities.
The language hubs would I think certainly work to decentralise some communities’ communication methods, and perhaps more importantly, more powerfully engage their youth.
Bringing kids programs in other languages would be a master-stroke. I think of how my schools had various students from different backgrounds, and that has become more and more the reality for Australian kids – yet it’s not reflected on the tv, and there’s an important opportunity going begging there to help educate kids for life about the positive aspects of cultural difference, multi-lingualism etc.
Update: Margaret Simons has a long article on the review at Inside Story.