The ABC’s managing director, Mark Scott, has proved a much more interesting pick than many anticipated at the time of his appointment. Over at Woolly Days, Derek Barry summarises a speech Scott made in giving the Latrobe University annual media studies lecture last week [full text in pdf here]. Scott gives the best read I’ve seen from a senior media figure on the impact of the “digital revolution” on the Antipodean news biz. Importantly, he pings flawed business decisions as a key cause of the decline of traditional media – something which is absent from a lot of the ‘future of journalism’ discussions which tend to assume that media orgs are being buffeted by inexorable winds not of their own making. And if Scott is right, those winds are going to wreak havoc – he predicts the disappearance of The Age and the SMH within a decade.
It isn’t noted often enough that the most innovative players in the Australian media scene are the public broadcasters – the ABC and SBS. While I think both still have some way to go in taking full advantage of the current potential of the web and mobile digital media, they’re streets ahead of the commercial competition – a fact which in itself should cause many to rethink some lazy assumptions about the nature of innovation. With the appointment of Griffith REVIEW’s Julianne Schultz to the ABC Board, it’ll be intriguing to see how some expertise at board level plays into the reconfiguration of public broadcasting – Schultz was intimately involved as an ABC executive with the first round of planning for ABC Online which hit a brick wall in the disastrous Jonathan Shier regime.
The ABC is doing well in recognising the opportunities via new media. The commercial broadcasters seem totally uninterested and clueless about the whole thing. But both ABC and SBS does have a structural advantage over the commercial broadcasters in that they don’t have to comply with Australian content regulations. Which is lucky for them, because they’d fail. This isn’t their fault; they’ve been starved for funds for years. If the government broadcasters did have to fulfill these regs, they’d have a lot less money for their digital initiatives.
I don’t know if this is useful, but I just finished an interview series with some “big players” journalists and academics about the future of journalism. Highly recommend it, since it seems that now a days both obstacles and trends seem to bypass national borders.
I think it’s worth pointing out that any criticism of both the ABC & SBS not making more of digital media should be tempered by recognition that they get no explicit funding to maintain or build online content. Until their charters are amended, there is no funding mechanism and no pressure for the government to fund their further growth online, yet both broadcasters have expressed a strong desire to do so.
Late last year I attended a stakeholder consultation with Shaun Brown for SBS when they were doing the rounds of the country, trying to get people to write in and support their push for a serious budget overhaul, including having SBS’s charter amended to recognise all things digital.
One of the more interesting things Brown said was that he introduced the increased advertising on the channel to fund staff salaries. Basically the budget for SBS had been so stagnant over the years it did not provide funds to give staff the normal and fair 4% CPI annual increase, so he’d been funding it out of the overall budget. His solution was to introduce the extra advertising, rather than lose good staff.
I thought that was a rather stark illustration of just how starved of funds our two public broadcasters have been – and they should get tremendous credit for how much they have embraced the internet and digital media without any extra budget to do so.
Good point, Myriad!
Yes, and one of the ways they do it is by expecting the independent producers they commission to produce drama and doco, to produce the on-line element for free. It’s a very sore point amongst the independent industry.
Yes, I’ve heard that’s a problem!
It’s high time we accepted the shape of things to come and changed the name of this country to Murdochia.
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Conroy knows this. That little CCCP Internet design of his isn’t about child porn at all. It’s about brand loyalty.
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And Mr Bahnisch your brand loyalty is in question. We will be compelled to send you to the Fox Funcamp For Re-Education.
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In the name of freedom.
Yes, and one of the ways they do it is by expecting the independent producers they commission to produce drama and doco, to produce the on-line element for free.
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And like the shennanegans that caused the writer’s strike in America. Dastardly behaviour that.
Providing online content costs money, yet the ads sell for cheap.
Making TV costs money too, but the ads are expensive and barriers to competition are high.
So there’s no wonder commercial broadcasters don’t care for the web. They just want to screw as much as they can out of the broadcast license.
We hear a lot about how print has been smashed by the net, but not nearly as much about TV’s woes. The fact is TV audiences have fallen much more than print circulation.
In a death spiral, the owners of commercial TV are content to extract the rents possible from the existing property – they’re not interested in spending money on something new.
No sure if Scott’s talk actually added anything new to the ‘discussion’???
At first I couldn’t understand all the fuss / criticism directed at broadsheets for not having adapted tot the digital age. After all, they have websites, don’t they? And those websites carry plenty of news stories. But then a few months ago I wanted to comment on an oped piece of Leslie Canold’s in the Age. Yet there was no Age blog to accompany the much-discussed piece (on whateva subject, which now completely escapes me). So that seemed pretty old-fashioned and curmudgeonly, to not invite lively discussion that bounced off the article.
But I think the ABC, especially friggin 774 has gone too far the other way. Their endless promotions of the website are surely self-defeating. Do they want a radio audience or not?. Isuppose tuning in and web-browsing are complementary – some of us can just manage to walk and chew gum at the same time! But still, think there’s an argument for the non-commercial network to not lose track of its core business.
Well said, matilda
And as far as discourteous goes: Jon Faine interrupting a studio guest to read out several inane text messages that he has on his screen. I want to hear real, live guests. Not some bloody texts.
@myriad – It’s a travesty that ABC doesn’t have a web budget!? I’m in the States, and NPR depends a great deal on web-outreach to deliver its exceptional content and provide wonderful visual and print resources for its listeners. PRI’s This American Life has completely crossed over, offering some of the best television anywhere…featuring some of the best videography while they do it. While I feel matilda’s frustration with constant barrages of ‘log onto xyz.org’ interrupting regular listening; the fact is that much of media consumption now takes place ‘off the clock’, via podcasts and whatnot. Hamstringing ABC does nothing to maintain purity in the content; especially since reaching the public is in its charter; and some of the public get their radio through the interwebs. Also, video provides a powerful medium that is no longer cloistered within TVLand. The possibilities are, er, myriad for what online video can bring to all sorts of content. Check this as an example.