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Over the past few months, the ABC has published Game of Thrones recaps, a guide to adult acne, run on-air promo ads for news stories and given grants to a very clickable range of projects under its new content fund. The public broadcaster is looking increasingly like its commercial competitors, and journalists feel like there’s a top-down push for higher-rating news stories, both online and in TV news programming.

Over a recent weekend, the ABC was running on-air promos for a story on the Sunday evening 7pm bulletin about the dangers of opioid use in rural Australia. The story was solid — an excellent example of some of the reporting the ABC does best. But the promotions — not the first of their kind, but a recent addition to the line-up — show that news and current affairs bosses at the public broadcaster are facing up to falling ratings. It’s a well-honed tactic from the Seven and Nine networks. The promo cycle for Sunday and Monday night news bulletins usually starts an hour or so after the Friday night news, and runs relentlessly throughout the weekend. The ABC has also adopted a mid-bulletin promo for 7.30, crossing to Leigh Sales with what’s coming up “later this hour”.

With falling ad revenues and ratings, the commercials are desperate for all the eyeballs they can get, so they heavily promote their news offerings. The ABC isn’t as aggressive (and doesn’t have the need for bolstering ad revenues), but it has a lot of staff around the country feeling like they’re in a commercial environment and that TV ratings are life and death events.

And that’s because the national audience for the 7pm has fallen from an average of 1.3 million on a Tuesday night in September 2015 to 1.072 million last Tuesday, with 7.30 dropping from 1.108 million to 746,000 on Tuesday night. While the ABC makes the national top 10 most watched programs on some nights of the week, 7.30 is very rarely a contender, such has been the fall in its audience.

And while audiences have dropped across the board, the 6pm broadcasts of Nine and Seven news have not lost as many viewers  as the ABC. Nor has A Current Affair.

It’s not just the TV promos that have a whiff of commercial telly about them. All news staff are given online training now, which isn’t just focussed on the technical training. Journalists (including camera operators) are taught about how to use video and photos for online, and how to work out which stories will rate well, and how to sell them for an online audience. In some departments, they’re sent regular rankings of whose stories got the most hits.

An ABC spokeswoman said staff were regularly updated on TV, radio and digital reach figures, as well as other audience data.

“ABC News has no targets around ratings. Our priority is to produce content that is valuable, relevant and accessible to our audiences,” she said. “Our goal — and our expectation for our journalists — is to make high quality, trustworthy and compelling journalism and topical content for Australians wherever, whenever and however they choose to experience it. To ensure digital and broadcast audiences are served equally, we offer training to broaden and enhance the skills of our content makers across both digital and broadcast. “

She said “quality journalism is at the heart of our strategy”, referring to the ABC’s coverage of the abuse allegations against Cardinal George Pell, the Lindt seige and the exploitation of elderly Australians in nursing homes.

But the story choice for both online and TV often doesn’t seem very ABC at all. Online, there’s the Game of Thrones recaps usually restricted to clickbait and pop culture news websites (which even made it as a top daily story for its Facebook Messenger news bot). The same bot has recently included need-to-know news including announcements from Comic-Con, an explainer on adult acne, and a story on “pupfluencers”— owners of an “Instagram famous doggo” making money through brand sponsorships.

You can also see the ratings chase in where the ABC is allocating funds. It announced $1 million in funding earlier this month for podcasts, after jumping onto the true crime podcast bandwagon with the successful Trace. The fund has raised some eyebrows at the broadcaster, given cuts to specialty programming at Radio National, home to the ABC’s most popular podcast, Conversations with Richard Fidler. The ABC’s content fund, announced to much fanfare in March, has also stirred the pot, choosing very click-friendly projects for its first year, including an ABC Parents project, a plan to share content from the ABC archives and a health cross-platform project.

RMIT senior lecturer Alex Wake told Crikey that while some of the content appearing lately on the ABC made her roll her eyes, the public broadcaster had to appeal to a wide audience.

“I have heard ABC journos getting increasingly upset about middle managers wanting clickbait stories to be produced,” she said. “But there needs to be light and shade and a careful balance. Just because it’s a public broadcaster doesn’t mean it needs to be boring.”

Wake said news had to be entertaining, and stories needed to be told in an engaging way for an audience other than the over-50s.

“The media is changing and the ABC also needs to change. We need to make sure young people engage. As long as they’re still investing in the important stories, and ensuring that good investigative journalism is covered, we do need to make sure young people engage,” she said.