How does the media code its message about itself? This past week we’ve seen one old practice at both the ABC and Nine. The outlets are using personnel as strategy, with senior appointments at each organisation flagging the big changes in Australia’s traditional media we can expect this year.
At the ABC, media watchers and staff insiders are parsing the federal government’s appointment of new chair Kim Williams, and over at Nine there’s scepticism about former Daily Mail and News Corp editor Luke McIlveen will run the once-were-Fairfax mastheads.
Both read like differing responses to the big question all traditional media face: what audiences do you want? How do you scale them, engage them and, in the case of commercial media, make money out of them?
Of course, both announcements came with the usual pabulum about quality and independence. While we should read the ABC announcement as a promise of more disruption and change, the Nine decision reads more like a reach back to its past.
The federal government plainly wanted the Williams appointment to be noticed. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was rolled out to lead a week of agenda resetting. The choice of one of the most experienced, if controversial, media renovators came paired with the usual palaver about “confidence” in the managing director David Anderson and the outgoing chair, Scott Morrison’s “captain’s pick”, Ita Buttrose.
But step-by-step, the government has now remade the ABC board, with the Williams’ appointment following on from last year’s appointments of digital-aware board members Louise McElvogue (one of the leaders of the previous Labor government’s Convergence Review) and Nicolette Maury, along with the gift of the election by staff of Laura Tingle.
It’s not done yet. There’s one more position to be filled later this year when the term of Malcolm Turnbull’s controversial 2014 pick of former commercial broadcast executive Peter Lewis expires.
Albanese and Communications Minister Michelle Rowlands studiously avoided commenting on the organisation’s fumbling of the management of its younger, more diverse, staff highlighted by the Antoinette Lattouf brouhaha (although Rowland cautiously commented that “all media organisations should seek to foster diversity in all its forms”).
Seems the PM and his minister are so “confident” in the ABC’s direction that they’ve appointed a notorious interventionist change-agent and outsider to help Anderson out.
At the press announcement, Williams gave an early warning to the vocal change-resistant faction within the ABC, leaning on the broadcaster’s charter to point to “the necessity of being innovative and comprehensive in the approach that is taken across all of the delivery methodologies of digital media, broadcasting on television, and radio, and clearly in a lot of written information”.
Under Anderson — the only ABC insider to rise to the MD job — the organisation has been marking time on innovation, even axing some of the audience-diversifying initiatives made under former MD Mark Scott (think The Drum) in response to the continued cuts to ABC funding and the relentless bullying from both the political and media wings of Australia’s right.
For Nine, the Williams appointment had the benefit of drawing attention away from its outsider appointment of McIlveen to lead a newsroom that has (as Williams himself said of the 1990s’ ABC) “a strong ‘antibody’ culture to new and unwelcome intruders”.
What makes McIlveen a surprise choice is in part his personal acculturation in News Corp (and Daily Mail) that sits at odds with the deeply serious Fairfax traditions. What’s more, it’s that his editing experiences of largely advertising-focused products sit at odds with the mastheads’ claimed decade-long pivot to subscriptions.
It reads like the final triumph of the Nine mass market ad-driven culture over the traditional journalism-focused business model it inherited when Nine took over Fairfax in 2018 — or at least that’s the message it risks sending to its carefully built-up audience of 460,000 paying subscribers.
The message: it looks like Nine reckons subscriptions have peaked. If so, it’s not alone. This weekend, The Washington Post’s new CEO Will Lewis broke free from managing a redundancy round to say publicly what plenty of masthead owners are saying privately: “My hunch is that the existing model is creaking.” (Like McIlveen, Lewis is an ex-News Corp, WaPo outsider.)
He told Semafor’s Ben Smith: ”We went from an advertising model to a subscription-based model, and that subscription-based model is now waning and then will enter a more significant period of decline.”
According to Nine’s latest financial report, subscriptions for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age were already flat. Licensing fees from Google and Facebook courtesy of the news media bargaining code are up for review this year.
This week, the AFR reported the company was looking to sell its controlling share in Domain, the residue of Fairfax’s “rivers of gold” classified advertising business. Perhaps the message is that Nine has decided to do what it’s always done best: build mass audiences for mass advertising.
I am getting very close to ending my lifelong subscription to the SMH. Most of the columnists I have enjoyed are gone and their replacements I find turgid, boring or stupidly rightwing
Case in point: the SMH doesn’t have that many full-time foreign correspondents these days. So far this month, the large majority of contributions by one of them, Rob Harris, have been about two of Europe’s royal families. There is more every week in the SMH on royal trivia than on the war in Ukraine, political crises in Europe, the rise of the far right, etc. put together. It is like a 1950s Women’s Weekly.
Whether it’s Ukraine or Gaza, the Guardian’s coverage of anything international is so many streets ahead of the Nine publications – they carry actual NEWS on both on a daily basis.
Tally up the articles published in the Nine mastheads the last 12 months on Harry Styles and Taylor Swift alone, Nine is all celebrity crap, relationship and dating advice (what stage of braindeath must you be enduring that you need someone to advise you how to go on a date?), RecipeTin Eats recipes, property porn, and articles about streaming shows strongly weighted towards their own platform.
I’ve actually lost count of the number of times I’ve provided editorial feedback drawing the same analogy to the Womens Weekly. Spend too much time on the site and you really do get to feel like you’re living inside Tory Maguire’s vapid, cavernous skull.
It’s consistently astonishing the word length Parnell McGuiness is able to pad her weekly brain farts out to, isn’t it?
And there’s your problem. They pay so little per word, if you’re going to earn a living, you have to bash it out fast.
Thirty years ago, having had quite a bit of exposure to the arts, I thought if my kid comes home and says I want to be a musician, visual artist, dancer, or actor, I’d be heart broken because, chances are, they’d live life on the bones of their backside. Ten years ago added journalist to that list.
That crusty curmudgeon Paddy is long gone but his brain farts live on.
I can remember when even the Brisbane Courier Mail resembled a broadsheet newspaper (about 20 years ago). Not a great one, but it had a couple of credible journalists and for a while even had a reasonable book section on Saturdays (disclosure: I used to review for it). Now it looks like what Barry Humphries referred to as “chubby comic books for adults” (his description of Australian newspapers) – a dumbed-down tabloid with joke headlines. McIlveen’s appointment suggests that the more venerable broadsheets of Sydney and Melbourne may be about to head down the same road to oblivion.
I gave The Age away in 2018 after being a loyal reader and supporter for 43 years. (I left The Australian in about August 1975 when I could no longer stand Murdoch’s hysterical anti-ALP propaganda).
Chris, I am not too sure about that comment you make in your article;
“ ….. the deeply serious Fairfax traditions.”
My experience is that those ‘traditions’ have become increasingly shallower and shallower over recent decades. A cynical observer might be tempted to describe them as now being ‘monatomic thin’.
These days it is Crikey and John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations that I mainly look to for my news and commentary. The odd article in The New Daily and The Guardian are also worth a read. Apart from Crikey, these are available free online. Why pay for a substandard product when a good quality product is available free online? I would mention that I have given a one-off donation to Pearls and Irritations as most of the articles there are excellent.
I am not at all confident that the appointment of Kim Williams to the Chair of the ABC will arrest, let alone reverse, the decline of the once-great ABC.
I used to donate to Pearls and Irritations, but the articles are so variable I don’t want to support it any more. Some are excellent, some just tinfoil hat stuff.
Thanks for that comment Woop.
It is interesting to hear what others think. I become aware of P & I just before the last federal election. I used to check the site spasmodically at that time. However, more recently, I have felt that the articles have been really good. They have many essays on the situation in Occcupied Pallestine which to me is by far and away the most important issue at the moment (certainly far more important than what Woolworths is, or isn’t, selling around Australia/Invasion Day.
Thanks again.
The Australian was briefly a reasonable paper until editor Adrian Deamer was sacked in 1973 .
The question for Kim Williams is will he do a David Hill, who took the chairs job in 1987, and then decided the best person for the MD’s job was himself, and he moved across and took the reins. In hindsight, they were golden years for Aunty. Can Williams rescue the ABC from managerialism from the board room alone? Probably not, so we’ll see, but given radio and screen ratings have been in free fall, you’d reckon something big will happen.
As for the nine newspapers, I’ll review my subscription at the end of the financial year, unless the coverage of the Dunkley byelection gets too biased to the right, in which case I’ll pull the pin sooner. No use rewarding bad behaviour.
Based on the appointment of McIlveen, The Age’s subscriptions have definitely peaked, and they’re actively telling anyone with a left-of-centre perspective that their subscription is no longer wanted. I will be heeding the message, and I strongly encourage other subscribers to do likewise.
And when you consider what % of the 460,000 subscribers that audience represents, you have to wonder how they see the culture wars that the current owners seem determined on waging playing out in business terms.
Yep, and how many of those subscribers are Teal voters? They’re people who’ve proven they’ll vote with their feet.
I have downgraded to digital, partly because delivery was so erratic. But I still value the Age’s investigative journalism, and its good but diminishing Melbourne focus. It’s hard to find any other outlet that isn’t entirely Sydney-focused, not only in news, but in vox pops, locale of experts cited etc.