Is the ABC really spread too thinly?
After last week’s budget cut funding from the ABC Andrew Dodd of Swinburne University of Technology asks whether the corporation has overreached in recent years in an article which first appeared on The Conversation.
If you want to capture a lasting image of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation at the height of its powers, it might be a good idea to take a screen-shot of the homepage of the ABC’s website. But do it soon. If you wait a couple more months, or a year, or two, the odds are the site won’t be as rich and layered as it is now, given the hit the corporation took in last week’s budget.
With A$120 million sliced off its base funding over the next four years, the ABC won’t be able to do all the things it does now. The Australia Network – Australia’s international television service – will disappear with flow-on effects across news and current affairs and the ABC’s overseas bureau. An additional efficiency dividend of 1% means other services will go too.
Staff and programs will be cut. Some innovations will cease, while other initiatives won’t happen. And there’s the distinct possibility the cuts are just phase one of a grander scheme to diminish the national broadcaster.
Steve Browning from News Corp here. Andrew has unfortunately got his ending wrong.
“axing the Australia Network looks like a gift to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which lost its bid for the service under the Gillard Government.”
News Corp did not bid for the service. Sky News Australia did. Sky News Australia is equally owned by Nine Entertainment, Seven Media Group and BSkyB. At the time of the bid, the old News Corp owned 39% of BSkyB. So the old News Corp had a 13% share of Sky News Australia. Nine and Seven each have 33%.
For the sake of completeness, the stake in BSkyB is now owned by 21st Century Fox. So the new News Corp has no investment in Sky News Australia.
@Stephen Browning: thanks for that clarification. So we can assume that no News Corp publication will at any time promote the interests of Fox, despite the fact that Rupert Murdoch controls both? That will make a nice change.
@Andrew Dodd: while iView is essential (and could be better), ABC24 serves no purpose. It is a waste of money.
If Scott does his job, the ABC will innovate around content, not channels and so on. Mimicking in BBC is not a good strategy.
Is not the ABC Digital Strategy a bad clone of the BBC ??
BBC Home Page > iPlayer / TV / Radio / Shop / More….
ABC Home Page > iView / TV / Radio / Kids / Shop / More….
Knowing people who have moved from commercial broadcasters to the ABC, they to a man say that it is much harder to find any fat to trim in the ABC than at their previous employees.
Anyone notice how News 24 has 4 times the audience of Sky News? The ABC channel is underestimated as the most popular rolling source of news – add up all the news channels listed on Foxtel and the COMBINED audience is less than News 24.
It’s hard to feel sorry for the ABC suffering a one percent “efficiency dividend” (how Orwellian is that term?). Government departments have been copping the dividend for years and it currentl;y stands at 2.5% for them. If I were Mr Scott, I’d lie low and accept that the ABC has been dodging bullets for years.
What I dont understand about ABC, is their digital television network where you have ABC3 broadcasting kids content yet they already have kids channels in ABC2 and ABC4. Also a lot of their programming consists of repeating old US shows on these channels. It seems a waste of resources.
@Warren Jackson ABC News 24 serves plenty of purpose. Maybe you don’t watch it and feel it doesn’t have any purpose to you, but in the absence of a TV, how else are you going to stream news worth watching?
@LastLineLenny: I suppose there are people who want 24/7 TV news “streamed”. But I think they are in the minority. A small minority. (When I need to know what’s happening I usually turn on radio national, which is the same but without the presenters’ faces.
My point is that there is a fairly large bucket of money involved and IMO the ABC audiences would be better served if the money went to original content.
I wish they had not cut the religion report and I would like more diversity – and preferably some surprising material. For example, I really would like a serious doco on the debate over climate change. As far as I can tell the science is plain enough, yet it’s somehow ignored. I really would value a very open exploration of why that is so.
Double J is not a “new” station, it is simply the old Dig radio with different content. And the vast bulk of the ABC’s budget is spent on TV.
The ABC has plenty of fat – look at the many layers of management within news. They make no stories, they coordinate no production. Most of their time is spent on ‘strategy’ and ‘style’ – you could axe 3/4 of them with no consequence (and by the way, they don’t come cheap!).
Speaking of not coming cheap – the recent salary leaks were informative. People like Tony Jones and Virginia Trioli (and many others) could NEVER work at any other media outlet … even if other outlets wanted the. So why are we paying so much to ‘keep’ them?
Plenty of fat. Call Jenny craig
@Viewer “What I dont understand about ABC, is their digital television network where you have ABC3 broadcasting kids content yet they already have kids channels in ABC2 and ABC4. [sic]”
There’s no “ABC4”, just “ABC 2 for Kids”, which is just a content brand rather than a discreet channel since it runs on daytime ABC2. Both ABC3 and daytime ABC2 reflect different audiences, with different programming needs. A toddler and a tween have different content/learning/programming needs. Two of the ABC’s strongest performers is its children’s content on ABC3 and ABC4Kids – they can produce world-class content.