Australia needs more than the New York Times’ view of the world
In this cross-post from The Conversation, RMIT University senior lecturer, Alexandra Wake, says the expansion into Australia by The New York Times makes support of our own publicly funded but independent national broadcasters more important than ever.
The New York Times’ global push for subscribers, supported by the opening of a small bureau in Australia, is likely to cause a few more worried faces in the already fractured local news market.
But more worrying for supporters of democracy in Australia is the pulling power of the US publication (and its innovative agenda) critically underlines the need for Australia to have access to strong local news which can give an Australian “take” on local and world events.
The Australian bureau is just one part of The New York Times’ US$50 million, three-year drive to expand globally and to grow its paying subscriber base outside the United States. Employees were told in a memo reported in the Times:
Because our digital report is still designed and produced mainly for a US audience, we have not come close to realising our potential to attract readers outside our home market… We are confident this will be a down payment on a new era of international growth for our company.
Curse the ‘worldwide web’ of companies competing for Australians’ attention! Let’s put up a firewall and make Australia great again! Hmmm. Instead, how about we worry about fake news on Facebook, be glad we have sites like The Conversation and Mumbrella, and celebrate that the NY Times is hiring journalists in Oz.
There, there’s so much news around –and ever growing – one doesn’t need the ABC/SBS in metro areas. What is needed, and where the NYT/Daily Mail/Guardian etc don’t go, is the massive deficiency in regional media which holds 35% of Australia’s population. Regional Australia generally gets a monopoly local newspaper, gets a 22% share of FTA advertising to finance content and distribution, and on ACMA data accounts for a miserly 10% of total FTA news budgets. Terrible waterfall for regional residents.
This can only be rectified if the ABC budget is allocated 35% to a totally separated regional ABC entity. It might have two hubs in say Albury and Toowoomba (one of which is HQ) and a CEO located in regional Australia reporting directly to the ABC board. Iain Audsley would take this gig and run it efficiently. It will obviously buy substantial components of programming from the ABC metro division, but certainly this will fill one of the major deficiencies in Australian’s access to relevant media. One hopes the Nationals, One Nation and Xenophon split the ABC this way.