What the ABC should learn from Joe Rogan … and Popeye

There is a lesson the ABC can learn from Joe Rogan, but it’s not what everyone is saying.

Two Wednesdays ago, the new ABC chair Kim Williams went into the ring with the American podcaster, answering a National Press Club question with observations about Rogan’s type preying on anxiety and spreading misinformation while “treating the public as plunder for entrepreneurs that are really quite malevolent”.

Rogan replied with a couple of dismissive acronyms, Williams responded and we had a wordy version of Mike Tyson versus YouTuber Jake Paul. The manosphere, having swamped Williams in sewage, declared Rogan a knockout winner. Can’t argue with 14.5 million subscribers.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

After the bout, the orthodox analysis was that the ABC should be learning from The Joe Rogan Experience. It should try harder to “engage with” the young audiences who are deserting mainstream media. It should seek “relevance”. On the ABC itself, American online culture journalist Taylor Lorenz reproved media “institutions” and “ivory towers”. Audiences, she said, “really want personality-driven media, they want to see who is making their news”.

Elon Musk likened the government-owned ABC to Pravda, though it’s hard to remember Pravda broadcasting such self-criticism.

Problem is, the advice is out of date. For a decade, the ABC has been on a forlorn quest for digital relevance. It has strained to “engage with” pretty much everyone, and done it badly enough to lose its mind.

When Michelle Guthrie became managing director in 2015, ABC iView tilted to data-gathering, signing you up to identify your habits and deepen you into a rut of your own creation. If you liked this, you’d love more of this. With a two-stroke engine, relentlessly de-funded by government, the ABC puttered along behind algorithmic digital businesses, and the harder it chased, the faster it lost audience.

A year after the Guthrie experience, the ABC became #YourABC.

Noooo! Like Amazon, like Google, like everything, the ABC pretended it was your servant, attuned to your every need, but in fact attuned to its own needs. Soon it resembled a parent bringing their teenager to a party and then hanging out, drinking wine in the kitchen. Somebody talk to me! I’m yours! Its website converged on the Daily Mail; its news got bogged down in lame cross-promotion; whenever it found a popular young presenter it flooded the zone, giving them six shows, a radio spot and four podcasts. The harder it tried, the needier it looked, and the fewer risks it took.

Data-driven imitation is a well that only trends towards empty. Adapted foreign formats (Grand Designs, The Assembly, etc) are anti-risk. If they succeed, they confirm the data. If they fail, they’re someone else’s fault.

We in commercial media have an excuse for selling our souls and fleeing from risk: we’re stretched on the rack of shareholders’ quarterly targets. What was the ABC’s excuse? It’s hard to pinpoint but my guess is the mesmeric effect of instant digital feedback. Clicks became synonymous with “relevance”. Fluxy digital numbers set the agenda. A public broadcaster whose creative identity had come from interesting people doing interesting things, independent minds innovating, blurred into a poor person’s commercial network. It wanted to be “relevant” more than it wanted to be interesting. This rot set in nearly a decade ago.

#YourABC? We were already burnt out on #YourColesworths, #YourGoogle and #MyQFF. “Your” and “My” actually meant “Their”. The ABC was throwing away its priceless point of difference. Who were commissioning new programs – the creative minds or the digital marketing division? The public sniffs out nothing so quickly as an overgrown teenager, one minute green-lighting a data-driven salad of market-tested ideas, the next having a crisis of conscience and overcompensating with the sales department’s idea of woke. The more the ABC chased the 18-30s, the faster they ran away.

(Meanwhile, 90 per cent of the ABC was continuing to pound out strong independent journalism, broadcast unlikely hits like Fisk and You Can’t Ask That and Gruen and Hard Quiz, provoke thought on radio, and try to endure the cycle while being told that they, the ageing heart, were the problem.)

The ABC began to lose confidence in whether it was a generator of great ideas or a digital platform. When Fisk moved to Netflix, new (and younger) viewers realised how freaking good it was. Identifiably ABC, it didn’t have to stay there. Like every ABC hit, none of the data saw Fisk coming.

Nothing loses audiences faster than self-doubt. Perversely, if the ABC wants to regain its self-confidence, it might look to Rogan – now. He spent decades wandering in comedy and the UFC, liberal, libertarian, not quite sure what, before he found the manosphere. Once he stopped chasing the game and decided, like Popeye, “I yam what I yam”, his millions and his president came to him. It’s kind of funny but, in his way, Williams is already asking the ABC to find its inner, upper-middle Rogan. Stop being so needy. Know thyself.

The mantra of commercial media is to give audiences more of what they already know. The appeal of the ABC has always been serendipity: the news story you didn’t think was a story until it surprised you; the show you didn’t want to watch but soon couldn’t stop. It didn’t want to gatecrash our party but held its own party and left its door open. That involves risk.

The ABC ought to dedicate a meaningful part of its budget to risk – new creators, new ideas – instead of generating pap out of existing data or formats. From Countdown to Fisk, surprise hits define the ABC. Until its leadership lost confidence, it took pride in its ability to be other than what it seemed.

Williams has supported restoring the ABC’s creative self-belief. If it keeps turning itself inside-out to obey algorithms, it will keep destroying its best assets. An old-fashioned idea, it’s really quite radical, and unwittingly similar to Joe Rogan. I’ll do me and you do you.

This is not an argument for the ABC to stop chasing 18-to-30-year-olds. To the contrary, it has an obligation to reach as many Australians as it can. But sometimes to get a dog (a muster puppy?) to come to you, you need to stop calling it. Turn away, do what you do best and do it with commitment. That’s how you get a twenty-something, or a dog, curious about you.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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