ABC staff urged to do more to engage Australians in the suburbs and outside of the big cities

Staff at the public broadcaster have been given instructions to do more to ensure content reaches as many Australians as possible through its digital platforms.

ABC editorial staff have been urged to do more to engage audiences they are failing to connect with, including Australians living in the suburbs and beyond the nation’s big cities.

In an email to editorial staff last week, ABC news director Justin Stevens outlined the public broadcaster’s new audience-first news strategy which sets out to “provide news, information and investigations for all Australians.”

In the correspondence, Stevens said the ABC News channel is also looking to “slow down the news cycle with more explainers and constructive conversations, while doing more to engage audiences that we aren’t reaching, particularly in the suburbs and outside the big cities.”

Stevens told staff the audience-first strategy is designed to add value to the public conversation and it is “factual, compelling and indispensable.”

About 1150 ABC staff recently took part in two town halls and Stevens highlighted the public broadcaster’s focus on three pillars – value, engagement and people.

Stevens said ABC staff needed to get “more creative” to be able to “tell stories in different ways for different audiences across ABC-owned and third-party platforms.”

For the ABC’s audio news and current affairs division, Stevens said staff should always think about “audience first when you’re writing stories, building your bulletins, commissioning stories for your run-downs and speaking to our listeners.

“A simple way to do that is ask yourself these questions: ‘why should the public care about this story? How is it relevant to them? And how can I help them make sense of it?’”

Stevens also said in the coming weeks the ABC is looking at how it can “get more bang for our buck out of high value content across all mediums, because any time we can free up can be invested in doing more high value work.”

He also said staff needed to weigh up high value content versus low value content.

“High value content may be a story that is relevant and useful, that tells people something they don’t know and advances their understanding of an issue, or that adds to their understanding of their community, their nation and the world,” Stevens told staff.

“It may be engaging – something people will want to talk about it and share with others.”

An ABC spokeswoman said the ABC News channel reaches 2.48 million Australians each week and “has strong audiences across its digital streams”.

“We believe there’s potential to further grow the reach of its news video content on digital platforms,” she said.

In June, ABC managing director David Anderson spoke about the public broadcaster’s five-year plan to focus on preparing for a “digital-majority audience” by 2028.

“We will focus on bringing audiences to ABC-owned platforms while also creating content for audiences who prefer social media and other third-party platforms,” he said.

“This will ensure we provide relevant content, in engaging formats, for younger audiences, especially those who do not use traditional broadcast services.”

The 2022 ABC annual report showed weekly users of ABC digital products grew by 15 per cent in 2021, and a further 4 per cent increase in 2021-22, to an average of 17 million users.

This exceeded the target of 14.2 million average weekly users for 2021-22, and the annual report said this was due to the Covid-19 pandemic which saw strong audience results.