ABC bias and bureaucracy should make way for better content

It’s about time someone tackled the bloated middle management layers of the ABC’s silos, and sharpened focus on content.

ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie. Picture: AAP

Five years ago when newspaper publishers around the world were panicked about digital disruption and falling newspaper sales all the talk was about the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph’s hub-and-spoke editorial floor model for publishing in print and online. It was really just an expensive ­office redesign proposed by management consultants.

At this company some papers followed suit and introduced electronic whiteboards and stand-up electronic desks to serve across platforms at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars per paper.

At The Australian we simply moved our online editors’ desks opposite the traditional backbench, those editors who put the print pages together at night. This was on the principle that they could simply talk to each other across the desk. Brilliant hey?

The cost to The Australian was a fraction over $2000 for a saving of close to half a million. And guess what? The Australian was the most successful paper at building paid content. It has now reported 100,000 paying online subscribers.

My point? Content success has nothing to do with process but everything to do with understanding of one’s audience and creative ideas and skills.

I was reminded of this when I read ABC managing director ­Michelle Guthrie’s words about her latest reorganisation of her various divisions or the speech of her chairman Justin Milne at the Hector Crawford Memorial ­lecture in Melbourne last Wednesday. Guthrie comes from ­Google and Milne is a former Telstra executive and current NBN director. Process abounds at both.

Guthrie on Tuesday focused on the breaking down of the corporation’s many content silos and their repositioning under three distinct categories: news, analysis and investigation under Gaven Morris, entertainment and specialist under former director of television David Anderson and ­regional and local under former head of radio Michael Mason.

This is all very sensible, will free up manpower and force the sort of multi-tasking that has been ripping through traditional print newsrooms. We might even find lumbering programs such as Insiders on Sunday mornings will be able to cover things that happened a ­couple of days earlier.

Think the Redfern demonstration by left-wing students at last Friday week’s Liberal Party function at which Tony Abbott’s sister Christine Forster was assaulted. It was apparently too late for Insiders 36 hours later, even though it had made quite a show of condemning right-wingers the previous Sunday for harassment in a Melbourne pub of Labor’s Sam ­Dastyari.

Why did Insiders ignore the Forster outrage after devoting so much time to the offensive ­comments aimed at Dastyari, who was not physically attacked and spat upon as Foster was. It was probably inertia rather than bias: no one wanted to work Saturday to pull together the Forster story properly. But it looked like double standards.

Ditto the AM program on Thursday morning. At minimum unconscious bias and PC attitudes were on show when an item about western Sydney ethnic communities in Labor seats who voted No in the same-sex marriage plebiscite focused on a group of African Christians from Parramatta and neglected to mention the strong Muslim vote against SSM throughout western Sydney.

These are exactly the sorts of biases and unchecked attitudes that rile ABC critics. So my view of Guthrie’s changes is this: about time someone tackled the bloated middle management layers of the ABC’s silos; why did it take 18 months and millions of dollars of consultant fees to do something that could have been done in 18 weeks? And when are you going to start getting your hands dirty with the editor-in-chief’s responsibilities you are paid to perform? To the board: when are you going to apply editor-in-chief standards to the MD’s role?

I already know the answer to these questions. Never. As with previous MD Mark Scott, ­management will replace direct accountability for content and with layers of process and ­bureaucracy. Why? Because none of them are content people.

Milne seems a smart guy qualified to oversee the changes required if the ABC is to serve its audiences in the modern digital era. As he indicated in his speech at the Screen Forever conference, ABC audiences want free content without ads and they want it whenever they feel like it. Lucky he has taxpayers to foot the bill.

But this is just process and no substitute for a creative understanding of content, whether news, sport or drama.

Milne followed his many predecessors in citing polling that shows 80 per cent of Australians trust the ABC. So what? I listen to ABC local, RN and News Radio. I also listen to 2GB. I watch ABC current affairs every day including The Drum but I also watch a lot of Sky News.

I have appeared on most ABC platforms and Sky News and 2GB and can confirm what every ­politician knows: the ABC is anything but streamlined. At Sky News you let yourself in the front door and walk straight on to the set. At ABC TV you start with half a dozen make-up stylists.

A vast amount of affection Australians hold for the ABC is for its British drama. Think Call The Midwife, Endeavour, Doc Martin, Inspector George Gently, Vera, DCI Banks and dozens of other shows. If you haven’t seen the new Saturday night drama of life at a British military base in Aden in the early 1960s, The Last Post, you are missing something special. Why can’t the ABC produce drama this good? Australian soldiers have been stationed in remarkable areas from Cyprus for 30 years to the Solomons. The ABC charter calls for it to tell “Australian ­stories”.

Why axe The Doctor Blake Mysteries? Why the endless ­recycling of Shaun Micallef, Wil Anderson, the Chaser Boys and the rest? My friend Gerard Henderson argues the ABC is a staff collective and he is right. It needs stronger editorial leadership.

Guthrie and Milne have done something reasonable responding to the demands of a modern, ­digitally savvy audience. Now they must do something brave. In my view they should not have scrapped Lateline and Dr Blake. They should have made them better. They should demand more high quality Australian ­stories of the sort the BBC has mastered. They should expect the ABC’s leaders to commission them.

The one really amazing ABC breakthrough this year was not from the MD or the board. It was an email sent to all staff by editorial policy manager Mark Maley in early August demanding fair treatment in stories for opponents of same-sex marriage, who comprised 40 per cent of Australians. That looked like the first baby steps of editorial leadership.