Marks takes ABC back to basics: TV, radio centre stage, again

Since the ABC discovered digital delivery a decade back, the media has been the message. So good on managing director Hugh Marks for making it plain that across all platforms news content will now be king. “I want content and the story to come first,” he told The Australian’s James Madden. If that means more coverage of serious stories on ABC television and radio, and less focus on lifestyle flummery and cultural campaigning that infest its websites, Mr Marks will start to undo a decade of damage, undoubtedly unintentionally done, by former managing directors Mark Scott and David Anderson, who both committed to digital platforms. In 2015 Professor Scott said the ABC needed “a digital strategy that allows you to deliver across multiple channels to different audiences on different devices”. The problem across the past decade is what it delivered.

Peripheral stories for micro-markets that are quick to create and mistake comment for reporting took ever more space at the ABC online. And the culture extended to broadcast TV and radio at the expense of conventional reporting. ABC TV’s main evening news bulletin regularly includes stories that focus on cultural questions that are not national news for most of the audience and belong online, if they belong anywhere. It is more than a decade since the ABC abolished state editions of 7.30, which used to hold premiers to account. What happens when news becomes optional was clear when the vastly resourced ABC was last with the least of broadcast media covering the death of six people in the April 2024 Bondi Junction stabbings. As the corporation’s Paul Barry said at the time: “You have to ask: If the ABC can’t or won’t resource its news channel properly, should it close it and use the money elsewhere?”

Mr Marks now signals his answer, and it is correct. Let us hope he leads the ABC out of the news wilderness of cyber space.