A boring Aunty: How the ABC is alienating its audience

Thursday was yet another fateful day at ABC studios all around Australia. For the umpteenth time, nervous glances were exchanged as hundreds of vulnerable staff awaited their fate. The guillotine had yet again been sharpened.

You could be forgiven for thinking that ABC staff might have thicker hides by now. After all, the journalists, producers, studio wranglers, office personnel and all the support staff who make content happen have been around this same circuit so many times in recent years.

The ABC’s current approach will not only never attract a younger audience – it is alienating the existing audience.Credit: Illustration by Matt Davidson

An “all-staff” email from managing director David Anderson on Thursday confirmed management’s determined pursuit of a “digital-first” policy and explained what everyone already knew. There is not a single one of the ABC’s 4000+ workers who disagrees with the basic proposition that Aunty is not immune to the changes rapidly impacting the entire media.

However, there is much disquiet at the choices made about how to respond to those challenges.

Adopting a “digital-first” strategy has been a flawed ABC mantra since Michelle Guthrie turned everything upside-down seven years ago. Claiming that taking content and putting it online before it goes to air on “legacy” radio or TV will somehow magically attract a younger audience is as laughably unsophisticated as it is wrong.

ABC political editor Andrew Probyn has been made redundant in the lastest round of staff cuts.Credit: Andrew Meares

Gone are the days when a manager backs staff against sniping from some thin-skinned minister in a federal or state government, or a commercial media rival.

If the content is good enough, the audience will find it wherever it is. For example, Tom Gleeson’s Hard Quiz rates its socks off on free-to-air TV, an inconvenient truth that contradicts the theory of “digital first”. If other shows were as entertaining, as compelling, as provocative they would also find their audience.

Yet “digital first” is what passes as a strategy from management who are looking to deflect attention from their own failures.

If there was a collapse in the audience at one radio station, or for a particular shift or format, or across one segment of television output, then it would be reasonable to draw attention to individual program makers and to question their personal style.

However, when the decline is across every radio network in every capital city, and across almost all TV genres on most days of the week, the problem is clearly elsewhere. The declines are “technology-agnostic”, and impact everywhere including the sacred cows of news and current affairs.

The few successes are outstanding local comedy – Hard Quiz, Utopia, Fisk, Mad as Hell, The Weekly and Gruen all punch above their weight. Around them much else is limp and lifeless.

This has become the most risk-averse and boring era of ABC programs ever.

When I left the ABC after a 30-year career, spanning 25 years on local radio, four years on Radio National and two years with TV, I was told I was the most complained about person in all of ABC Radio.

My reaction was, “Well what are the rest of them doing? Aren’t they trying?” Being complained about was, to my way of thinking, a measure of success, a sign that people were listening and that my program had impact.

To the managers, however, it was an embarrassment and a sure indicator that I needed to be more closely controlled. Gone were the days when a manager backed staff against the self-interested sniping from some thin-skinned minister in a federal or state government, or a commercial media rival.

The repetitious mantra from panicking managers is always about being more balanced, more cautious, while at the same time insisting on program output that will attract a younger audience. That approach will not only never attract a younger audience – it is alienating the existing audience, leaving no audience at all.

The basic reality is that people grow into the ABC, not the other way around. Does anyone seriously argue that the bulk of the audience listening in 2019 when I finished on ABC Melbourne were the same people who had been listening since 1989 when I started? Of course not.

If the content is compelling, people find you wherever you are, whatever technology they need and wherever you sit on the dial. Witness when COVID hit, or bushfires; the audience numbers soared as listeners flock to ABC radio and TV for the Daily Dan or for that vital emergency broadcasting – authoritative, calm, live coverage of something that really matters.

In the last federal budget, the Albanese government kept its promise to give the ABC the funds to secure its future. What they curiously have failed to do for months now is replace two directors who have departed the board.

New ideas and insights are desperately needed.

Jon Faine is a regular columnist.

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