At least 10 staff from SBS Television’s subtitling unit will be made redundant because of what the network’s critics have long feared — an apparent reduction in foreign language content.
SBS says the downsizing is the result of “significant over-capacity” uncovered as part of an external review of the subtitling unit. Crikey understands the redundancies were announced by managing director Shaun Brown on Tuesday in a meeting with the team.
“While SBS will retain a significant subtitling presence in-house, a number of redundancies were announced across the entire unit,” SBS corporate communications manager Jane McMillan said.
The move comes amid growing concerns that SBS’s reliance on advertising revenue has come at the expense of quality foreign content. In a letter to the government’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in 2008, SaveOurSBS.org spoke of the apparent shift:
“Since advertising was first allowed on the SBS in the early 1990s, there has been a steady drift away from the original multicultural mandate of the SBS.”
According to the SBS Charter, the network’s “primary function” is to “provide multilingual and multicultural radio and television services” in order to “reflect Australia’s multicultural society”. Dr Mike Walsh, a senior lecturer in Screen Studies at Flinders University, believes SBS has strayed from its original mandate.
“There was a time when SBS was really unique in the world’s TV landscape. It played a vital role in bringing a diverse range of non-English language broadcasting and films to a large number of the general Australian community,” he told Crikey.
“Recent management seems to have a policy to make it less unique, to pull it into the mainstream forms of television.” As a result, “foreign language programming has fallen into a cultural no-man’s land.”
While SBS has maintained the number of hours of foreign language content that it broadcasts over the last few years, SBS TWO now shows over nine hours of foreign language news every day. These news bulletins are broadcast without subtitles, meaning less work for the SBS subtitling unit, internationally acclaimed as one of the best in the world.
According to a source within the unit, SBS also intends to “buy much more material subtitled overseas because it’s cheaper” as well as “outsourcing subtitling to cheaper agencies”. These measures are likely to lead to a further reduction in work for Australian subtitlers and, conceivably, further job cuts.
At its peak, the SBS employed 60 staff in its subtitling unit, all for a single TV channel. Despite now broadcasting on multiple channels, SBS has already reduced its subtitling unit to 30, with the recently announced cuts taking it down to 20.
Sources tell Crikey that, while Brown claimed redundancies would be announced in the days following the initial meeting, two staff members were spoken to by subtitling manager Winnie Lai shortly after the meeting.
“An hour after the meeting they started calling people into the manager’s office — they’d already decided who was going to go,” the source told Crikey.
Crikey has also been told that a further two subtitlers have since been informed of their upcoming redundancies by Lai. All four subtitlers are the sole staff members for their respective languages, with the Swedish, Dutch, Russian and Hungarian languages reportedly affected. An email sent from Brown to subtitling staff has confirmed the initial talks:
“I authorised Winnie Lai to have conversations with single person language groups that may be affected,” the managing director wrote.
While Brown has assured staff that “these conversations are not the commencement of a redundancy process”, Crikey has been informed that the staff involved have been left in little doubt as to their futures at SBS.
Crikey believes that members of the subtitling unit will be seeking action from the Community and Public Sector Union following the cuts.
Merde! (Damn!)… Living on a place where they speak one of the few remaining “strong” Aboriginal languages (Warlpiri), this doesn’t come as a surprise to me.
The monolingual, ethnocentric, xenophobic forces of ignorance are in charge.
To me, cultural and linguistic diversity is the crowning glory of human achievement.
Die klootzakken willen dat verpesten (those silly people want to spoil it).
Before you start picking on me, my watering down of the “sub-titles” is deliberate.
I believe that we need a robust public debate but how well our public broadcasters are meeting their charter.
The only times our politicians seem interested in the public broadcasters is when they perceive political bias in the reporting.
Within the vacuum of public debate about meeting the charter, the management of both the ABC and SBS have increasingly acted as if the stations were THEIR stations.
Both the ABC and SBS have lost track of what they should be doing according to their charters, and are becoming increasingly populist.
That both the ABC and SBS watermark all their programs shows that marketing their brand is perceived as more important than quality broadcasting. SBS’s now and next graphics are designed to draw attention away from the program. Promotion over end credits is now common-place on both the ABC and SBS.
A friend even saw the ABC put up a full-screen ‘coming up next’ information screen on-top of a still running interview on ABC2.
The head of SBS has said that if the Government gave them the money to replace ad revenue for the ads in-between programs, that he would still show ads in-between programs.
So what is the real reasons that SBS want ads in-between their programs if it is not for the revenue. It is because every ad break gives them an opportunity for more branding and station promotion. SBS management want SBS to look and feel like a commercial TV station (perhaps they think this will look good on their resume).
They do not care what viewers think.
Of course programming is the main way they are both moving away from their charter.
Am I the only person who is sick and tired of most of the ABC drama budget being spend on yet another attempt to recreate the success of Sea Change?
I’m sure that if you asked SBS viewers whether they like the current SBS or would prefer a return to the good old days, the answer would be an overwhelming wish to go back to the original charter.
As an owner and viewer of the ABC and SBS there seems nothing I can do about my unhappiness with current management.
We need some sackings at both SBS and ABC, and I’m not suggesting we sack the ordinary staff. It is the top management that needs to go.
“really unique” – qualifying an absolute.
This is sad indeed. I have often seen films on SBS a 2nd time having seen them at the cinema originally, and the work the subtitlers do is simply superb (I can only vouch for the French and Japanese, although I have no doubt the quality is strong across the board). If we are now to rely on the (usually) American original subtitles, God help us all.
Another scandal with SBS is that they run World Movies.
To maximize the profit from this, SBS shows movies on pay first, and then waits about a year before showing them on FTA TV.
As an example, two non-repeat movies on SBS TV next week are from 2006 and 2007. I’m sure that when SBS was new, we did not have to wait so long to see these world movies on FTA TV.
And as someone who has viewed several hundred foreign films in the cinema, I also have high praise for the work done by the SBS subtitlers.