Critics and supporters alike of departing ABC news director Gaven Morris would say he brought the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” mantra to the public broadcaster’s news division.
While he’s been director, the ABC has come to dominate news, building large online audiences among so-called digital natives coming through Facebook, Google and Apple News who, he’s said, “never use the ABC for anything else”.
But it’s had to get there while sustaining the support of its loyal but aging audience for its linear broadcasters, many made unhappy by change.
Morris has had 11 years in his latest stint at the ABC of attempting to square that particular circle. In 2010, he came back from Al Jazeera to launch the 24-hour television news channel, which drove cultural, personnel (and industrial) change in the newsroom.
In 2015, he was appointed as director news, analysis and investigations, despite internal grumbling that the job should have gone to someone considered more a “journalist’s journalist”. As a compromise, Craig McMurtrie was appointed deputy director and executive editor.
The ABC’s dominance is partly due to its own initiatives and partly due to the financial decline of commercial news media. While commercial mass media look at the internet and related social media platforms and see threats, the publicly-funded ABC need see only opportunities.
News Corp and Nine need to make money off the platforms by pulling users into their core site where they can be sold subscriptions. As a free service, the ABC can use the platforms to push news content out to new audiences.
News Corp hasn’t been happy and has been eager to let people know. The Australian made Morris’ departure all about them: “Rolling, internal battles with senior journalists, who at times acted like a law unto themselves, placed a huge strain on the 49-year-old, who was also under immense pressure from the ABC hierarchy to rein in the seemingly unregulated use of social media by some of the public broadcaster’s highest-profile reporters.”
In an interview with ABC Melbourne’s Rafael Epstein yesterday, Morris took the high moral (and ratings) ground: “One of the things that I encourage our people to do constantly is not to look at small/medium mouthpieces that have an agenda and look at the impact that we have with our audiences.” Ouch!
The focus on platforms and programs opening and closing misses the big change under Morris: stories are now shaped from the beginning with an understanding of how different audiences will come to it. It’s the practical application of what former ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie called the “equal digital life”.
In a 2019 interview, Morris said: “When Four Corners does a good story, then it should have a life for all platforms. We should be able to take that story and make it just as compelling on a different platform for under 40s.
“We didn’t need to change our editorial values for younger audiences, we just needed to find where younger audiences wanted to consume it — this is the big lesson of the digital age.”
Supporters point to the success of the fast-moving innovation online which saw the ABC break through to be the leading source of digital news since the summer of bushfires in late 2019 or the 24-hour news service with a younger, more diverse journalistic cadre, which became must-watch television in lockdown for the rolling COVID press conferences. (ABC managing director David Anderson pointed to these wins in announcing Morris’ departure yesterday).
Critics point to the breaks: the closure of what once were destination programming like the 7.45am radio news bulletin, the purge of long-serving senior journalists in the 2020 round of job cuts (some allegedly under political pressure) or the struggling Thursday night reboot of Q+A.
And there’s areas where the jury is still out, like the recent “true crime” investigations look into the 1970s with the Luna Park fire or the Juanita Nielsen disappearance.
Whoever replaces him (the internal tips are McMurtrie or investigations head John Lyons), there’ll be more change to come. Morris says: “When you move from a clock-driven organisation to one that’s on-demand, it changes fundamentally how you put a newsroom together. A lot of broadcasters haven’t grasped that yet.”
ABC vs Sky. No contest. Independent real news vs vapid murdoch propoganda.
You win some, you lose some. It looks like Morris has really cracked on with the omelette, but maybe dropped some bits of shell in there along the way.
The fact that News Corp has been so spectacularly rattled by the ABC lately (more so than usual), it shows he’s largely done a good job.
A+ for taking the ABC to number 1 in news online. The ABC is big but with TV, entertainment and more than 50 regional, local, metro and music radio stations, a huge number of people don’t actually work in news.
D- for not dealing well with the high profile reporters engaging in running Twitter battles with the government. There used to be a time when ABC reporters were measured in what they would say. In fact, they still are on the radio. But these days, they fire it out on Twitter whenever they feel like. There’s no delay for defamation on Twitter, and nobody to sub your tweets.
And it’s cost them a small fortune already.
Morris’s last and maybe biggest plus was the diversification push of say the last 8-12 months or so. It’s been really noticeable and an unambiguous good thing. Yes, yes, I know to some this might have ‘token wokes’ plastered all over it in rainbow paints but actually Screen Presence at the ABC is one place where some determinedly bolted-on touchy-feezzz will do a huge amount of long term good. There are oodles of visibly different ABC faces and bods (and regional provenances, and specialities, and background interests etc) now appearing in reporter and other on-screen roles. This is the ABC absolutely doing its Charter job of reflecting ourselves properly back as us, ‘normalising’ the non-(ABC)-normal. They really should try to get some young explicitly conservative talent into the day-to-day ‘jobbing screen gig’ mix, too, even if they have to go knocking on IPA or churchy or similar gasp! sources. Nothing beats a fresh-faced cadet reporter in a three piece suit and monocle, or twinset n’ pearls and BBC tones, for slyly subverting our subconscious preconceptions…
But that’ll likely come with the new expanded cultural territory, anyway. Most cultural groupings are actually quite a bit more socially conservative than the whitey/Anglo stock that has typically fed into an ABC career. Regardless, over time these atypical cultural and ethnic and regional cohorts will – I think, anyway – simply beget a wider range of news n’ views ‘organically’. So I hope they stick with the radically non-orthodox ‘template’, it’ll really change our perceptions of what it is to be Australian. Plenty of the newbies are still a bit clunky and raw on-screen/air, stylistically, linguistically, vocationally, craft and tech wise, etc. But broadcasting is tricky to get a handle on, and you have to be granted patience/time and breathing space to learn, get comfy, get your style and personality sorted, grow into the presenter you’re suited to be.
And on this point…to Morris’s second big plus, IMO:
Bluntly, the Baby Boomer generation of ABC newbies were gifted an incredibly privileged journalistic academy and learning curve thanks to the generous ABC Elders of their day. And yet as the current privileged ABC Elders, those who’ve endured (at least in the Metro hierarchies) have largely repaid the public broadcaster (and its taxpayer investors) by…becoming a feather-bedding gaggle of selfish career-&-ideological narcissists. There is so much taxpayer Vanity f**king Publishing being handed out to aging ‘legends’ of Australian public journalism. Who gives a sh*t what Kerry O’Brien thinks, he’s retired. Who gives a sh*t what Barrie Cassidy learned about ‘Leadership’ at taxpayer expense? Who cares what Mr and Mrs Sarah Ferguson make of contemporary US politics, and who gives a f**k if Sally Neighbour has a bug up her bum about god. Etc etc etc….whatever your views of the politics of the ABC and these and other senior ‘marquee’ by-lines, one thing they have all failed dismally to do is actually train/prepare/bestow opportunity on the next generation of ABC journalists. It’s this Boomer era vocational narcissism – me, me, me, the ABC is my by-line, my career, my opinions, me, me, ME – that is truly unforgivable.
And most of the recent problems stem from this individual solipsism. The editorial culture’s systemic problem is less about ‘lefty staff capture’ or ‘ideological bias’, and much more to do with a far more banal hijack: ie by a small scrabbling rabble of Colossal Byline W*nkers & Princesses. The worst ABC failures have all been failures of anti-leadership by lousy example, with key senior journalistic/editorial staff egos too massive and fragile to own and set right really bad journalistic mistakes. Reckless accusations – undergraduate/Uni rag-level gossip – lobbed about, despite being unsubstantiated, and in fact unsubstantiable, which means unanswerable, which means…if run = a gratuitous (true or not) abuse of ABC journalism’s raw power. (If a young ABC journo needs to learn one thing, fast and early…it’s about disciplined restraint of their own raw power.) Other ego-stemming issues? No-one senior and brave enough to provide firm editorial pushback/oversight to senior peers. An arrogant refusal to respond to well-grounded complaints with anything but a f**k-you schoolyard fart. A kooky – almost creepy – lack of ‘news triage’ perspective…to the point of rolling hyper-obsession over two or three always-iffy yarns, sounding like that batty old hippy Aunt who keeps going on and on about the time she gave Mick Jagger a blow-job in a Carnaby Street change cubicle, and he never called her back.
All this institutionally-decadent stuff has come on the watch of (and often come from) old, white, Boomer time-servers, who’ve drifted up the ranks into nominal ‘senior’ positions almost by accident. And yet who instead of acting like editorial adults now that they are there – learning to say ‘No’ to pushy star journos, for example – are again circling the usual self-serving, f**k-the-LNP/management/Board wagons in ‘it’s all about me‘ mode. So IMO – if it’s accurate – Morris’s purges (or attempts) of some of that era of microphone/telly Boomer dreck, who in any case’d had few original thoughts since Nov 75 nor filed many original yarns, might serve as his second great legacy.
Had he also prised that huffing old blowhard out of his Grand Canyonesque ar*e-groove on the LNL chair on his way out, I’d have called it a B+. As it is, a solid B, with a nod to his occasional Senate Estimates night-watching and his better Rupert barbs espesh.
Great spray – as usual.
Any chance of a shorter version, in English?
Selk, you know me by now..
I know I should try harder to be less of a mouthy boot, but I’m quiet serious when I say I don’t get paid enough/have enough time to write short & succinct pearls here at Crikes.
Anyway if you can’t play with new styles/forms in an obscure online comments thread…’whither the novel?’, as the posh dinner party peeps say….
PS…thanks as ever to crikey, btw, I am invariably grateful when my hairier rambles sneak in…
The reading/comprehension age of the general population is 14-15yrs, tops.
If we assume Crikey’s self selected, self centred, self satisfied, self gratifying $ub$criber$ to (believe themselves to) be somewhat more comfortable with those squiggly lines forming letter thingies into words, it’s still a big ask.
Beyond the majority, if May 2019 is any measurement.
Ah, Selks, you know very well that everyone here at Criks writes strictly for an audience of…one. In my case, at least, that audience is impeccably discerning. I of course presume yours is too.
It’s one thing to target and recruit a more diverse staff, it’s quite another to grow a more diverse audience.
The weird truth is there are still a lot of white, middle class conservatives who tune into the ABC rather religiously.
Having your diverse staff present the same, or similar, stuff to the same white middle class audiences is simply not going to get the ABC’s broadcast audiences up.
Once they have the staff, how are they going to speak to the audiences they’re effectively recruiting from?
The ABC is for all Australians so it’s great to see diversity, but aside from fair representation – a noble goal in and of itself – what is the actual purpose if not to tell the stories of different communities and from different perspectives?
Fair question.
The true cultural power of television is that it penetrates miles beyond our conscious intellect. I’ve long maintained that TV is a genuinely subversive – usually malevolent – psychological disruptive. The world that’s presented via our TV screens is so compellingly ersatz, so almost-true and beguilingly attractive, as to be. a kind of hallucinogen. Issues are black and white, and succinctly and easily resolvable. Energy is infinite, as is activity, fun, emotional sweep, human eloquence. There are no smells, no pain, no money worries, no tiredness. Everyone is attractive and thin and, by definition, included. If you’re on TV, then…you exist in TV Land.
For most the ABC’s existence…almost everyone working on screen has been white. I don’t know how that has affected our collective self-perceptions but I know it can’t be positively. It’s enough for me to do the simple thought experiment: what would I and Australia be like if, growing up with only Indigenous faces on our public broadcaster?
When you appear on TV, your cultural power is in so much more than simply the content you deliver. It’s your…being.
You…are a (TV) Man. And vice versa.
That’s a great question regarding what it would have been like if there were only Indigenous faces on the ABC growing up.
Whitewashing TV has a massive cultural impact.
And anyone who has a child who likes watching TV would note that your comments on its subversive, psychologically disruptive nature would have to agree with that too.
Mainstream TV itself is losing its power with its audience numbers. Yet we “consume” more video content than ever. The ability for minority groups to self-broadcast is subverting traditional media and forcing them to change too.
McLuhan was on to something but derailed by his religiosity.
He should be read as a primer but Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death‘ should be nailed onto the crystal doors of meeja’s Wittenberg cathedral.
definitely…Huxley’s dystopia always more seductively destructive than Orwell’s.
The thing that you f’d up the most Gav, was the demise of the 7:45am news. That’s when I left the ABC until 11am.
You couldn’t be more wrong. The bulletin was absurd and had to go.
Let’s say you tuned into your local ABC at 0730 for the drive to work under the old system, to find out what’s happening in your city or town, maybe enjoy a song or two and a bit of chat on the way to work about the issues of the day…
First thing, under the old system you’d hear was 5 minutes of local news. Then 10 minutes of your local program Then 15 minutes of news at 0745. Then 30 minutes of News/CAFF with AM. Then, what used to be the 0830 local news bulletin (was cut down in most markets to headlines).
So you’d tune in to local radio for 65 minutes and 55 minutes of that would News and Current Affairs. Largely different versions of the same stories repeated in each bulletin with a few interesting things in AM.
They have a separate station for that if all you want is news.
Losing the 0745 gives us more local programming. It’s way better – there’s still a full 10 minutes of news from 0700 to 0710, AM is still there and so are the 0630 and 0730 local bulletins.
The ‘24-hour television news channel’ is another metaphor for what is wrong at the ABC and media in Australia.
Not sure why 24 hours news channel needs its own special news bulletin package, like ABC Online News Just In, that highlights car crashes, murders, violence, wildlife, disasters and most of all people vomiting emotions for audiences, while avoiding more serious topics and issues.
Why not simply use existing content from state bulletins, including politics, versus fresh content deflecting from key issues of the day e.g. global warming?
Seems more about allowing safe infotainment that follows others, does not challenge the LNP, and to take priority over informing society and electorates.