Nothing drives site traffic like gossip, as the figures attest for my blog yesterday — when I posted the deliciously painful correspondence between Eric Ellis and The Monthly.
Meanwhile, I’ve been waiting for a quiet day on the media patch to give a more serious matter a going over. Thanks to Malcolm Turnbull hogging the headlines, the quiet day has arrived.
And I would point out that I can tackle this topic, at length, only because I am serving a niche audience of media workers and those interested in media workers. My costs are low. If this post attracts only 100 readers, nothing much has been lost.
The measure of my success is about intensity of engagement with my audience, rather than only the size of the audience. This is one tiny example of niche media, and how it works. And niche media is one of the ways of the future.
Having pointed that out, I’d like to turn to the perpetual debate, stoked most recently by Foxtel boss Kim Williams, about the place and future of taxpayer-funded “broadcasters” in an age of media plenty. In his speech last week, Williams suggested that the ABC should be funded only to do those things that the market cannot do — and that government funding for Australian content should be made available on a contestable basis, rather than simply given to the ABC and SBS.
Williams’ model would see the ABC reduced, I think, to little more than Radio National and perhaps Four Corners. It would be a much tinier institution, and we all know that tiny institutions are easy to wipe out.
All this, as I suggested in this post at the time, is part of a broader battle between media that asks users to pay at the point of use, (and can therefore afford to provide high-quality content to comparatively small audiences) and free-to-air media, advertising funded and taxpayer funded. Given that the advertising-funded free-to-air mass model is basically broken by audience fragmentation, the main free-to-air warrior is taxpayer-funded “broadcasters”.
I’ve put the word “broadcaster” in inverted commas for obvious reasons. The ABC and SBS are much more than broadcasters these days. They are multimedia organisations. While ABC managing director Mark Scott has ruled out ever publishing a dead-tree newspaper, the ABC is now turning its attention to the one aspect of multimedia that, to date, it has not done well — text. This is the thinking, I am told, behind the new op-ed venture to be edited by departing Crikey editor Jonathan Green. The ABC is taking it up to the newspapers.
Should Auntie be allowed to do it? Why should the ABC be able to compete against already stressed businesses? It has to be acknowledged that Williams’ arguments are powerful, and I agree that the case for taxpayer-funded media needs constant examination and reassessment. But I also think that the justification for the ABC’s draw on the taxpayer purse is stronger than it has been at any time since it was founded in the 1930s.
I would put the argument for the defence under three headings: equity, innovation and addressing areas of market failure.
Equity
Quality media that is free at the point of use is important for information equity, and information equity is important for tolerable and democratic societies. The commercial free-to-the-user business model is broken, as Rupert Murdoch knows (hence, the paywall debate) and as our debt-ridden commercial television stations know only too well. If quality content is only available to those who can afford to pay, then we create an information under-class. Taxpayer-funded media is a safeguard against that dangerous scenario.
Innovation
At a time of enormous change, public broadcasters can afford to experiment at a depth and with a daring impossible for media companies bound to decaying business models and the bottom line. Public broadcasters can embrace audience fragmentation, without having to worry about the impact on advertising dollars. It can explore new ways of serving many different, small but intensely engaged audiences. Innovation is key to the justification for the ABC’s existence. If the ABC did not innovate, it would be harder to argue for its claim on the taxpayer purse. But experimentation implies that it must be allowed to sometimes fail.
Addressing market failure
Returning to those decaying business models, over the next few years we are likely to see increasing areas of market failure in fields including Australian content, investigative journalism and rural and regional reportage. Having public “broadcasters” is an insurance policy against the impact of these failures on our democracy. A public asset such as the ABC means our media and civic future looks brighter than that of the US and much of Europe.
Lest anyone think I am a slavish defender of publicly funded media, I’ll make the point that this set of justifications won’t last forever. Cast forward 20 years, when new business models have emerged, when innovations have been adopted and settled in, then it is easy to see that the justifications for taxpayer-funded media might be different, or even absent. The ABC is currently having a renaissance and a golden age. It won’t last, at least not in this way.
In fact, it might be the last golden age before something else — something less of an institution and more of a process — takes its place. What the ABC might be doing right now, in its experimentation, its opening up to the audience, is ushering in its own replacement, in which content makers will be in a direct relationship with the audience.
The immediate spur for these reflections is this speech by the BBC director general, Mark Thompson. We know that Mark Scott has read it and liked it, because he recommended it to his followers on Twitter. The speech is a vigorous defence of public “broadcasting” using the concept of public space.
Read the rest at The Content Makers.
Fear not, the ABC will never make much headway in the space of opinion columns, such as yours.
Think of ABC News the same way you think of other protected, national interest industries, like agriculture.
Frank Campbell
Posted November 27, 2009 at 8:34 am | Permalink
There’s a teensy problem with the tempting “third space: public space” argument. Corporatism. In the last 25 years, we’ve seen those paragons of 20thC independence, the great cultural institutions, converted into “corporations”. Most are revealingly referred to as “industries”. The former universities are now real estate developers, vocational trainers and marketers of mass (crap) “education” to ghettoised foreigners. Education is now a “product”. Packaged and branded. Language is Watsonised. Academics are gagged, measured, weighed and cowed by short-term contracts. The same toxic process is evident in every one of Thompson’s vaunted “public spaces”, from national parks to museums and schools. Resistance continues of course. Enemies of the corporate state wage guerrilla war in every institution.
The “third space” has been colonised by corporate capitalism. This is exacerbated by the influence of the newly corporatised state in every “public” space. True, the old paternalistic state set up most “public” institutions, but in its new corporate form it delivers these to capitalism. The ALP itself is a classic example of a corporatised body, perfecting bureaucratic absolutism, spin etc. Members are now superfluous. A vulgar and early example of corporate penetration of public institutions was the insertion of a Macdonald’s fast fat “outlet” in Melbourne’s Childrens Hospital 20 years ago.
So when Thompson says ‘public space’ “…exists not to make money but to serve the public and it is accountable to them, not just as customers in James Murdoch’s formulation, but as citizens”, he’s being disingenuous. The “market” (euphemism for capitalism) has compromised the state and both have compromised public space.
Both “market” and state are being outflanked by info technology. The enemies of the corporate state may yet triumph. Democracy is as relentless as water. It will seep through. The ABC is best placed to extract itself from corporatism. If it fails, corporatism survives and we’ll have to go it alone.