Red Alert

Posts Tagged ‘ABC’

Nats axe TVNZ7. Meanwhile in Australia…

Posted by Clare Curran on May 12th, 2012

$158.1 million extra has been announced this week for the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) will receive new funding to ensure that an estimated 10 million Australians in regional, rural and remote areas have access to improved ABC radio service.

The Aussie Govt contributes around $912 million a year to the ABC and around $200 million to SBS.

The Australians continue to invest in public broadcasting. Meanwhile, New Zealand’s only public broadcasting television channel TVNZ7 which costs $16 million a year to run will be axed on 30 June because this government doesn’t support it. Doesn’t put a value on it.

Go figure!

Support the campaign to Save TVNZ7 here and here

Read about the Australian boost to public broadcasting funding.

The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, has announced a range of measures to support Australia’s public broadcasters. The Government will provide an additional $158.1 million over five years to the Special Broadcasting Service Corporation (SBS) in part to launch a new indigenous free-to-air television channel.

“In an increasingly multicultural society, the Australian Government recognises SBS as one of Australia’s most important institutions,” Senator Conroy said. “This represents the most significant funding boost SBS has ever had, and will ensure SBS can continue to provide a unique broadcasting service that includes comprehensive television, radio and online services.

“Like other broadcasters, SBS operates in a rapidly changing broadcasting landscape, which is being affected by the introduction of digital multi-channels, new digital platforms, and changing audience expectations. This additional funding will allow SBS to address its immediate financial pressures, adapt to the changing media environment and build or upgrade its technology capabilities.”


Whimless

Posted by Clare Curran on May 12th, 2011

 

Doesn’t matter what side of politics you’re on, we should all be able to cope having the piss taken. Unfortunately we don’t seem to do it much anymore on TV. What’s happened to all our great comedians? And all our great shows? They’ve gone or given up I reckon.

John Clarke please come home


The news is crap #2

Posted by Clare Curran on September 3rd, 2010

I want to believe in our media. I believe the craft of journalism to be an extraordinarily important thing.

It is a critical part of our democracy. And it distresses me that I am so critical and that it has so deteriorated.

I believe that most journalists believe in their craft. And many are good. The institutions they work for have morphed and twisted so much to adapt to a changing world without being able to catch up, that the quest for market share has become so much more important than reflecting back and challenging our society, our culture and the issues that beset it.

So I am heartened tonight to discover this piece, a speech written by Mark Scott, the managing director of Australia’s ABC TV and radio. He is reflecting on the Australian election and the role played by media. By social media. How it could change. For the better.

It gives me hope.

Though we have to focus on our media.

Here’s an excerpt. I urge you to read the piece

The ABC hosted Jay Rosen for a day while he was recently in Australia. He is always good value on the role of social media and the nature of politicaljournalism – in some ways quite a contrarian – and full of encouragement about things we could do better.

He had two suggestions for the ABC, which we are exploring and will likely pursue.

The first is to provide more background, detail and context for members of our audience who are coming fresh to complex stories: like an ETS, or the NBN, or the operations of a hung parliament. The ABC has a role as a patient explainer of these complexities, to help people catch up with the conversation, understand what is being said and to make a contribution if they wish. It plays nicely to our Charter role to provide an educational service to the community. It makes policy more accessible and can bring important issues into the mainstream.

And Rosen said we should plan more thoroughly and consult more widely around what national issues are at play in an election campaign. Long before the campaign starts, talk with the community, engage with experts, undertake polling, think about national challenges: the immediate and the far-reaching.

Charter? What’s that? Planning? Backgrounding, education? Explaining complex issues? making policy accessible? Conversation? Golly. Doesn’t really feel like our media.

Hat tip @abcmarkscott (twitter)


Agile and quality media. How do we get it?

Posted by Clare Curran on June 30th, 2010

Last week’s events in Canberra changing the leadership of the Australian Labor Party were huge from a media perspective. Janet Albrechtsen writes in The Australian how Sky TV News covered the story like no other broadcaster, with agility and flexibility. Unlike the lumbering ABC, the public broadcaster.

Read this excerpt and reflect:

After Wednesday, is the ABC asking itself whether it has the energy and team spirit that kicks in so readily at its poor cable cousin at Sky? Does it understand the urgency of 24-hour news, where mistakes will be made and quickly corrected? Or will the monolithic ABC, even with a 24-hour news channel, fall victim to its culture of bureaucratic paralysis and infighting between fiefdoms?

Last weekend on SBS, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy was asked what he did on Wednesday night. He recalled “getting all these phone calls from journalists asking ‘What’s happening? What are you doing?’.” He replied: “Well, I’m sitting in my office all alone watching Sky News like you are.” What a disgrace that the federal minister who funds the ABC could not get the story from our national broadcaster.

It might surprise you to know that I agree with her. Though I’d add that much of the breaking news came via Twitter, which is leading the way for how breaking news events are starting to be delivered in real time.

I, like many of my colleagues, watched Australian Sky TV via the Sky news service in Parliament.

We don’t have an equivalent Sky TV News service in NZ. We don’t have an equivalent news service, really. I’d like to see a modern, adaptive, flexible news service. I’d also like it to be a public news service, or at least partly. But we’ve got some real thinking to do about how to make that happen.

But read the piece and tell me what you think.


A thousand journos

Posted by Brendon Burns on April 28th, 2010

As the knife is sharpened for second round cuts to TVNZ, including $5m off the news budget, the ABC’s managing director Mark Scott has given a speech how his organisation maintains a news operation of 1000 journalists, why that is important and why it continues to be funded.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/04/20/2877979.htm?site=thedrum

Here’s a snapshot…In an Australian context, the demise of most of the long-time media barons and family ownership structures around media organisations has inevitably led commercial broadcasters to first reduce the priority given to, and then reduce investment in, serious news and current affairs.

The evidence is strongest in radio and in regional areas, but also in the major television networks.

If the product doesn’t deliver profits, commercial investors must first slash costs, then investment, then simply walk away. They carry no overarching commitment to journalism as a public good, as something inherently necessary in a society with responsible government and accountable public and private institutions. Their brief is to maximise the return to shareholders. That is their responsibility and our systems of corporate governance and accountability would not have it any other way.

But now, after years of commercial market cuts to investment in news and current affairs, we’re in a good position to appreciate the wisdom of a continuing public investment in the ABC’s news service.

Meanwhile, the TVNZ ‘Charter Gutting” Bill was due to complete its first reading today but the tobacco excise hike has delayed that.

 


Sigh… if only we could

Posted by Clare Curran on January 21st, 2010

Here’s something we could truly aspire to. Just announced:

The ABC will launch Australia’s first free-to-air 24-hour television news channel in 2010.

The ABC’s Managing Director, Mark Scott, said the ABC’s commitment to quality news and current affairs would enter a new era with the creation of the new digital channel.

The channel will provide live continuous news coverage of major breaking stories from Australia and around the world. Broadcasting around the clock will enable the ABC to increase its in-depth coverage of local, national and international affairs through background features and analysis, combined with the ABC’s unrivalled long-form current affairs reporting.

We do have our own version, TVNZ 7, but it needs a boost and to be taken really seriously rather than be an add on.

TVNZ 7 is a commercial-free New Zealand 24-hour news and information channel on Freeview digital television platform and on SKY Television Digital from 1 July 2009.

Just imagine if we could consistently produce news around New Zealand drawn from New Zealand and overseas across a digital platform that encompassed radio, television and online mediums that was driven by news values and not ratings.

That’s the New Zealand I want to live in.

My colleague Brendon Burns is doing some work in this area and will have mroe to say on this subject.

Hat tip: Mark Scott, ABC Managing Director on Twitter (abcmarkscott)


Counting connections

Posted by Clare Curran on November 6th, 2009

This seriously hurts my head, so I felt I had to share it. How fast is social media growing? Watch it live!

Hat tip: Mark Scott ABC (Australia) Managing Director. Twitter him at abcmarkscott