As Australia’s media staggers into the summer silly season, legacy media is fighting the last battles of the bruising traffic wars of the twenty-teens as it restructures programming, repositions products and reshuffles personalities.
But here’s the good news: while the media is struggling, journalists are getting better, diving in, looking for solutions as they adjust to the big challenges of what’s been tagged the global polycrisis.
It’s the coming of deep journalism.
In legacy media, meanwhile, the hammer of their intellectual and organisational investment in the priority of audience growth is banging away at what passes for news in the Australian cycle: political and celebrity gossip, leavened with polls, crime, car crashes and natural disasters. Oh and don’t forget the perennial culture wars outrage (why, just this past weekend, here’s the latest on Australia Day!).
It’s all part of the hunt for the elusive “traffic”: those unique visitor numbers that can be monetised through whatever advertising dollars Google’s monopoly on ad tech allows to slip through.
The ABC, too, has fallen for the traffic lure, with its decade-long remaking of its managerial team so that it possesses a more commercial bent. These hires are suits with a lifetime of training to see audience aggregation through a lens of light programming, inoffensive personalities and bland news judgment all marked “largely harmless”.
Too late. Looks like the always mythical mass audience is done with being pushed and pulled across increasingly marginal viral offerings dressed up as news. The media’s relentless doubling down on the trivialisation of the gossip framing no matter the subject doesn’t grow audiences. It drives them away.
It’s why the latest big headache for legacy news media isn’t (or isn’t just) misinformation. It’s news avoidance. According to the 2024 Digital News Report released by the University of Canberra, about two-thirds of Australians actively avoid news, worn out by “news fatigue”.
There’s more figures buried in News Corp’s latest financial report to its US regulator, that show what people aren’t reading: the company’s still un-paywalled tabloids. Monthly unique visitors to London’s The Sun (the paper that claimed to win elections back in the 1990s) have slumped from 140 million in 2021 to just 80 million this year.
It must get worse for News Corp’s managers when they look at what people are reading, like the record global hard-back sales of Spare, the memoir-cum-tabloid critique by the company’s continuing legal foe, Prince Harry. His book says of Rupert Murdoch: “I couldn’t think of a single human being in the 300,000-year history of the species who’d done more damage to our collective sense of reality.”
Commercial media have been working hard to pivot away from the hard grind of digital ads towards reader subscriptions. Early stay-at-home COVID saw a surge, but growth has stagnated — or fallen, as The Washington Post found in October when its subscriptions dropped 10% after it took the play-safe route of declining to endorse a presidential candidate.
The cycle of daily reporting — the one thing after another that mass media were built to serve — no longer meets the challenges of the moment that historian Adam Tooze has popularised as the “polycrisis” — the complex interaction of climate emergency, mass movements of peoples, the collapse of the neo-liberal growth model, and the war(s) on (and for) democracy.
As the cheap hits of the viral cycle fade and paywalled subscriptions stall, audiences are looking elsewhere, curating their own news feed from multiple, varied sources, fracturing the solidity of once traditional habits of news consumption. As the Digital News Report highlights, news consumers are looking for news that “helps me learn”, “keeps me engaged”. News that merely entertains? That ranks last.
Legacy media — as the ABC and the free-to-air networks alike are finding — can no longer rely on the traditional loyalty of audiences to keep coming back because there isn’t anything else on offer.
Instead, news-hungry audiences are embracing the long form to understand what’s going on — from podcasts to YouTube talks, from email Substack newsletters to literary magazines. It’s being fed by new media start-ups, particularly in populations large enough for a small audience to be big enough to get by, like the Vox/NY Mag group in the US, or “The Rest is…” podcast range in the UK, or the Digipub network in India.
It’s a trend reflected, too, in the subscription numbers. While tabloid media struggle, mastheads that offer deep analysis are thriving. In News Corp, for example, its upmarket mastheads like the London Times, the Wall Street Journal and, yes, even The Australian are building solid audiences for their journalism.
That said, Australia’s population size make it a weaker trend here. And that’s the opening for the ABC.
The public broadcaster’s strength has historically been built by aggregating often small audiences through discrete offerings (think triple j versus Classic FM). The past decade’s trend to corporate uniformity (like axing The Drum) may have meant fewer missteps that cause red faces in Senate estimates. But it’s made the corporation more bland — and effectively outsourced too many of its news choices to the judgments of News Corp editors.
Late last century, the ABC was able to rejuvenate Australian creativity and production by rethinking itself as a platform for drama by opening itself up to co-productions. By rethinking itself as a platform within the emerging ecosystem of deep journalism, the ABC can do the same today, helping Australians build the media we need, rather than a dull cultural echo of the US information flow.
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