BotW: Kim Williams picks the wrong fight; End-of-week crumbs for publishers; Goodbye WSFM, hello Gold
Welcome to Best of the Week, kicked off on the delayed VA1536 home to Tasmania after a dash into Sydney. A delay feels different when it means that the lengthy drive home through winding roads will be in the dark. Still, it beats last week’s Virgin flight where broken air conditioning left the cabin so overheated I found myself worrying the flight would be cancelled if a passenger fainted before takeoff. Bring on wonderful.
Today: Kim Williams makes an enemy, ARN Media kills an iconic brand, and new journalism grants at the end of the government’s legislative flurry.
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End of term, end of government?
It feels like the end of term. The official TV ratings year ends tonight (remember 2023 when we still used to look out for the overnight numbers? How quaint). The eighth and final radio survey of 2024 ends today too (get ready for brekky with the B team from Monday). And the last sitting day of the Parliamentary year, and possibly the Albanese government, wrapped up yesterday.
The week in Parliament was both chaotic and underwhelming as two-and-a-half years of media and communications policy dithering came down to a final five days.
Across the week the Social Media Minimum Age Bill passed all its key stages. Once legislated, it’s going to be eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant’s problem to make the back-of-an-envelope law work in the real world. Which it won’t.
The watered down amendments to the existing Privacy Law also passed yesterday. The government dialled back the scope of those back in September in a win for marketers and a loss for consumers.
Just as relevant is what didn’t make it to the legislators. On Sunday, communications minister Michelle Rowland announced that the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill would be withdrawn.
And in a victory for lobbying by the sporting codes and broadcasters, Labor’s promised changes to betting ads never got out of the Cabinet. In the space of a year-and-a-half, the government has gone from a unanimously supported parliamentary inquiry recommending a complete ban on betting ads, to a plan to stop the ads on social media but still allow them on TV, to complete inaction. If there’s now an early election, that will be that.
As Mumbrella’s Nathan Jolly observes on the topic today: “It’s the time of year where we buy now, and pay later.”
A $15m Friday night fillip
The government had a similar loss of nerve when it came to the News Media Bargaining Code. Nine months after Meta said it would withdraw from funding news, treasury minister Stephen Jones (who was hand balled the decision after Treasurer Jim Chalmers claimed a conflict of interest that got him out of this radioactive process) is yet to decide whether to designate the company under the code.
With Donald Trump returning to office in the US, talk of a levy on the (mostly US-based) digital platforms has evaporated. The appetite for starting an economically damaging trade war with Trump is low.
Instead, in the 4.08pm, last-day-of-Parliament, taking-the-trash-out slot came an announcement yesterday afternoon. The government will attempt to fill Meta’s $70m-a-year funding hole with the one-off $15m News Media Relief Program.
Publishers of “core news” will be able to apply for grants of $13,000 per journalist. The grant covers creators of digital public interest journalism focused on regions, suburbs or diverse audiences.
As the government puts it: “This is a demand driven grant opportunity, so grants will be made to eligible applicants on a first-come, first-served basis until funding is exhausted.”
That amounts to 1,154 journalists. Independent publishers had better cancel their weekend plans and start working on their applications today. Once the big publishers get their applications in, that will be the full allocation gone instantly.
The program is a sticking plaster, not a policy.
The business model of media is creaking across the world. That two hour drive home in the dark last night was good podcast listening time. But jeez, it was depressing catching up on how tough things are everywhere.
From New Zealand, I listened to the emergency edition of The Fold, in which the owners of independent online publisher The Spinoff disclosed that their operation is in desperate trouble after missing out on two rounds of government funding during the country’s worst advertising recession in decades.
Then I listed to The Media Club from the UK, where the panel declared the golden age of TV over, with funding for producers having collapsed.
Maybe the continuing downwards spiral for journalism and media is inevitable. It could be the case that it’s impossible for government policy interventions to change the outcomes. But at the moment, we don’t know whether that’s the case, because there has been no significant intervention.
Labor finished the week with some pre-election political wins after passing lots of bills. But when it comes to the future of the media sector, it’s yet to create meaningful policy. Politics is hard enough, but policy is harder.
Williams goes off piste
Remember that child’s party game of trying to simultaneously pat your head while rubbing your belly?
On my flight home last night, I experienced the cognitive equivalent. While rereading the text of ABC chair Kim Williams’ speech to the Australian Press Club, I attempted to listening to a podcast from Joe Rogan at the same time.
Eventually, The Joe Rogan Experience lost. His meandering conspiracy chat with venture capitalist Marc Andreessen became too tiresome. I got 15 minutes into the three hour episode.
Williams made a mistake on Wednesday. An off-the-cuff, and ill-informed, comment about Rogan created global headlines, and shifted the focus away from the content of his speech.
We’ll come onto the noise shortly, but first the signal.
Williams did what every ABC chair does: he asked for more money.
What was interesting though was how he made the case. Mark Scott, the last impressive managing director of the ABC before the disaster of Michelle Guthrie and the dud of David Anderson, spoke to me for my book Media Unmade about how he used to go about asking for more extra funds.
“My feeling in dealing with government was to not go in there crying poor – everybody cries poor. The government wants solutions to problems they have. So I would explain how the ABC could provide a solution.”
For Scott, that included getting $136m in funding for the ABC’s kids TV channels by arguing that it would help drive the switchover from analogue to digital TV to free up spectrum that ended up auctioned to the telcos for nearly $2bn.
“They had already banked the money. I argued that a powerful way to get people to move across was to have great content delivered through digital by providing an ABC children’s channel,” explained Scott.
Williams took a similar approach. He acknowledged that the ABC receives $1.1bn a year (by contrast, Nine’s annual revenues are $2.6bn; News Corp’s local revenues are approximately $1.4bn).
Then Williams flagged a specific mission: to combat misinformation and disinformation. That ties in to the government’s media agenda, such that it is. Or it did until Monday when it withdrew its Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill.
And Williams is right. Misinformation is on the rise and the platforms are propagating it. The ABC is part of the solution.
And then came the noise. The misstep was triggered by a question, ironically, from an ABC reporter. Jane Norman asked Williams about Joe Rogan who hosted Donald Trump on his show. “He’s the world’s most popular podcast host. He has three billion listeners. He’s successfully managed to capture that bro market in America, and his influence is such that in the wake of the US election the Democrats have said one of Kamala Harris’s mistakes was actually that she didn’t appear on his program.”
She added: “In Australia how would or should the ABC go about capturing that audience?”
Williams first instinct was the right one. For a moment it appeared he was going to hold back. “I’m not sure I’m the right person to respond to that question. I am not a consumer or an enthusiast about Mr Rogan and his work.” If only he had stopped there.
Instead, he made a couple of mistakes.
First he accepted the premise of the question. He repeated, a couple of times, the statement that Joe Rogan has three billion listeners. “I am not one of the three billion,” he told Norman. “And I’m unlikely to be three-billion-and-one any time soon.”
That’s obviously nonsense. Almost half of the world‘s population is not listening to The Joe Rogan Experience every week. The statistic is about as inflated as a newspaper readership number.
It’s a massively popular podcast - Rogan’s paymaster Spotify claims 14.5m listeners. But that’s not three billion. Norman’s number was about 40 times too big. Perhaps she misread The Joe Rogan Experience’s Wikipedia entry, which puts his total number of YouTube views as 5.7bn since it began.
How deeply ironic when a question from an ABC journalist leads her chair to repeat misinformation after he’s just warned of the dangers of misinformation. As Williams had observed from the podium 31 minutes earlier: “We will sometimes make mistakes. But when we do, we will acknowledge them, correct them, and redouble our efforts to avoid them in the future, as we have done in recent times. Our processes are and will remain robust and under vigilant editorial review.” It’ll be interesting to see how he does that.
But that wasn’t the main blunder.
Williams, after admitting that he hadn’t listened to Rogan, mischaracterised him.
“People like Mr Rogan prey on people’s vulnerabilities; they prey on fear; they prey on anxiety; they prey on all of the elements that contribute to uncertainty in society. And they entrepreneur fantasy outcomes and conspiracy oucomes as being a normal part of social narrative.
“I personally find it deeply repulsive. To think that some has such remarkable power in the United States is something I look at in disbelief. I’m also absolutely in dismay that this can be a source of public entertainment, when it is treating the public as plunder for purposes that are really quite malevolent.”
The manosphere has a spectrum of characters; at the maddest and most malevolent end are people like Alex Jones and Andrew Tate. That’s not the place on the chart where Rogan belongs. He is closer to the podcasting equivalent of your stoner friend who wants to talk about whether man really landed on the Moon. He’s not my cup of tea, but he’s not repulsive or malevolent.
Rogan’s response - on X of course - of “LOL WUT” was fair enough.
By allowing himself to comment on an area of which he was not an expert and had not researched, Williams placed himself and the ABC into a new front of the culture war which was soon fanned by Elon Musk, and the First Bro’s fan boys.
The signal got lost in the noise.
Declaration of interest: Next year, I’ll be co-presenting MediaLand on ABC Radio National
New Gold, goodbye WS
Yesterday ARN Media announced it was killing off a famous brand. Sydney station WSFM, which is already part of the Gold network, will be rebranded as Gold 101.7.
Instinctively, it seems a terrible idea to kill off an iconic brand which has decades of investment in building it. The orthodoxy goes against that. But the orthodoxy also says that the best number of brands is one.
And the radio industry has a unique problem. For the most part, stations sprang up before networks were a thing. That’s why the likes of The Fox in Melbourne and 2Day FM in Sydney sit awkwardly under the Hit Network label. So much value is imbued in those brands that it would be hard to move away. Nova was fortunate to have launched later, as the era of networking was beginning.
ARN Media’s strategy is a network one. Some day soon (although not as soon as ARN had originally thought) Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson will present a national show on Kiis. Christian O’Connell will do the same on Gold.
The WSFM rebrand had to happen. But it’s still a sad moment for a great station
Unmade Index totally becalmed for the first time
For the first time since the Unmade Index began in 2022, it started and ended the day on the same number yesterday. The index closed on 446.4 points.
(For fans of additional decimal places we should share there was a slight movement. The index fell from 446.38 points to 446.36 points. Technically, that’s a drop of 0.00448%.)
Positive movers within the index included Pureprofile which leapt by 21.2% and Ooh Media which was up by 2%.
The biggest negative movement came from Seven West Media which lost 3.2% and Motio which dropped 7.1%
COTW: Kitchen Warehouse escapes the poster
In each edition of BotW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their Campaign of the Week
LBB’s APAC reporter Casey Martin writes:
Special Group found a clever use of the out of home format with a series of format-busting executions for Kitchen Warehouse’s Black Friday sale
Each execution is skillfully crafted, from metal bent by heavy cast iron pots and pans, to a shredded poster emulating freshly-made pasta. Blended words, knife-cut paper, and fast-paced motion caught in a still moment creates dynamism and silliness, while the message remains clear.
In case you missed it:
On Monday we reacted to the shocking news of the death of marketer Lisa Ronson:
On Tuesday we analysed the fast-developing FAST TV sector:
On Wednesday we questioned the assumption that radio audiences are ageing:
On Thursday we shared our feisty Sydney Compass panel:
And on Friday, we broke the news of James Manning’s abrupt exit from Mediaweek:
Time to leave you to your Saturday. Cat McGinn, Abe Udy and I will be back on Monday with Start the Week
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
A 70 something year old scholar telling off 20 something year old blokes for listening to Rogan suggests KW hasn’t read the less well educated room, or learned from the Democrats’ fate with half a population.
He really did need to stick to his script, which was excellent, and (further irony) the most next-gen-audience-appealing tactic for the ABC.