How Q&A personified a brave and experimental ABC
Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade.
Today: How Q&A rode the Twitter wave , and Vinyl Group shares fall after it returns from its ASX suspension
To get maximum value from a paid membership of Unmade, sign up today.
Your annual membership gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy; and to Unmade’s Compass end-of-year roadshow.
You also get access to our paywalled archive.
Upgrade today.
How the Twitter wave broke for Q&A
Another day, another obituary for a respected TV show.
On Sunday we learned that The Back Page, which has been on Fox Sports for 29 years, is coming to an end.
On Monday it was the turn of Network Ten’s The Project, ending after 16 years.
And last night came news that Q&A is to be canned by the ABC after 17 years.
The (TV) times, they are a-changin’.
The axing of Q&A is the most visible move to date by the ABC’s new managing director Hugh Marks. By my maths, he hits the 100-day mark next week. It was among several at the ABC expected to be announced as soon as today.
I can’t, by the way, quite bring myself to call the show Q+A. Ditching the ampersand in a 2020 rebrand did not turn around the audience decline.
At its height, Q&A was a great show. Considering the format was not a particularly innovative one - from the beginning it resembled the BBC’s Question Time, on air since 1979 - Q&A’s first few years were notable for their innovation in production, particularly around social media.
Back when Twitter was a net positive, rather than the malignant force that its evil twin X has become, on-screen tweets were a key component of Q&A.
It’s not much more than a decade since the ABC was celebrated as an innovator in the technology space, early into the market with streaming, podcasting and social media. That’s not something that could be said now.
In 2011 producer Amanda Collinge spoke at Mumbrella360 about the phenomenon the show had become. Live moderation of the 18,000 tweets per hour around the #Q&A hashtag was no mean feat. The late Leslie Nassar deserves to be remembered for his contribution to the developing technology.
The simple format - five guests, usually including a representative from the government, and a presenter to moderate questions from a live audience - was robust, particularly in big news weeks. Sometimes Q&A made news - including the shoes thrown at former PM John Howard and the monstering of Duncan Storrar after he had the temerity to raise a question about life close to the breadline.
Some politicians played it artfully. Malcolm Turnbull in his bomber jacket was a frequent flyer.
Much, but not all, of the show’s audience decline can be put down to changing audience behaviour. Streaming is the greatest competitor. But the audience has also declined compared to Q&A’s commercial TV competitors.
At some point, the innovation stopped. What the missing innovation was, it’s hard to say. You don’t know what you’re not getting.
The decline of the show personifies the changed culture at the top of the organisation. From the bravery of the Mark Scott era came the incompetence of Michelle Guthrie and the timidity of David Anderson. Hard for any controversial live show to innovate in that environment.
Before Marks started, Q&A’s fate was already pretty much decided. One of the last remaining assets of network TV is habit. Audiences got used to tuning in to see Tony Jones weekly, on a Monday night. Then it became Hamish Macdonald. Or Stan Grant. Or Patricia Karvelas. Or David Speers. Or Virginia Trioli. On a Thursday. Then back to a Monday, But only in six week blocks.
That Monday habit of the 7pm news bulletin building into the sharp snark of Laura Tingle on 7.30, then into Australian Story (I worry the structure changes to insert Leigh Sales has broken that format too); the agenda-setting Four Corners, then a late night finish with Q&A was a scheduling jewel. There was a time when a politically-interested TV viewer would have worried about missing it.
Marks really had just two choices: Either the expensive option of reinstating Q&A to a year-round weekly slot in the hope of rebuilding audience habit, or killing it. In the circumstances, he made the right call.
*Declaration of interest: I co-present the weekly show MediaLand on ABC Radio National.
Vinyl Group falls on return to ASX trading
Vinyl Group saw the Unmade Index’s biggest fall of the day after returning to the ASX following an eight-day suspension over issues with its disclosures admin.
Vinyl Group - which operates music platforms and entertainment publications, lost 7.7% to land on a market capitalisation of $151m.
The biggest gain on the Unmade Index yesterday came from ARN Media, which was up by 1% to a $161m market cap. Rival audio company Southern Cross Austereo fell 2.3% to land on $150m.
The Unmade Index fell slightly, closing on 558 points, a drop of 0.37%
More from Mumbrella…
Time to leave you to your day.
We’ll be back with an audio-led edition tomorrow
Have a great day
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
