Media

Are television stations becoming irrelevant? When we thought of television just a few years ago, it was often in terms of the most successful network. For example, in the US it was NBC's Thursday-night lineup of great comedies; here in Australia Channel 9 was a powerhouse across the board. There was an audience out there that almost never changed channels. Now, the focus is very much on individual shows. MasterChef is the perfect example: with it, Channel Ten earned supreme ratings glory, without it, Ten was relegated to fourth place on some nights. The fact is that, despite the stations' sneaky attempts to keep us glued (usually by running popular shows beyond their scheduled finish time), we are more willing than ever to switch stations to follow the programs we like. We'll also record, time-shift and download the shows we want to see and often, horror upon horror, fast-forward through the ads). That's why the longterm future for successful TV networks won't be as simple broadcasters, but as producers and distributors of the content people want to see. In the short term, though, they are creating digital channels in the hope that their mix of reruns and cult-appeal first-run shows will attract the audience members who aren't tuning in to the main stations. Eventually, though, we'll all be able to download legally whatever we want whenever we want. The channels' biggest hope then will be to create more and more "event" television, like MasterChef, that relies on us all watching it at once, tweeting about it as we go, and chatting about it over the watercooler the next day.

In journalism, it's variously called a "write-off" (or "woff"), a "blurb", a "gofirst" or a "standfirst" - a short, snappy line that summarises or teases a story and, hopefully, encourages people to keep reading. Some sub-editors are very good at writing them, to the point where the standfirsts oversell the story and reading on only sets up the reader for disappointment. Some blurbs, rather like the one I've cut from brisbanetimes.com.au and pasted here, miss the point. Surely the big news about Matthew Newton is not how he worked so hard for months and will now miss the chance to host The X-Factor, it's the fact that he had a spectacular metldown (not his first) and allegedly beat up his (now ex) girlfriend Rachel Taylor, who has taken out an AVO and vowed to press charges, and was consequently dumped by the show and by his own management. I don't think anybody is, as the blurb seems to imply, standing around the barbecue today discussing how unlucky Newton is. (Apart from the one X-Factor wannabe quoted in the story.) In fact, I suspect many people will, like News Ltd writer Paul Kent, vigorously take another tack. My opinion? Newton probably is ill, in which case he needs treatment, but that shouldn't be allowed to overshadow what he's (allegedly) done. We should all take a reality check on who the victim really is.
PS: Yes, the blurb is supposed to summarise the story at hand, but it doesn't even really do that. Maybe "X-Factor contestant defends hard-working Matthew Newton"?

In a week that has already seen Australian networks Seven and Ten announce new digital channels (7-mate and Channel Eleven), Britain's Channel 4 has unveiled its autumn season with at least one idea we'll undoubtedly be seeing in the antipodes soon. Channel 4, which is screening its final series of Big Brother, is to launch a "docu-soap" called Seven Days in Notting Hill. According to the Guardian, "viewers will see events that have only just taken place [and] will also be able to give online advice to the people in the show". I imagine Ten or one of the other Australian networks is already eyeing "Seven Days in Bondi Beach". Channel 4's schedule will also feature comedy series from Morgana Robinson (described as "Kenny Everett without the beard"), Frankie Boyle (a Scottish comedian who was the standout performer in the panel show Mock the Week, which hasn't screened here) and Robert Webb (solo, without his higher-profile partner David Mitchell). I'd like to think Australian audiences will be seeing all of that somewhere sooner rather than later.

Reports that Hamish Blake and Andy Lee (pictured) are quitting their drivetime show, which blitzes the ratings every weekday in every major metropolitan market across the nation, is bad news for the Austereo's Today radio network. It's hard to imagine another act, local or networked, that could garner such consistently high ratings. Of course, it also presents an opportunity for other stations to even the playing field in the afternoons, and that's got to be a good thing for the medium. I'd like to think we'll get some strong local shows, but I fear networking is inevitable. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if 2011 is the year that one commercial network attempts a national breakfast show. I know they've failed in the past, but the times they are a'changing. The shame for Austereo is that, if anybody could do it, it would have been Hamish and Andy.
P.S. One last thing about H&A: they proved that you don't have to be obnoxious to score big listener numbers. They'll be missed.
P.P.S. The duo will still be heard on Austereo one day a week.

A brief beef: I am sick of seeing and hearing news items where local governments are referred to simply as "council" without an article. Would we write or say something like: "Mr Bloggs said bank would put up interest rates"? No. Yet we often read or hear in the media the likes of: "Cr Nerk said council would approve the project." I know public servants and politiicans speak this way but that's no reason for media professionals to follow suit mindlessly.

We journalists are a sensitive breed. We take it personally when people say bad things about our profession or our particular medium. In fact, we often get so emotional in defending ourselves that we don't do what we're trained to do -- and that's look clearly and objectively at the facts. For years now, many newspaper journos have had their heads in the sand about the implications of declining circulation. If they are not in denial about it -- and how could you be when you look at the figures -- they are full of wacky ideas about how they can reverse the trend. The sad fact is that the decline of newspapers is terminal, it's just a matter of when the plug will be pulled. Specialist publicaions may have a little longer, but it's likley that print will be dead within a decade or two. This doesn't mean newspaper journalists are necessarily doing a bad job, it means the demand is for online delivery. All very good -- except that too many online consumers expect their news for free, and it's near-on impossible to deliver a quality product for nothing. In the UK, the Daily Mail may have found a formula that works -- but it's too early yet to say whether advertising alone can support the major mastheads as we know them. Even if it does, further staff cuts are inevitable -- and, of course, that will impact on quality. It's hard to know what to make of Rupert Murdoch's plan to introduce a national "newspaper" for delivery on iPads, but some commentators have already written it off. At least Murdoch is putting his money where his mouth is and giving it a go. And, by doing so -- and by constructing paywalls around some of his existing online products -- he's acknowledging the thing many of his own employees can't accept: that newspapers are living on borrowed time.

I was complaining on Twitter recently about the trouble I've been having with video on the websites of Australia's two biggest newspaper publishers. On the Fairfax sites (including brisbanetimes.com.au and smh.com.au), videos auto-load after a short delay in which, if I can find the right place to click, I can switch them off. Videos on the News Ltd sites (news.com.au and its subsidiaires) give me the option to watch or not but they take an age to load (and I'm not a patient person, so I often abandon my attempts). Neither situation, I ventured in a Tweet, is ideal. One of my tweeps said video has no place on newspaper sites. I disagree. I think they should offer video -- and, inevitably, they will have to do so just to be able to compete -- but they should invest more not just on the content (which can be amateurish) but on getting the technology right. Then I remembered one provincial newspaper where I worked as a younger man, where the IT guy (as he would be called today) was a slacker who deliberately made maintaining the very basic computer system seem more difficult than it really was. Because nobody else on staff knew much about computers, he'd created a nice little earner for himself and his secret knowledge. Of course, nowadays there are many different technologies at play and different delivery platforms to consider, so the job is genuinely difficult. But the fact is, they've got to do it. If the product doesn't work to the expectations of the potential readers, they will go somewhere else. A technological failure could sink a masthead just as easily as an editorial error.

In the official radio ratings survey 5 for Brisbane released today, B105 remains no. 1 overall, with 612ABC's Spencer Howson still king of breakfast. Overall, the top four were B105, 97.3FM, Nova 106.9, 612ABC and Triple M. It was a solid result for 97.3, whose Robin, Terry and Bob also came fourth in breakfast after Howson, B105's Labby, Camilla and Stav, and Nova's Meshel, Tim and Marty. 612ABC also had a good survey, adding points across the day, with Steve Austin being particularly strong in the evenings. After recent gains, 4BC has slipped back marginally overall and in the breakfast shift, where Jamie Dunn is now in sixth place ahead of 4BH and 4KQ. Stablemates BC and BH had the biggest losses overall. In the Sydney results, covering the periods May 9 to June 12 and June 27 to Ju1y 31, the top three were 2GB, ABC702 and 2Day. The two leaders both had falls, but not enough to topple them. Biggest gainer overall and in breakfast was 2UE, while WSFM also added audience in breakfast. Nova held steady in breakfast, with a slight rise overall, and Classic Rock and Triple M slipped slightly. In Melbourne, 3AW held its big league, followed by ABC774 and Fox FM. Triple M, home of Eddie Maguire, slipped marginally overall and in breakfast. Newcomer MTR ranked at the tailend, but it wasn't on air for the full survey. The networked Hamish and Andy show continued to blitz allcomers in the drive shift.
Disclosure: Until today, Brett Debritz was a regular on the 612ABC breakfast show with Spencer Howson. He will be watching future surveys with great interest.

It was my last regular 612ABC spot this morning (before I head overseas again) and, to celebrate, Spencer Howson and I went to the streets to ask people if they could provide surnames to match 10 "famous" Brisbane first names. The results are here. Interestingly, the three people everybody knew were Anna Bligh, Kevin Rudd and Wally Lewis. In a bonus segment, not put to air, we showed people some photos of famous faces and sought names. Results here.

He may have threatened to pull the pin back in March, but the word around the Brisbane media traps is that Jamie Dunn is signing on the dotted line again as breakfast host at 4BC. While Dunn and co-host Ian Calder's audience share has grown a little lately, they are yet to reach the ratings heights of commercial talk stations in other state capitals. The next bunch of figures, to be released on Tuesday, will be interesting.

As Peter Preston notes here, video didn't kill the radio star, and UK radio listenership is at record highs. That doesn't surprise me at all, and I'm sure listening figures are still buoyant in Australia too (although last time I looked, the radio audience wasn't keeping pace with population growth). But I must take issue with some folks on Twitter who think this is a good sign for all "old media" --specifically that newspapers will continue to thrive the way radio has. The simple fact is that radio, whether it's delivered on the AM and FM bands, on the free digital spectrum or over the internet, is basically the same beast as it ever was -- spoken word plus music designed to inform and/or entertain various targetted markets. And so long as we humans have to do things -- like drive cars or iron or watch the children play -- that require the separate employment of our eyes, radio has no need to change. Newspapers face a different challenge, because the method of delivery is changing more radically and the audience is splintering. While the printed word will survive as long as people can read, the medium of words on newsprint will decline and almost disappear. There will undoubtedly be, even in the distant future, some people who keep books and old papers, and maybe even some who publish them. But as far as the business side of things goes, putting words and pictures on paper, and delivering the product by truck, simply will not be viable. And, as we've already seen, once you start to publish newspapers electronically, they cease to be newspapers as we know them. They can have audio and video and interactive elements -- and, crucially, they can be accessed from anywhere in the world. So far, newspaper publishers haven't excelled in delivering quality sound and vision, except when it is lifted from their professional colleagues at radio and TV stations. Meanwhile, over at Twitter and other social media sites, the really breaking news is being delivered in 144 characters or fewer and in "real time". So when it comes to news "hot off the press", the whole dynamic is changing. Many newspapers are already evolving into magazines that combine longform feature articles and endless opinion pieces at the expense of actual news. Publishers are investing in a small number of highly paid columnists and other specialists rather than in large numbers of flexible foot soldiers who can dig out news at the local level. Looming large over these changes is the big question: who's going to pay for it? Rupert Murdoch is already betting some of his considerable farm on the fact that readers of The Times will pay for online content, while Peter Preston notes that the UK Daily Mail's website is doing fine by creating its own online niche. He says the online edition could be profitable by advertising support only, without a paywall. Australian publishers are already weighing which way to go. The current thinking is that The Australian will embrace a paywall but its News Ltd stablemates (The Daily Telegraph, Courier-Mail, Herald Sun etc.) will not. Not yet, anyway. Farifax already has internet-only titles in Perth and Brisbane and a recent Macquare Bank report suggests taking the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age wholly online would be a profitable move. What the publishers all know is that print is declining and they must invest in quality online products. And they know there are two groups of readers out there: those who will pay, and those who never will. Readers who decide to pay will demand extremely high standards of journalism that reflect their own world view; those who don't pay will still want a product that engages them and tells them what they want to know. Even the online "freesheets" must have unique, targetted content. There is so much choice out there that readers have no reason to bookmark and regularly visit any one product unless it really stands out in a crowded market. My hope is that publishers will see the wisdom of investing in journalism -- not just big-name, big-buck columnists but old-school journos who know their patch and can consistently unearth good yarns that might otherwise go unreported. After all, if we want to know the latest on Lady Gaga or Lindsay Lohan, we merely have to type their name into Google and select one of thousands of choices. But where do we go if we want to know what's happening in our own backyard? The way things are going, there will soon be no news at all from the parish pump -- and we'll all be the poorer for it.

Anybody who's been following my Twitter stream closely will know I've been haing a running battle with Telstra (without going into details, the latest is they stuffed up in March and owe me more than $100 but I won't get it for another four or five weeks). Now I'm sad to report that they Telstra isn't the only telecomms company making a fortune for offering a minimal service. Here's some "highlights" from the global roaming section of my lates 3 Mobile bill:

Yes, that's right, it cost me $1 when somebody called me and hung up immediately. For a two-second call from Egypt (I realised I'd dialled the wrong number), the cost was $2.60. The mark-up on the actual cost of providing this "service" must be enormous. In the UK, new providers have sprung up offering discount global roaming -- is anybody in Australia doing it?

Like about 1.5million Australians, I sat down on Wednesday night and watched the winning ABC trifecta of Spicks and Specks, Gruen Nation and Yes We Canberra. The shows gave Aunty, which regulalry comes fourth in the ratings, the top three spots on the night's ratings chart, and helped push Channel 10 -- which had been riding high until very recently on the success of MasterChef -- to the overall No.4 position. (There's more on the numbers here.) What it all proves is that the days where viewers would stick to the same station hour after hour, night after night have long gone. Now, more than ever, we pick and choose the programs we like, wherever we can find them. With the internet offering a whole new range of ways to access programming, this presents a big challenge to the broadcasters -- unless, of course, they are also in the business of making the shows that people want to see.

The quickened pace of the news cycle continues to confuse traditional media. For newspapers, one of the big questions these days is: should we publish something in print after it's already appeared online, especially on our own websites? In the case of the Courier-Mail today, the answer was yes (in regards to a picture on page 14 which was all over its webpage yesterday). Today, the printed C-M finally caught up with the death of the world's oldest Twitterer, Ivy Bean, who passed away on July 28. A two-day lag for news from Britain used to be commonplace, but it's not now. Meanwhile, mX surely set some kind of record yesterday with an item about this controversial new website, catsthatlooklikehitler.com. Sorry to burst the bubble, but it's been around since June, 2006 (do a search on the Wayback Machine if you doubt me)! A hip'n'groovy, youth-oriented paper like mX oughta know stuff like that.
PS: This intro from the C-M could have been written by the copywriter for a washing powder commercial:

NEW tests have smashed Queensland's first case of DNA innocence testing after analysis found a convicted killer was 45 billion times more likely to be linked to blood from the scene.

More likely than who or what?

With MasterChef having sailed off into the sunset for 2011 [correction: 2010], what will be the next big gastronomical reality show on television? Well, if I have my way, it will be Australia's Best Cook, a competition to find somebody among us who excels in making real Aussie tucker rather than 3-hat restaurant fare. Ideal contestants would include bachelors and bachelorettes who specialise in domestic meals for one and busy mums to cooks from country pubs and suburban clubs who keep the masses fed with tasty but simple fare like lamb chops and veg, steak sandwiches, works burgers, seafood baskets, pavlovas and lamingtons. Bringing the best qualities of both Matt Preston and George Calombaris (i.e. fat and bald), I'd be one of the judges. Sounds like fun? I really think so -- now I just need Shine Australia, Fremantle Media and/or one of the networks to get behind it. You can hear me speaking about the proposed format towards the end of today's spot with 612ABC's Spencer Howson, where I also talk about an online newspaper integrity index and reveal some Doctor Who gossip.
Update:The edited audio describing Australia's Best (Basic) Cook is here.
PS: If you're in the TV business and want to know more about the format -- and trust me, there is more -- contact me here.