Jonathan Holmes: ABC in good shape, but questions News 24.

In the nearly three years since Jonathan Holmes departed as host of Media Watch he is, as his Twitter profile tells us, “still watching, listening, reading and occasionally writing.” And he maintains a keen interest in the ABC.

Last week, speaking at an event for Friends of ABC in Melbourne, he shared his thoughts on the public broadcaster, and journalism more widely. In the lead up to the Federal Election, the lobby group has a well-pitched campaign in the wake of cuts to the broadcaster. And as ABC begins a new chapter under newly-installed managing director Michelle Guthrie, Holmes is watching with interest to see what changes the former Google exec will bring, particularly to ABC News 24.

While he commended Mark Scott’s “digitalisation” of the ABC he differs on the value of the news channel versus the cost to run it.

“Mark was tremendously successful in getting the changes made that needed to be made. I have some arguments with some of the things that he did. Posterity may find that some of things he decided to do were blind alleys,” Holmes said.

“I think, personally, News 24 is possibly going to be a very expensive blind alley which sucks an enormous amount of resources. As he kept telling us, he didn’t get any extra money from government to make News 24. It was funded by efficiencies.”

Whilst new technology has made improvements on inefficiencies, the hungry beast of the 24 hour news cycle makes increasing demands on journalists.

“There’s something they don’t have time to do anymore: to find out what’s happening!” he declared.

“Our correspondents in Bangkok, when there’s a riot or whatever going on, have no time to scratch themselves, let alone going into Bangkok and finding out what’s happening for themselves. This is a huge problem, as it is for all journalism. But for News 24 the fact is young people –most people- don’t sit down and watch broadcast anymore. They have much more convenient ways of getting news on their mobile phones and tablets, and they don’t want to watch hours of broadcasting. That was a 1990s cable television phenomenon when CNN was at their height.

“Nowadays you have to pump out short news stories that people can consume in 30 seconds on their mobile phones.

“I think Michelle Guthrie is very savvy on this, by all accounts. She might well say, ‘You know what, we don’t need to broadcast 24 hours a day with news that very few people are watching. We’ll put it online or get rid of it altogether and just focus on mobile platforms which is where the future is.’”

Funding cuts to the ABC have seen 500 jobs cut, with the further $48 million reduction listed in the May budget, including more than $6m axed from the ABC News Division.

“The Fact Check Unit was only started 2 years ago. Frankly, I don’t think it worked,” he continued. “Nobody understood it. It wasn’t very high profile. That’s the least of our worries, that that should go. A lot of other things that have come from special funding, like the rural websites, have been quite successful and are still going to go. The National Reporting Team has been tremendous and caused great improvement in ABC’s journalism –which wasn’t all that fantastic for a very long time.”

While he acknowledges the distinctiveness of some SBS programming, Holmes suggests SBS is struggling to justify its existence as a second public broadcaster. It was a question Mark Scott had raised in his final tenure. ‘Backroom’ mergers were worth considering.

“Since it went partly-commercial, in order to get the audiences that it needs to get the advertising to pay for itself, it’s doing that less and less. The documentaries are much less effective than they used to be. It still does some great things, no question,” Holmes said.

“But the justification for it in terms of being a multicultural broadcaster I think is pretty thin these days. It’s really a kind of ‘toff’s television’ that is provided free to those of us who like that kind of thing.

“It’s a little bit difficult to see how we justify having two public broadcasters. So look, maybe down the track there will be a merger, just because it’s a way of saving public money.

“I think it would be a shame if that happened.”

Describing the ABC as “extraordinarily well-placed and extraordinarily important” Holmes believes the ABC remains too popular to be in any real danger from politicians who remain reluctant to mess with it.

He rejected campaign catch-cries that the ABC is in danger of ‘death by a thousand cuts.’

“I don’t think the ABC is in that spiral of crisis yet,” he insisted.

“We’ve had to make some comprises but we’ve always had to make compromises as long as I’ve ever been at the ABC. And there are efficiencies still to be made as the technology improves and so on.

“But I still think the journalism and the output of the ABC is as good as it’s ever been, while I’ve been there.”