tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/mark-scott-4100/articlesMark Scott – The Conversation2022-08-29T20:02:52Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1892332022-08-29T20:02:52Z2022-08-29T20:02:52ZToo many people drop out of teaching degrees – here are 4 ways to keep them studying<p>Australia’s state and federal education ministers recently agreed to work on a plan to <a href="https://theconversation.com/its-great-education-ministers-agree-the-teacher-shortage-is-a-problem-but-their-new-plan-ignores-the-root-causes-188660">fix the country’s teacher shortage</a>. </p>
<p>The plan is due in December and one of <a href="https://www.jasonclare.com.au/media/portfolio-media-releases/5170-national-action-plan-on-teacher-shortage">five priority areas</a> is “strengthening initial teacher education”.</p>
<p>Initial teacher education is the university degree students undertake to become registered classroom teachers. Worried that too many students are <a href="https://www.jasonclare.com.au/media/transcripts/5167-radio-interview-with-patricia-karvelas-rn-breakfast-friday-12-august-2022">not completing</a> their teaching degrees, federal Education Minister Jason Clare has asked Sydney University vice-chancellor Professor Mark Scott to report back on the issue by the end of the year. </p>
<p>We draw on our experience as teacher educators and educational researchers to suggest four ways to help increase the pace and rate of students completing their teaching degrees. </p>
<h2>But first: what is the problem?</h2>
<p>It looks like there is no shortage of people wanting to be a teacher – at least to begin with. </p>
<p>Figures from the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership <a href="https://www.aitsl.edu.au/research/australian-teacher-workforce-data/key-metrics-dashboard">show</a> there is actually a modest increase in students signing up to initial teacher education courses. Between 2005 and 2019, numbers rose from 24,285 students to 28,694. </p>
<p>Even accounting for some natural attrition, these numbers are enough to sustain the teaching workforce. But the figures for program completion are significantly lower. </p>
<p>In 2005, 16,526 teachers graduated and in 2019 it was 16,644. We also know that while the number of students graduating from all fields of study at university <a href="https://www.dese.gov.au/quality-initial-teacher-education-review/resources/next-steps-report-quality-initial-teacher-education-review">increased</a> by 40% from 2009 to 2019, the number of students graduating from teacher education declined by 5%. </p>
<p>Why might this be so? </p>
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<h2>1. Unreasonable testing demands</h2>
<p>LANTITE is the national Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education. It’s a two-hour literacy test and a two-hour numeracy test, undertaken in formal exam-like conditions. All student teachers must pass both components in order to graduate. </p>
<p>There are logistical challenges with undertaking LANTITE. Opportunities to sit the test are limited to four testing windows a year, with in-person testing centres in a relatively small number of locations. </p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/it-hurt-my-heart-and-my-wallet-the-unnecessary-test-stressing-teachers-before-they-even-make-it-to-the-classroom-187860">'It hurt my heart and my wallet': the unnecessary test stressing teachers before they even make it to the classroom</a>
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<p>This forces student teachers from regional and rural areas who prefer to attend a physical test centre to bear the extra effort associated with time away from home, including travel and accommodation costs. </p>
<p>The test is in addition to other university courses and costs A$196 per attempt. Research has <a href="https://theconversation.com/it-hurt-my-heart-and-my-wallet-the-unnecessary-test-stressing-teachers-before-they-even-make-it-to-the-classroom-187860">found</a> the test is not only highly stressful, but also expensive and not an accurate indicator of teacher quality. </p>
<p>It’s time to find more convenient and less costly ways to assess student teachers’ literacy and numeracy skills. </p>
<h2>2. Costs of getting qualified</h2>
<p>Student teachers must undertake uninterrupted blocks of professional experience in schools in each year of their degree. While this is a critical part of the degree, it comes at great personal cost. </p>
<p>The intensity of the professional placement, including full days in schools and time spent in the evenings gathering resources, planning lessons and marking students’ work, means student teachers can’t do other paid work.</p>
<p>It may mean they can’t earn an income for up to six weeks at a time. On top of this, there are also travel expenses to get to school each day. They may also need to buy stationery and resources to use in their lessons. </p>
<p>A guaranteed stipend that takes into account the real costs of undertaking a teaching placement is essential.</p>
<h2>3. No guarantee of a permanent job</h2>
<p>Despite the media talk about the teacher shortage, many student teachers are unable to secure permanent employment in their preferred subjects, especially in city areas. The greatest need for teachers, and the greatest opportunity for permanent employment, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-25/rural-teacher-shortage-hits-new-lows/100861556">is in rural and remote areas</a>. However, it is not possible for all graduates to relocate for work.</p>
<p>Many new teachers seeking a job close to home are forced to cobble together a series of part time or short-term contracts, across a range of schools, year levels and subjects. Teaching out of their field of expertise is not unusual. </p>
<p>This means student teachers face uncertainty around their careers and the links between their studies and job prospects. High-performing student teachers need to know at the outset that there will be fair and reasonable opportunities to get a secure job close to home in their areas of expertise. </p>
<h2>4. Declining status</h2>
<p>In March 2022, when he was acting federal education minister, Stuart Robert <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/education-minister-blames-dud-teachers-for-declining-education-results-20220317-p5a5k6.html">blamed </a>
“dud public school teachers” for the decline of academic results of Australian students. </p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/no-wonder-no-one-wants-to-be-a-teacher-world-first-study-looks-at-65-000-news-articles-about-australian-teachers-186210">No wonder no one wants to be a teacher: world-first study looks at 65,000 news articles about Australian teachers</a>
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<p>Recent <a href="https://theconversation.com/no-wonder-no-one-wants-to-be-a-teacher-world-first-study-looks-at-65-000-news-articles-about-australian-teachers-186210">research</a> that looked at media reporting on teachers in Australia for the past 25 years also found “teacher bashing” to be the norm. The media also made out that teachers’ work was simple, and easy. </p>
<p>This reporting devalues the profession and weighs heavily on students when they are considering their commitment to their teaching studies (which are already costly and don’t guarantee a job close to home and in their area of expertise). </p>
<p>We need to make sure student teachers know they are doing important and complex work and that it is valued by the schools and communities where they teach.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189233/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Beryl Exley is an AITSL Accreditation Panel Chair and interstate panellist. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Donna Pendergast is a Director of AITSL and Chair of the Queensland Council of Deans of Education.</span></em></p>Two teacher educators look at how we can keep students in teaching degrees. Reimbursing them for professional placements in schools would be a start.Beryl Exley, Professor, Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University, Griffith UniversityDonna Pendergast, Professor, Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1037552018-09-24T20:18:26Z2018-09-24T20:18:26ZDespite her good intentions, Michelle Guthrie was never the right fit for the ABC<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/237759/original/file-20180924-85770-i0vl0r.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=323%2C0%2C3670%2C2000&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Rolling cuts, plummeting morale and a hostile government - Michelle Guthrie had much to contend with as managing director.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wes Mountain/The Conversation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Michelle Guthrie has been badly treated – not by being sacked, but by being hired in the first place. As a former Head of ABC TV News and Current Affairs, I met Guthrie several times at functions in the ABC, and once at a social dinner party. We discussed the state of ABC News and other editorial matters. She was well aware she was on a steep learning curve.</p>
<p>Dubbed early in the gossip mill as Rupert Murdoch’s and Malcolm Turnbull’s candidate for the job, I found her intentions good and her background at Google a major plus for leading the ABC in a digital era.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/michelle-guthries-stint-at-abc-helm-had-a-key-weakness-she-failed-to-back-the-journalists-103759">Michelle Guthrie's stint at ABC helm had a key weakness: she failed to back the journalists</a>
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<p>If there were worries, they were two: her lack of political smarts in the complicated and potentially volcanic relationship with the federal government; and her lack of experience in journalism, radio or television production, and the myriad other forms of content creation that ABC employees specialise in.</p>
<p>Her first federal Budget saw a <a href="http://about.abc.net.au/press-releases/abc-2016-2019-funding/">$20 million a year</a> “Enhanced Newsgathering Program” from the previous year cut by a third to $13.5m. I <a href="https://theconversation.com/memo-to-michelle-guthrie-expert-ideas-for-the-new-abc-era-58929">wrote in The Conversation</a> in May 2016: </p>
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<p>If she was Malcolm Turnbull’s preferred candidate…it hasn’t helped her in the Budget…Her failure to hold the line on ABC funding will not go down well.</p>
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<p>Job cuts followed.</p>
<p>It is one of the top KPI’s for a managing director of the ABC: hold and build the budget.</p>
<p>I think it’s true to say that most ABC staff hoped this was a minor blip and would be corrected in coming years. There was a determination to embrace the old Aussie “give her a go” mindset, and staff were willing to listen to what Guthrie proposed as her signature policies.</p>
<p>But what they heard in a series of staff meetings was nothing new: that the new digital era required changes in demographics, skills and programming; that the organisation need to be downsized; that new executive reporting lines would be created and simplified; and that the ABC had to ignore its very young and very old rusted-on viewers and concentrate on the 15-30 and 30-50 year-olds, who had left it in droves.</p>
<p>They had heard all this from the previous managing director, Mark Scott, for many years. In fact, the drive to enter the digital world had begun under the leadership of Brian Johns in the early 1990s. He appointed me to head up a multimedia unit in 1994. The task: put the ABC on the internet. Quickly, the ABC’s new home site - www.abc.net.au - became the top media site in Australia and remains one of the top sites today. But it was Scott who made digitisation his defining contribution. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/media-files-abc-boss-michelle-guthrie-sacked-but-the-board-wont-say-why-103752">Media Files: ABC boss Michelle Guthrie sacked, but the board won’t say why</a>
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<p>For all the talk of “content”, it became clear that comparisons between Guthrie and Scott inside the ABC found her wanting. Scott, the former editorial director of Fairfax’s newspaper and magazine division, might have lacked radio and television skills, but he knew a good story when he heard one. He made a good fist of claiming the title of editor-in-chief. </p>
<p>Guthrie, a lawyer by trade, spoke about content and platforms, but was all at sea about how to bring these two concepts together. It was a major hole in her armoury. (Even in News Limited, many admire Rupert Murdoch’s intimate knowledge of the trade of journalism. It runs in the family. It used to be the same with the Packer empire at Channel Nine until Jamie Packer fell in love with casinos and gambling as sources of wealth. The Fairfax barons also enjoyed newspaper production.) </p>
<p>Very soon Guthrie lost the staff she was leading. In a time of constant change, morale fell and the honeymoon ended. The rolling series of federal Budget cuts under the Abbott and then Turnbull governments ensured series after series of expensive payouts to highly-skilled program-makers who were supposedly there to produce the “content” for the new platforms Guthrie envisaged. </p>
<p>Many meetings were called to save various sections of the ABC and keep their identities. I attended one, a group of former general managers of ABC Radio National appealing to chairman Justin Milne and Guthrie to not incorporate the station and its staff into various “content streams”, thereby ensuring the end of what was called (the old) “appointment radio”. </p>
<p>The meeting was run by Milne, politely listening to each person and then assuring them it would all be alright. Guthrie was left to comment at the end: </p>
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<p>Changes will need to go through me. Trust me, I’m a fan of RN.</p>
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<p>The changes proceeded apace.</p>
<p>The casualisation of the new working arrangements has now left many staff not just demoralised but angry. Working crews have left on big packages only to return as freelancers on insecure tenure. </p>
<p>The anger has manifested itself in the <a href="https://www.proudtobepublic.org.au/protect_abc">“Proud to be Public” campaign</a> by the formerly dominant union at the ABC, the Community and Public Sector Union. This group is more militant than the old Friends of the ABC lobby group, which is full of Liberal voters who care passionately about cuts to the ABC. And finally, the anger of staff is shown in another new group, Alumni Ltd. - former ABC staff willing to join the struggle to save the ABC from Liberals who want to destroy it.</p>
<p>In my view, Guthrie came at the wrong moment to be the “change agent” for the ABC. Mark Scott had already been that figure, and had all the necessary qualities to connect with staff and carry them through the digital revolution.</p>
<p>Guthrie’s performances in Canberra (especially before <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-17/michelle-guthrie-during-senate-estimates/9878626">Senate Estimates</a>) were too amateur and insecure. Her own credibility as a content-maker was not up to scratch in a highly critical creative environment like the ABC. Finally, her seeming inability to bring her senior managers and staff with her proved crucial - especially in an environment where a hostile government half-captured by the ideological right, not to mention News Limited, was snapping at her heels on a constant basis.</p>
<p>The choice of Guthrie was wrong from the start. It did no service to her, nor to the ABC. The then Board did her no service in throwing her in the deep end of the ABC at a time of great change.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103755/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Manning is a former senior manager with the ABC.</span></em></p>A former senior manager with the ABC laments the poor choice of Michelle Guthrie as managing director, leaving her - and the organisation - in an invidious position.Peter Manning, Adjunct Professor of Journalism, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/589312016-05-06T00:39:28Z2016-05-06T00:39:28ZMichelle Guthrie should look to UK and reality TV to achieve a more diverse ABC<p>Dear Michelle, </p>
<p>Welcome back to Australia and may I say how pleasantly surprising it is to finally have a diverse face at the helm of the national broadcaster.</p>
<p>Those of us, like me, who are part of the 26% of Australians who were born overseas, look forward to your promise for a more diverse ABC. As do those who - like you - are part of the <a href="http://www.abs.gov.au/census">20% of second generation Australians</a> with at least one parent born overseas who speak a language other than English at home.</p>
<p>Two years ago I wrote about the lack of diversity at the ABC for this <a href="https://theconversation.com/whose-australian-stories-cultural-diversity-at-the-abc-29481">website</a>. I was thus a little surprised to read recently of the outgoing ABC managing director Mark Scott’s “<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/27/abc-failing-to-reflect-racial-diversity-of-modern-australia-says-mark-scott">mea culpa</a>” on the issue.</p>
<p>Scott told <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/scotty-doesnt-know?utm_term=.so8vadW65#.qsmaA4vW1">Buzzfeed’s Mark Di Stefano</a> that one of his biggest failures as MD was employing “too many Anglos”. Contrasting Australia with the UK, he said:</p>
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<p>When I watch and listen to the BBC when I’m in the UK I think the on-air talent really represents a diversity of modern Britain. </p>
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<p>Scott had ten years to do something about this. Yet it could be argued that, apart from ABCNews24, the main channel got whiter and whiter under his stewardship. Was he unconsciously hiring people who looked and sounded like him?</p>
<p>Do you watch reality television Michelle? It’s blind to colour. If you have the voice or the cooking skills, you can make it. Have you been watching My Kitchen Rules? <a href="http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/reality-tv/spice-sisters-tasia-and-gracia-seger-win-my-kitchen-rules/news-story/2768dd456a1a6deed5b48db6bb97d3c5">Tasia and Gracia Seger</a>, “The Spice Sisters,” won. We got to meet their multicultural family – which has lived in Indonesia and India as well as Australia. There was even an Albanian woman cooking on the show, delighting my mother, who has Greek-Albanian ancestry. And Dami Im, the Korean-born singer who won the fifth season of X Factor Australia, will <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/programs/eurovision/article/2016/05/05/first-look-dami-ims-eurovision-2016-performance">represent Australia at Eurovision</a> (to be broadcast by SBS).</p>
<p>Of course a more diverse ABC, one that truly holds a mirror to Australian society and tells all its stories, might make SBS less relevant. I wonder at the timing and urgency of this cultural diversity rhetoric? Is it just a coincidence that at Scott’s final <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-24/mark-scott-delivers-national-press-club-address/7195888">Press Club speech</a> he again brought up the issue of an ABC/SBS merger? </p>
<p>Still, SBS broadcasts in languages other than English. And as migration patterns change, I’d argue it’s more important than ever for migrants to hear news and programs in their mother tongue – both for social cohesion and their sense of belonging. I don’t think the ABC can or will do that.</p>
<p>Apparently ABC radio is now forming a <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/abc-radio-staff-told-to-put-people-with-difficult-accents-on-air-20160502-gokjsh.html">diversity action group</a> to examine whether there’s an unconscious bias against certain accents in the voices that are put to air. This is a great idea but cultural diversity by committee has already been tried. Two years ago, I wrote that ABC news and current affairs had formed a <a>diversity action group</a> too. I am not sure what it has achieved.</p>
<p>After my article was published in 2014, the ABC wrote to me and the editors at The Conversation. They were especially concerned about my comments regarding Australian Story. The program told such an overwhelming number of white stories, I wrote, that I sometimes felt I was watching Landline.</p>
<p>The ABC’s Sally Jackson wrote: </p>
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<p>Although the program pursues stories in a wide range of communities, it is the case that there is a higher failure rate in non-Anglo communities, i.e. stories are pursued but there is a reluctance to proceed – often, ironically, for cultural reasons. […] The team is also seeking other ways to introduce more diversity, such as seeking out people from diverse ethnicities as guest introducers.</p>
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<p>This begs the question: why was ethnic talent pulling out of appearing on Australian Story? Was it an issue of trust? Or cultural insensitivity? </p>
<p>Australian Story, or “White Australian Story” as many of my multicultural friends facetiously call it, is a complex program to produce with very high production values. But it has failed to reflect diverse Australian stories. </p>
<p>For 19 years, it was run by its founding executive producer Deborah Fleming. In a <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/deb-fleming-farewells-australian-story-the-abc-show-she-founded-19-years-ago-20150725-giitog.html">swansong interview</a> last year, she told Fairfax Media’s Paul Kalina that the show suffered from the “tyranny of pictures that can make or break any TV show, the format requires its subjects to have a good command of English.”</p>
<p>Under its new executive producer Deborah Masters, I recently watched an episode that contained a subtitled interview with <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/austory/content/2015/s4348989.htm">the mother of Socceroos coach Ange Postecoglou</a>.
She was speaking in Greek. That was a refreshing change. I look forward to more such stories. </p>
<p>Look at what the Americans have done to make their television screens reflect the reality on the street. Look, too, at what the BBC is doing right now with its affirmative action policy. </p>
<p>The BBC has employed a <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/ariel/33637666">Head of Diversity, Inclusion and Succession</a>, Tunde Ogungbesane. He says he never watched the BBC before because it did not reflect his reality. He will be tackling unconscious bias at the recruitment level by removing people’s names – and where they went to school – from their job applications. </p>
<p>The BBC has made available a two million pound Diversity Fund to help create new programs. It has created new internships and a new leadership development program so that diversity happens from the top down.</p>
<p>The BBC has also pledged that half of its workforce will be women by the year 2020. The ABC’s most recent <a href="http://about.abc.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/EquityDiversityAnnualRPT201415.pdf">cultural diversity report</a> shows that 52.5% of all employees are women. </p>
<p>However only 11.8% of ABC employees were from non-English speaking backgrounds in 2015. This is down from 12.4% the year before. </p>
<p>And the numbers for content makers are even worse: 7.4% last year were employees from non-English speaking backgrounds – down from 8.2% the year before. It looks like Mark Scott was right – he did hire too many Anglos!</p>
<p>Let us hope that soon there will be more people who look like you making programs and appearing on our ABC.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58931/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Helen Vatsikopoulos worked for the ABC from 1982-87 and 2000-2009, and for SBS from 1988-1999.</span></em></p>The ABC’s new chief, who took over last week, has identified improving diversity at the broadcaster as a top priority. This is long overdue - the BBC has already tackled the issue from the top down.Helen Vatsikopoulos, Lecturer in Journalism, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/582882016-04-25T20:14:43Z2016-04-25T20:14:43ZIn Conversation: Mark Scott on his decade in charge of the ABC<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119780/original/image-20160422-4752-eb1c7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Mark Scott has altered the ABC in profound ways.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Mick Tsikas</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Mark Scott is to step down as the ABC’s managing director in May following ten years in charge of the national broadcaster. These years have been marked by technological change and significant disruption in Australia’s media landscape.</em></p>
<p><em>Scott recently caught up with University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis to reflect on his time as ABC managing director. You can listen to listen to their discussion below in audio produced by <a href="https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/the-policy-shop">The Policy Shop</a>, a monthly public policy podcast based at the University of Melbourne.</em></p>
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<p>If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.</p>
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<p>Mark Scott, the ABC’s outgoing managing director, cites the <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/45bb2ef4-de3a-11df-9364-00144feabdc0.html">famous quote</a> from Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard to encapsulate his time at the helm of the national broadcaster.</p>
<p>Scott joined the ABC in 2006 with major technological change about to hit. There was “no smartphone, no tablet, no fast broadband, no big streaming services, no social media”, he recalls.</p>
<p>Yet the wave was on its way. If ABC was to be “as loved and respected for future generations as it had been in the past”, concluded Scott, “then change was an inevitability”.</p>
<p>There are parallels for those in public universities. There, new technology is challenging long-standing practices. Yet as the ABC has demonstrated, it is possible to embrace change and thrive.</p>
<p>Scott’s leadership at ABC is recognised for innovation and new digital initiatives. Podcasts, online catch-up service iview and its 24-hour news channel, ABC News 24, have proved critical to sharing Australian content and building internal capacity within the ABC.</p>
<p>The right decisions may only look clear in retrospect. The decision to proceed with podcasting content was not initially obvious or strategic. Scott says:</p>
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<p>It was really a bunch of people at Radio National saying “have a go at this”. It was an experiment, an innovative moment. </p>
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<p>Downloads of ABC podcasts will reach 160 million this year.</p>
<p>iview, another success from Scott’s time at the ABC, started with a conversation about audience expectations:</p>
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<p>With iview we didn’t know whether it would be a streaming service that would be important or a download-to-keep service that would be important. We just knew people wanted to catch up with programming.</p>
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<p>Scott set two teams to work on the problem. This initially small but ambitious program now supports around 35 million iview plays a month.</p>
<p>Scott believes News 24 proved transformative for the ABC well beyond its initial remit. For Scott, it was almost a Trojan horse:</p>
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<p>You were going to put this behind the wall of the ABC and the ABC would be different forever as a consequence.</p>
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<p>The lessons from News 24 flowed back into state-based news broadcasting, and reshaped how the ABC now develops all news broadcasts, Scott says.</p>
<p>Again, there are interesting similarities with universities, as the campus <a href="https://theconversation.com/moocs-learning-about-online-learning-one-click-at-a-time-30782">embraces online learning</a>. It requires new digital, pedagogical and production skills to deliver high-quality online content, yet public universities have proved skilled and sprightly. </p>
<p>At the University of Melbourne nearly one million students have now enrolled for a Massive Online Open Course, with content developed for an online setting also available for the classroom.</p>
<p>Digital media is ubiquitous. It allows international players to offer content directly to Australians, requiring the ABC to find a distinctive voice for its offerings. </p>
<p>As Scott notes, the ABC serves fewer than 25 million people who speak English, a language used by more than 700 million people worldwide. The challenges become more obvious as Netflix and other aggressive new media services seek out global markets.</p>
<p>Scott says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The world’s content is going to flood in. You can listen to great radio from all around the world. But who will tell Australian stories? Who will have local voices on the ground, all around Australia? Who will celebrate Australian culture? I think that is the space the public broadcaster will increasingly need to play.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A global media accentuates the difficulties funding local media. Scott points to the challenges for newspapers groups like <a href="https://theconversation.com/fairfax-media-holds-steady-on-digital-strategy-54959">Fairfax</a>, where he worked as a senior executive. The loss of traditional advertising income bodes ill for the traditional newsroom.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is very hard for traditional newspaper companies to find a revenue model, either through advertising or through paywalls, and I think they are still challenged by that. </p>
<p>I don’t think it’s that they won’t survive. I think the challenge is what kind of services will the revenue model allow them to afford. And part of the pain at Fairfax is coming back from big staffing numbers that were funded by classified monopolies, to the reality that they face today.</p>
<p>It is almost easier for The Guardian in this country to build up from nothing than it is for Fairfax to come back from where they were.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Scott is clear: if the ABC is to survive such challenges, it will be sharper, more strategic and more relevant than ever before.</p>
<p>Scott is a thoughtful chief executive who has altered the ABC in profound ways to preserve its core mission as the place that tells Australian stories. As commercial rivals succumb to internet economics, only the ABC with its public funding can support a national newsroom and multiple channels. Maintaining the independence and public trust of such an institution is a significant responsibility for any managing director.</p>
<p>Scott will hand to Michelle Guthrie a much-transformed ABC – one that does the same things in very new ways.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58288/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Glyn Davis is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, and host of The Policy Shop.</span></em></p>Mark Scott will hand to Michelle Guthrie a much-transformed ABC – one that does the same things in very new ways.Glyn Davis, Professor of Political Science and Vice-Chancellor, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/547272016-02-24T05:08:40Z2016-02-24T05:08:40Z‘Fired with enthusiasm’ from beginning to end: Mark Scott says goodbye<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/112679/original/image-20160224-16425-1fnigrl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Mick Tsikas</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>ABC managing director Mark Scott’s recent <a href="https://theconversation.com/abc-managing-director-mark-scotts-address-to-the-national-press-club-55308">speech</a> to the National Press Club today had the quietly confident tone of a CEO who knows he’s leaving his organisation in broadly better shape than he found it; or that at least he is leaving it in one, reasonably healthy piece. These are turbulent times for all media organisations, and all media executives. </p>
<p>Not that the ABC has in recent times been a “problem” in the sense that its opponents often assert. It was always a lean, mean, public service machine, receiving much less per capita than the BBC, while expected to do the same, rather amazing, kind of thing. In simple terms, its remit is to provide content and culture that is deemed important and valuable to the Australian nation as a whole, including but not restricted to content that the commercial market will not deliver. </p>
<p>The ABC is not a market-failure organisation – and Scott has often emphasised that point – but a publicly owned and managed cultural resource in an increasingly fragmented and chaotic media environment where billionaire barons cannot simply be left to their own devices. </p>
<p>In 30 years the ABC’s share of Australia’s GDP has fallen by two-thirds, yet it regularly attracts public approval ratings in excess of 80% (Newspoll). Scott leaves an ABC not in crisis, or decline, but on the cusp of a digital future in which public service values will be more not less important. As he put it: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>A well-funded ABC is one sure bet in an uncertain, unstable media world. It is the way of ensuring that the Australian conversations, culture and stories that shape our sense of Australian identity, are present in the mix. Available free-of-charge in every Australian home.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That this mix includes every sector and niche of the internet should go without saying, but Scott has repeatedly said it anyway, to those who argue that the online market should be left to the Murdochs and Berlusconis of this world, while public service media be allowed to sink into stately decline – rather like vinyl records in the era of Spotify.</p>
<p>Scott has done his bit to keep the ABC both financially viable and culturally valuable as one of the world’s most effective and efficient public service media organisations, leading major digitally driven reforms which have, as one would expect, been controversial but absolutely necessary. </p>
<p>The passing of time demonstrates the fundamental correctness of his digital strategy. However, it will be up to his successor to manage the ABC’s digital consolidation and long-term sustainability in the face of hostility from the private sector.</p>
<p>Scott’s remarks ended with the suggestion that the ABC and SBS should merge, utilising the niche-targeting capabilities of digital platforms to satisfy the needs and demands of what have until now been distinctive – if often overlapping – user groups. </p>
<p>This reminds me of the Channel 4/BBC relationship in the UK, and the issue it raised. In Australian terms, do we really need two public service media organisations in a country of just 20 million-plus, when there are now – because of digital and internet technologies – hundreds if not thousands of channels available for any language, ethnic, religious, professional or lifestyle-oriented niche group we might decide wants it?</p>
<p>The taxpayers and media audiences of Australia will ultimately determine if the political will exists to support both the ABC and SBS into the future. But Scott does no harm by placing the issue so prominently on the agenda. His record gives him a legitimate platform from which to talk about the future of public service media in Australia, and to remind those who support its values not to take the ABC for granted.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/54727/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brian McNair receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is a Chief Investigator at Queensland University of Technology.</span></em></p>ABC managing director Mark Scott’s recent speech to the National Press Club today had the quietly confident tone of a CEO who knows he’s leaving his organisation in broadly better shape than he found it…Brian McNair, Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/442292015-07-03T02:44:24Z2015-07-03T02:44:24ZMaking sense of Zaky Mallah<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87254/original/image-20150703-11303-ipwg8u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Calm before the storm – preparing for Q&A.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by the author</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Under wraps with my annual winter cold much of this week, I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on the Q&A/Zaky Mallah affair. I’ve read the angry columns and editorials, heard politicians declare their deep disappointment with the ABC, and most recently, former ABC managers such as Ian McGarrity have been <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/zaky-mallahs-valid-question-discounted-by-his-qa-presence/story-e6frg6zo-1227425839666">giving their view on the merits or otherwise of Mallah’s appearance</a>. </p>
<p>One studio member from the night in question was <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/abc-scandal-zaky-mallah-had-previous-invitations-to-qa/story-fna045gd-1227419158939">quoted</a> complaining that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… a potentially irrational man was loose and the ABC allowed that to occur without giving me a choice to absent myself.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I won’t engage here with all of the criticisms and condemnations made of Mark Scott, or Tony Jones, or Peter McEvoy, many of them rooted in partisan hatred of the ABC and all it stands for. Errors of process and editorial oversight were clearly made to enable an extreme religionist who jokes about “gangbanging” female journalists to come on live TV and say something stupid to an elected member of parliament. </p>
<p>Those mistakes were acknowledged by the ABC, and one assumes that appropriate lessons are being learned. Such errors happen, though, in all media organisations from time to time. Other media outlets, including The Australian, have worked with Mallah (and paid him). </p>
<p>These appearances, it’s true, have usually been pre-recorded or subject to editing, as opposed to Q&A’s live transmission. But it is precisely the capacity for unpredictability and unscripted spontaneity that gives a format such as Q&A much of its appeal. </p>
<p>In a world of professionalised political communication, Q&A is a rare media space where ministerial spin doctors are necessarily left at the studio door. Expert panels often include people other than career politicians, who are encouraged to speak their minds rather than tow a party line. </p>
<p>Audiences are largely self-selecting individuals who care about politics and public affairs enough to give up their Monday evening and join 100 of their fellow citizens for an hour of live debate. I’ve done it myself, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. On that occasion, American movie actor James Cromwell was on the panel, and some of his comments were very refreshing by comparison with the scripted messaging of the pollies sitting alongside. </p>
<p>But that kind of “liveness” carries risks. Regarding Zaky Mallah, it might be agreed that the benefits to the producers of being seen to be inclusive even towards the most extreme Islamist viewpoints in Australia – something we’re all asked to do to varying degrees, in the name of conciliation and coexistence – were outweighed by the costs of enraging the anti-public service media lobby. </p>
<p>Last week, in the immediate aftermath of the show, I <a href="https://theconversation.com/dont-fear-difficult-debates-on-qanda-43773">suggested that</a>, for all Mallah’s views are offensive to reasonable people everywhere, and certainly to me, hiding them away or censoring them won’t help win the battle of ideas. Better out than in, one might say, where we can see what we’re up against. And where better to see and hear it than on live national TV? </p>
<p>Australia’s is a vibrant, noisy democracy, and its political culture can be rowdy and unruly, just like the Q&A audience on occasion. Sometimes, the balance between free expression and public offence is delicate. Sometimes that line gets crossed, and live TV is of course especially vulnerable to grandstanding by ideologues and narcissists. But we should always err on the side of caution before calling for “heads to roll” because someone says something in the media we don’t like or agree with. Leave that approach to the Islamic State boys. </p>
<p>That said, there are two big issues arising from the Mallah affair, it seems to me, which are related, and are not going to go away in the short-to-medium term. </p>
<p>One is that of the ABC’s alleged “bias”, as exemplified by the inclusion of a radical Islamist on Q&A. This argument has long been a staple of the privately owned media, and News Corp titles in particular, whose columnists and pundits characterise the ABC’s journalistic culture as “left-of-centre”, or “liberal”, or even worse, “lefty liberal”. </p>
<p>If there is a bias at the ABC, it’s not to the left in any sense that I recognise. The Killing Season, just completed, was an evisceration of the ALP’s incompetence and cowardice over six years and two prime ministerial spills. </p>
<p>Did the ABC give the ALP an easy ride between 2007 and 2013? In this context, I think the boycott of Q&A by Janet Albrechtsen and others is self-defeating. I for one want to hear her on the ABC, and agree totally that the panel needs a full range of opinions on every issue it discusses.</p>
<p>The more ideological a political actor is, the more he or she perceives public service media to be biased against them. This is true of both left and right on the spectrum. It’s true of the Greens, and the trots, and Rise Up Australia, and Islamists like Mallah. It’s true of the BBC in the UK, accused of bias by the Scottish nationalists because they lost their referendum, and of bias by the unionists who thought the SNP got off too lightly on policy scrutiny. </p>
<p>What the ABC can be guilty of, for sure, is a bias towards cosy consensus, inclusive reasonableness, social democratic values of the type that drove its founding and ethos, and which are not in themselves “left” but which have defined Australia for much of the past century. </p>
<p>The ABC is biased towards a view of one nation, albeit an increasingly multicultural nation, engaged in rational debate for the benefit of the society as a whole. On that Monday in Sydney, Q&A’s producers deemed that vision to include Mallah. </p>
<p>And here is the second big issue – how does a liberal media culture committed to pluralism engage with and include representatives of Islamic fundamentalist ideology in a public domain which they openly despise and would close down if they could? </p>
<p>How does the ABC in particular, charged with representing the diversity of all Australians, manage this intensifying clash of cultures, enabling moderate Muslims as a whole to feel included in the national debate, while signalling clearly its intolerance of someone like Mallah’s extremism?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/44229/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brian McNair receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Under wraps with my annual winter cold much of this week, I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on the Q&A/Zaky Mallah affair. I’ve read the angry columns and editorials, heard politicians declare their…Brian McNair, Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/345362014-11-24T19:38:28Z2014-11-24T19:38:28ZIs this the beginning of the end of the ABC as we know it?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65303/original/image-20141124-19618-1xwccm8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">ABC boss Mark Scott is strengthening the broadcaster's digital offerings in response to budget cuts – a template established by the BBC.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>While Australia’s elected representatives <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tony-abbott-denies-breaking-promise-on-the-abc-we-have-fundamentally-kept-faith-of-voters-20141124-11sucm.html">argue</a> over what then-opposition leader Tony Abbott meant when he <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN-hbWVXsyE">promised</a> “no cuts to the ABC, or SBS” the night before the last election, directly to the electorate, while advertising himself as a leader who could be trusted not to break his promises, the cuts <a href="http://www.minister.communications.gov.au/malcolm_turnbull/news/national_broadcasters_to_implement_efficiency_measures#.VGwOtimSyCU">are in</a> and the <a href="http://about.abc.net.au/our-abc-our-future/">announcements</a> of what form they will take at the ABC have been made.</p>
<p>Most had been heavily trailed last week, but now we know for sure that some 400 jobs will go because of these cuts. Regional facilities will be closed, services and programs will be cancelled or, in Lateline’s case, moved to ABC News 24. ABC websites will be rationalised, with 100 or so earmarked for the chop. State-based sports broadcasting will go, along with the state editions of 7.30.</p>
<p>It’s a catastrophe for those ABC employees whose jobs are in the firing line. They will now prepare to join the ranks of the thousands let go by the commercial media in the last three years. Some will be redeployed, Scott assures his staff. Nonetheless, 10% is a big chunk of the workforce. Even if the emphasis will be on what are implied to be less-than-essential management and administration posts – in an attempt to limit the damage to content while responding to government <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/abc-too-sydney-centric-says-exjournalist-mp-sarah-henderson-20141121-11rkvg.html">claims</a> that the ABC is flabby and inefficient – this is a major loss of human resources. </p>
<p>But the ABC is bigger than its individual employees, and job cuts in themselves are sometimes necessary for the longer-term sustainability of such institutions. No sector, public service media included, is exempt from those processes.</p>
<p>After all the speculation of recent months and weeks, then, after the leaks and the speeches, the lobbying by supporters and opponents of public service media and the pressures from government, where does this leave the ABC? Are we seeing a necessary step in the digitally driven rationalisation of a 20th-century analogue monster, necessary to make it fit for purpose in the 21st? Or is this the beginning of the end of the ABC as we know it?</p>
<p>To listen to ABC managing director Mark Scott as he defended his decisions, there’s little doubt that he wants Australians to see these cuts and the changes they force on the ABC as the former - painful adjustments to changing realities, but in the end good for the public service patient.</p>
<p>The ABC has successfully moved into 24-hour news and content streaming, Scott stresses, through ABC News 24 and iView – two developments which he is clearly very proud of and determined to build on. The future is online, and in real time, interactive and participatory, and it is bright. To signal the direction of change, the ABC will create a “Digital Network Division”.</p>
<p>With this strategy, Scott is following the template established by the BBC when faced with similar financial pressures in the last decade. This is to go on the offensive, resist the private competitors who dispute your right to play the online and 24-hour news game, and confirm without apology that your public service remit extends to the digital platforms increasingly used by Australian audiences for their TV and radio consumption. </p>
<p>Play to the ABC’s popularity, in other words, and to the rise of a demographic for whom mobile platforms are more and more important as a source of news, information, entertainment and every other form of content. The ABC should be about cutting-edge digital innovation if it is to retain its place at the heart of Australia’s cultural life. </p>
<p>In all of this, Scott is articulating the only viable strategy for all public service media organisations – no retreat to the cultural ghetto demanded by the big private interests and their supporters in the News Corp media, but in the avant garde of digital innovation, harnessing its vast potential for public good. </p>
<p>But if digital is the big winner in this round of cuts and restructuring, the big loser would appear to be the ABC’s regional infrastructure. Radio services are being closed in five locations. TV production in Adelaide (though not news and current affairs) is being wound down. The state editions of 7.30 will be replaced by a national current affairs magazine show in the same slot. </p>
<p>The impression given is of a substantial thinning out of the rural and regional editorial resource base, and a creeping metro-centralism as more and more production is concentrated <a href="https://theconversation.com/abc-cuts-a-tale-of-two-australias-sydney-melbourne-and-also-rans-34424">in Sydney and Melbourne</a>.</p>
<p>On the other hand, a new Regional Division is promised. This body, importantly led by someone who doesn’t live in Sydney, will play a strategic role in co-ordinating regional resources to improve coverage and content. As such, it is argued that the closure of a radio station in Nowra – or the axing of Radio National’s Bush Telegraph – is less important than the establishment of a new strategic approach which harnesses the power of digital technology to better serve the vast and sparsely populated Australian continent.</p>
<p>This is a risky approach. It has already generated fierce criticism from those who fear any change as the thin end of an ideologically shaped wedge. Cutting state sports coverage is also going to be unpopular. </p>
<p>However, Scott insists that these and other cuts will not damage the ABC’s capacity to fulfil its public service remit, within which the provision of quality regional and rural news and current affairs is a core element. Programs and schedules evolve all the time, for many reasons other than financial. Scott seems genuinely to believe that the democratising, decentralising, participatory potentials of digital tools will strengthen rural and regional services rather than undermine them. </p>
<p>In the end, and with an anti-ABC government in charge, Australians who value public service have little choice but to trust Scott, whose personal and professional commitment to the public service media ethos is real. </p>
<p>Having been confronted with a hostile government on the attack, Scott now faces his final challenge as managing director – to lead the ABC through implementation of these cuts in such a way that his positive vision of the future of Australian public service media is realised.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34536/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brian McNair receives funding from the Australian Research Council</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Swift does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>While Australia’s elected representatives argue over what then-opposition leader Tony Abbott meant when he promised “no cuts to the ABC, or SBS” the night before the last election, directly to the electorate…Brian McNair, Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication, Queensland University of TechnologyAdam Swift, Senior Research Associate, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/295252014-08-15T05:26:22Z2014-08-15T05:26:22Z‘It’s our ABC’<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/56585/original/98n6cbfj-1408078096.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/56585/original/98n6cbfj-1408078096.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56585/original/98n6cbfj-1408078096.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56585/original/98n6cbfj-1408078096.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56585/original/98n6cbfj-1408078096.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56585/original/98n6cbfj-1408078096.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/56585/original/98n6cbfj-1408078096.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the day that the ABC released the results of a Newspoll survey on attitudes to the corporation, managing director Mark Scott addressed students at QUT with the message, ‘It’s our ABC’! ‘Us’ being the Australian public, of whom 84% regard the ABC as valuable, according to the Newspoll survey. </p>
<p>In a significant rebuff to the vociferous critics of the ABC in some of the commercial media, the poll found that only 9% of Australians thought it was not doing a good job. </p>
<p>Interestingly, Sky News headlined a story about Scott’s speech thus: <a href="http://www.skynews.com.au/news/national/2014/08/15/abc-boss-hits-out-at-newspoll.html">‘ABC boss hits out at Newspoll’</a>. Speaking as someone who was there, that seems a curious angle to take. </p>
<p>Even curiouser, the 84% approval figure was not reported in this item. </p>
<p>Far from hitting out at Newspoll, Scott used the survey results to attack those critics of the ABC who challenge its legitimacy and seek to undermine its public service status; those such as Queensland senator James McGrath, who has proposed selling off Triple J and other ABC assets. Scott conceded that there were too many websites at the ABC, too much of a long tail in the digital space, suggesting that there may be a shrinkage of its online presence down the track.</p>
<p>But when questioned about which parts of the ABC, if any, he would choose to sell off, Scott rejected the notion of privatisation. </p>
<p>Why? ‘It’s our ABC’, as the Newspoll survey shows, and as Scott was clearly proud to assert with reference to hard numbers; the Australian public’s ABC, that is, and notwithstanding the noise made to the contrary by influential controversialists, there appears to be no public appetite for dismantling the corporation to the benefit of the commercial sector. </p>
<p>But Scott’s speech was frank and clear on the need for change within the ABC. There ‘can be no room for hubris or complacency’, as he put it. He quoted Lampudesa’s The Leopard to suggest that ‘if we want things to stay as they are, things need to change’. </p>
<p>If the ABC, in other words, wishes to survive and prosper in the digital era, to retain its privileged place in the affections of the Australian people, it must adapt and innovate to the needs and expectations of an increasingly mobile, lean-forward audience who watch and listen to their media content on smart phones and tablets, rather than TVs and radio; who want to interact with that content, to share it, and also to participate in its creation. </p>
<p>All of this, Scott insists, the ABC understands and must address in its strategic decisions around content provision. </p>
<p>Scott noted, for example, that while the ABC dominates the children’s market with programs such as Peppa Pig, and the over-50s market – ‘We own the rest homes’, he proclaimed with a smile – the 20-50 demographic was less secure. How do we address that gap, he asked. There was no answer to that question in the speech, but neither was there any doubt that an answer must be found, if public support and funding are to be preserved in the years and decades ahead. </p>
<p>Scott repeated the notion that the ABC is not an organisation which exists only to fill gaps in the commercial content marketplace, although it must certainly provide important content in the public interest which the profit-driven media fail to deliver, such as children’s programming, or arts, religious and science coverage. </p>
<p>But Scott cited the success of digital catch-up service iView, and Kitchen Cabinet on TV, as models for the kind of innovative, engaging, relevant ABC he wished to see going forward.</p>
<p>In some ways the speech could be read as an appeal to the ABC’s more ideologically minded critics to respect its place at the heart of Australia’s national culture, and to get the message of the Newspoll survey. Public and private media have co-existed for decades, he pointed out, usually without rancour or excessive rivalry. This appears to be what the Australian audience wants, so let’s get on with it. </p>
<p>We’ll see if this appeal to reason and evidence impacts where it matters on the current debate around the ABC’s future funding and role. If peppa pigs could fly, maybe.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/29525/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
On the day that the ABC released the results of a Newspoll survey on attitudes to the corporation, managing director Mark Scott addressed students at QUT with the message, ‘It’s our ABC’! ‘Us’ being the…Brian McNair, Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/213042013-12-11T04:10:14Z2013-12-11T04:10:14ZABC could learn from BBC realpolitik over spy leak fallout<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/37319/original/dx4dm8vb-1386649544.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Known for good political antennae, ABC chief Mark Scott has come under fire for his decisions around the Snowden spying leaks.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The current stoush between the ABC and the government sees two competing perspectives on the role of public service media in play.</p>
<p>The Coalition, on the one hand, regards the ABC as duty bound to serve Australia’s national interests in its news coverage of stories like the Indonesian spying revelations. </p>
<p>As government of the day, it takes upon itself the right to determine what the national interest is – in this case, not having Australia’s intelligence efforts against foreign governments made public, and certainly not in cooperation with The Guardian, a private news organisation with a global reputation as a progressive, left-of-centre outlet.</p>
<p>The managers of the ABC, on the other hand, define the national interest to be broader than whatever the current government says it is, implying that it may include blowing the whistle on the state security apparatus, in the event that the spooks have behaved inappropriately, illegally or both. </p>
<p>The ABC, <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-03/abc27s-mark-scott-hits-back-at-australian-over-bromance-spy-st/5131014">says Mark Scott</a>, must have editorial independence in making this judgement, and cannot be seen to be dictated to by any government, regardless of ideological complexion. He says the ABC’s independence is crucial to the performance of its public service role, and to the ongoing credibility of its journalism.</p>
<h2>This isn’t partisan</h2>
<p>Had the Snowden revelations appeared during the Gillard-Rudd years – recalling that the ALP was in charge when the spying on Indonesia’s president is reported to have occurred – the response would have been more or less of the same: angry criticism from the prime minister, directed toward an organisation perceived to be unruly and disloyal.</p>
<p>In the UK, interestingly, the worst clashes between the public service BBC and the government over the former’s journalism happened under New Labour, during the war in Iraq. </p>
<p>Andrew Gilligan’s 2003 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/09/Iraqandthemedia.bbc">reportage of the allegedly “sexed up dossier” which gave Blair’s government justification to invade Iraq</a> was <a href="http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/domestic_politics/alastair%2Bcampbell%2Bversus%2Bandrew%2Bgilligan/3498447.html">condemned by Tony Blair’s communication director Alistair Campbell</a> and others. </p>
<p>The fallout saw the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/jul/19/guardianobituaries.iraq">suicide of the whistleblower</a>, and <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3448943.stm">the resignation of the BBC’s Director General and Chairman</a> in what was the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3437471.stm">worst political crisis in the BBC’s 90 year history</a>.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/37321/original/jrdj5py4-1386649769.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/37321/original/jrdj5py4-1386649769.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/37321/original/jrdj5py4-1386649769.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/37321/original/jrdj5py4-1386649769.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/37321/original/jrdj5py4-1386649769.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/37321/original/jrdj5py4-1386649769.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/37321/original/jrdj5py4-1386649769.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former Director General of the BBC Greg Dyke leaving the BBC in January 2004. He resigned after heavy criticism of the BBC’s editorial decisions.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Jeff Overs</span></span>
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<p>So this is not a left-right issue. Recent research has shown slightly <a href="https://theconversation.com/whose-views-skew-the-news-media-chiefs-ready-to-vote-out-labor-while-reporters-lean-left-13995">more News Corp journalists than ABC staff support the ALP</a>. </p>
<p>Nor is it only a consequence of a conservative right-of-centre government wishing to have a pop at the public service (although Abbott and his colleagues do enjoy a bit of that when the opportunity comes along). </p>
<p>And can the fact that News Corp media are <a href="http://blogs.abc.net.au/nsw/2013/12/news-limited-steps-up-criticism-of-the-abc-fairfax-commentator-mike-carlton.html">engaged in a propaganda war against the ABC</a>, as they <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8227915.stm">have been in the UK against the BBC</a>, is not good enough reason to dismiss the critics as motivated by the financial interests of the Murdoch family.</p>
<h2>Legitimate questions</h2>
<p>The ABC is publicly funded, and does therefore have special duties and responsibilities over and above the commercial news media. </p>
<p>It is legitimate to ask if those responsibilities permit collaboration with a foreign news organisation to report a US whistleblower’s allegations about the Australian secret service’s spying operations on a close and powerful neighbour like Indonesia.</p>
<p>I say that as a strong believer in the democratic importance of public broadcasting, and public service journalism in particular. I’ll happily pay my taxes to support the ABC, as I did the BBC, on the basis that it is excellent value when compared to the cost of pay-TV subscriptions. </p>
<p>In the UK, Sky charges nearly four times as much for a yearly subscription as the cost of the BBC licence fee (the equivalent of about A$200 a year).</p>
<p>More importantly, public broadcasters are key to the kind of consensual political culture enjoyed in Australia, where fairness, balance and a degree of journalistic impartiality are rightly regarded as essential underpinnings of pluralism and multi-party democracy.</p>
<p>The privately-owned news media is also an integral part of any democracy, but the news and journalism on which we all rely for information and analysis of events should not be the exclusive plaything of billionaires, which is what would happen in Australia if the ABC was marginalised or abolished.</p>
<p>To avoid that, the ABC must take care to preserve its special place in the hearts and minds of the Australia people. In the current stoush it must justify its reportage of sensitive matters which may indeed impact on national security, and be very clear that it is on the right side of the argument. </p>
<p>The stakes are too high for mistakes, and the enemies of public service media too powerful and cocky at this stage in the political cycle to be given a shot at an open goal.</p>
<p>After the Gilligan controversy in the UK the BBC was muted, and remains so, not least because of its <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20286888">obvious failings in the Jimmy Savile scandal</a>. Its managers know how close the broadcaster came to a catastrophic loss of political confidence in 2003/04, and how vulnerable they remain at a time of financial austerity and wholesale cuts to the public services.</p>
<p>ABC managers know that they too are vulnerable to the cost-cutting agenda of a right-wing pro-market government, and cannot afford to take the moral high ground without regard to the bigger political picture. It is not a time for offending the Coalition, or even being vulnerable to the accusation of same.</p>
<h2>On reflection</h2>
<p>The ABC must be scrupulously even-handed in its collaborations with the private sector. Co-productions and commercial partnerships on infrastructure are one thing – explosive journalistic exposes are another. The BBC, I suspect, would not have partnered with The Guardian on a story like this. </p>
<p>Its 2012 partnership with the non-profit Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in which false allegations of child abuse were made against a senior Conservative politician, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20277732">led to major errors, libel accusations and further political crisis for the broadcaster</a> in the wake of the Savile affair.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/37322/original/2d7y9pcr-1386650042.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/37322/original/2d7y9pcr-1386650042.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/37322/original/2d7y9pcr-1386650042.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/37322/original/2d7y9pcr-1386650042.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/37322/original/2d7y9pcr-1386650042.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/37322/original/2d7y9pcr-1386650042.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/37322/original/2d7y9pcr-1386650042.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">George Entwistle, another former BBC Director General, surrounded by reporters and police after resigned from his position in the wake of a BBC Newsnight documentary report on child abuse.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Facundo Arrizabalaga</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The ABC, in partnering with the Guardian Australia, is not accused of journalistic failure like the BBC, but of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/01/abbott-criticises-abc-guardian-australia-spying">raising the profile and commercial prospects of the latter</a>. Is it the job of a public service broadcaster, ask the critics, to work so closely with one commercial outlet in a crowded market of struggling private providers?</p>
<p>The ABC should perhaps have contented itself with reporting the Guardian revelations second hand. That horse has bolted, however, so it might be prudent for the organisation to demonstrate soon that it can work in a similar way with News Corp Australia or Fairfax – that is, to cooperate in breaking a story that the powerful don’t want the Australian public to know about.</p>
<p>But the government is wrong to suggest that for the ABC even to report this story, with or without a partnership with The Guardian, is somehow un-Australian. </p>
<p>On the contrary, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/03/rusbridger-home-affairs-nsa-key-exchanges">as Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger insisted in London last week when asked if he “loved his country”</a>, it is an entirely patriotic thing to blow the whistle on unaccountable national security agencies when they begin to infringe on individual freedoms and privacy rights. </p>
<p>The real damage to the national interest would be in ignoring Snowden on the assurances of the spymasters that, actually, everything is okay.</p>
<p>As long as no actual harm was done to Australian security personnel in vulnerable situations overseas or at home, there is no reason why this story shouldn’t have been told by the ABC. All over the world the NSA leaks have prompted high level reflection on the checks and balances which exist to rein in our intelligence agencies, and to prevent creeping authoritarianism.</p>
<p>But the ABC also has to think about realpolitik, and the risks of being seen to be in any sense partisan. Its survival matters too much to us all.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/21304/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brian McNair does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The current stoush between the ABC and the government sees two competing perspectives on the role of public service media in play. The Coalition, on the one hand, regards the ABC as duty bound to serve…Brian McNair, Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.