Over 18 months ago the fearless poetry spouting leader of the ABC, Mark Scott made quite a splash about another jewel in the Ultimo crown, a so-called continuous news centre. This worthy initiative was mean to herald a 24hr news service to all Australians, not just those who are prepared to pay for Sky News. According to Scott –
A digital age service, the CNC will ultimately deliver news 24 hours a day to every outlet of the ABC
Unfortunately for the Australian public as viewers, the CNC hasn’t really delivered. Sky News has basically murdered the ABC for speed of getting news to air as tonight’s little fracas with the Liberal Party demonstrates.
In the space of an hour and a half from 7pm, the start of the National ABC bulletin, Sky were all over the story with a complete coverage of the Turnbull presser, as well a series of relevant face to face interviews with senior liberal party politicians. The ABC with a Parliamentary news bureau that dwarfs the resources of Sky could barely manage to get a stream of the Turnbull presser out. As for web content, the problem is that while the ABC journalists were busy generating text and feeding the archaic ABC web platform, Sky is going live on the bigpond site around the country.
The other problem is that the public through their taxes pay for the ABC. The Mark Scott CNC sounds fantastic but as Sky has demonstrated via Bigpond, putting a studio output on the web isn’t rocket science. Instead of grandstanding Mark Scott should do the right thing by the journalists and production staff of the ABC and give the ABC news a chance of being seen to be as good as Sky, otherwise what are we paying for?
Yes Sky are playing the continuous news cycle vs the ABC’s carefully considered and measured reporting but when news breaks, continuous coverage wins in terms of relevance. If you win an audience with breaking news, they are more likely to turn back to you the next time. Of course a complete cynic might observe that Mark Scott really isn’t interested in actually promoting journalism and news coverage at the ABC, he just wants to play tootsies with Planet Janet and her boss (who happens to own a third of Sky.)
The evidence…
