Mark Scott’s year of living dangerously

Woolly Days' Australian media personality for 2009 is the CEO of the ABC, Mark Scott. Scott has led the ABC for the best part of five years but it is only in the last 12 months that he has established himself as one of the major figures in the Australian media landscape, and is proving to be a formidable opponent to older players.

Scott is a former Liberal Party staffer who was appointed ABC boss in 2005 aged just 42. He resigned a role as editorial director at Fairfax to take the ABC job. At the time Scott was forced to deny he is a creature of the Howard government saying “I have a cordial, nodding relationship I suppose with the [then] Prime Minister and the minister, but no more than that.”

Scott has proved an able non-political servant. He effortlessly survived the transition to Labor Government in 2007 and now seems to have an important ally in Communications minister Stephen Conroy.

The media landscape now looks very different to how it appeared when Scott first took over the ABC. Kerry Packer died and his beloved television channel was sold off to anonymous private equity firms. The alliance with Conroy has seen significant increase in funding and an end to government distrust of the ABC. The gradual ubiquity of broadband is seeing ABC take an important lead in the rollout of digital services. Scott himself was in the vanguard of ABC take-up of Twitter most notably used to give out Victorian bushfire information in February.

Scott was also able to put in place a structure underneath him he could trust. His two new trusty lieutenants were Kate Dundas and Kate Torney. Dundas was appointed head of radio while Torney was the new head of news. Torney’s role would be to carry out Scott’s vision for ABC News as “the seeds of a 24 hour news channel”. Dundas’s job would not only mean looking after the five stations (Radio National, NewsRadio, JJJ, Classic FM and local radio) but also making sure their content was available as a media-rich service together with podcasting, user-generated content and other integration with the internet. Dundas also picked up digital radio which went online on 1 July. This was in line with Scott’s statement from April: “No other media organisation is doing more with user‐generated content or using the web more to encourage robust local content.”

Possibly the most important action of the year was the renewal of ABC’s triennial funding. The 2009 federal budget gave an additional $185m to the two non-commercial stations, the lion’s share going to the ABC. It included $15 million to set up 50 regional broadband websites linked to local radio stations to create “virtual town squares for communities”.

Digital television is also a crucial piece of the jigsaw. ABC has set the pace with ABC2 around since 2005. This year finally saw the challenge of the other operators with One, SBS2, Go and SevenTwo all debuting on air. But ABC hit back in December launching ABC3 as the nation’s first children’s channel.

Also at the end of the year, Scott consolidated ABC online opinion into a new site called The Drum (a symbol also used in marketing by JJJ). He headhunted Crikey.com.au editor Jonathan Green to run it and populated it with articles from ABC’s stable of political journalists. The new star in the crown was Annabel Crabb whom Scott poached from the Sydney Morning Herald. Scott had long cherished the wry and shrewd sketchwork of Crabb as part of his vision to make the ABC a quality destination for digital journalism.

Scott made many notable public speeches this year but two stand out. In April he gave a remarkable Annual Media Studies Lecture at La Trobe University in Melbourne in which he showed how the global economy, the shattering structure underpinning the business model, and business blunders were forever changing the nature of media in Australia. The second, near the end of the year was the so-called “end of empire” speech. It was a direct challenge to News Ltd from a powerful man at the top of his game, in response to James Murdoch’s MacTaggart lecture in August which complained about the growing power of the BBC, and Rupert Murdoch’s China speech about the end of the age of the Internet free ride being over. Scott’s view was that News “empire” no longer has the power to dictate terms over the cost of the ride.

Scott was proving to be a tough negotiator as well as having a silver tongue. He reneged on a pay agreement with the CPSU citing the GFC as a factor and he took ABC into a cost-cutting partnership with WIN to build a shared TV presentation and control centre in Western Sydney. He also went to China in September to lobby the government allow the ABC to be carried on Chinese pay TV. Though there has been some criticism about the lack of investigative journalism in his vision, Mark Scott is proving to be a top media performer who seems to have mapped out a useful and exciting future for “your ABC”.

Media140 and Mark Scott

I’ve just finished watching ABC boss Mark Scott display his fine sense of humour for the second time in four days. Tonight I watched his flagship ABC1 channel where Scott was justifiably praising the wonderful Andrew Olle lecture given by Chaser executive producer Julian Morrow. Scott said Morrow and the Chaser team were the reason why the ABC legal team had quadrupled in size. He said Morrow was the reason for his grey hair and letters he gets from Gerard Henderson and also suggested that Morrow could afford a Lachlan Murdoch-like $23 million Sydney mansion if he was prepared to rely on his ABC salary for a thousand years. (photo of Mark Scott at Media140 by Neerav Bhatt)

The self-deprecating wit hides a very sharp brain of a man who is now probably the second most important media player in Australia (behind Lachlan’s Dad). He acknowledged Morrow's important points about primary and secondary audiences and how the ABC should react to them. He also endorsed Morrow's points about the importance of new media. The head of Australia’s foremost public broadcaster has used a number of key speeches to throw his weight behind the new media revolution and he was in zealot mode again on home turf at Ultimo on Thursday when he made the keynote speech for day 1 of Media140 Sydney. Scott’s introduction to Twitter is typical of many people’s experience (including my own) with an initial period of scepticism, followed by silence and then eventual acceptance. Scott said he signed up in late 2007 and followed just one person: Ana Marie Cox (the American political blogger who founded Wonkette).

Scott said he quickly became “bored and confused” and his interest in the tool faded away. He quoted co-founder Biz Stone's statement that "if there were two or three sentences I'd use to describe Twitter, one of them would be 'I don't know'". It wasn’t until February 2009 that he re-engaged with Twitter and “came to understand it”. Scott’s epiphany was due to the Victorian Bushfires emergency. As the scale of the devastation started to emerge on Black Saturday, the ABC local radio station 774 Melbourne’s twitter hashtag became an increasingly vital hub of information using the hashtag #bushfires. Scott praised ABC staffer Wolf Cocklin (@wolfcat) who manned the Twitter feed for three days solid passing information to and from the broadcaster, the CFA, the police and members of the public.

Inspired by WolfCat, Scott returned to Twitter and quickly became enamoured of its possibilities. But while he joked about his assiduous management of the number of his followers, he said Twitter was just a technology and it was communication that counted. He reminded the audience of the famous Henry David Thoreau quote: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

But Scott did have important things to communicate in his speech. He used the occasion to announce two new ABC online initiatives. Firstly he was commissioning 50 digital media producers help local communities to create their own content and secondly was the launch of “ABC widgets” to allow people run broadcaster news feed content from their own blogs and social media pages. As Margaret Simons noted, the issue will be whether commercial media organisations selling ads would also be allowed to use the widgets.

Scott also provided a set of four guidelines for ABC staff using social networks. These were 1) do not mix professional and personal conduct in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute 2) do not undermine work effectiveness 3) do not imply ABC endorse personal views and 4) do not disclose confidential information. The guidelines are straightforward and encourage journalists to engage with social media rather than be afraid of them.

With Murdoch-led paywalls on their way, it is crucial that ABC journalists have the right tools available to them to provide a useful free-to-net alternative for those unable (or unwilling) to afford to buy their news. As the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism notes, social media, blogs and user-generated content are not replacing journalism, but they are creating an important extra layer of information and opinion. Most people are still happy to rely on mainstream news organisations to sort fact from fiction and provide a filtered view. But these people are increasingly engaged by this information, particularly when recommended by friends or other trusted sources. With Mark Scott at the helm, it appears the ABC are well placed to become leaders in this new exciting field.

Is Rome burning? Murdoch picks a fight with the ABC

“You want sensitivity training? Don’t hang out in a newsroom, that’s your sensitivity training."
(From Overheard in the newsroom #1979)

Everyone know the media is a harsh business full of oversized egos and a well defined sense of self-importance. So when there is substantial disagreement on a major matter of media principle, it likely the bruises will be public. No noses have been bloodied yet in the big private v public access battle is playing out at the moment but it is only a matter of time. This fight is serious. Corporate media led by Murdoch want to charge for content but are aware they will leak substantial audience to publicly-owned media companies who have no intention of charging directly for content. Public enemy number one in Australia is ABC boss Mark Scott who is fast becoming a talisman for the power of new media.

The charge of Murdoch and his formidable empire is public corporations are inherent anti-competitive institutions whose funding power gives them an unfair advantage. The ABC undercuts private companies’ ability to provide content on the Internet, says Murdoch. Last week, ABC boss Mark Scott took up the cudgels and compared the empire of The Sun King to the Fall of Rome. He ridiculed News Corporation’s plan to charge for Internet content and provided a spirited defence of the national broadcaster’s right to provide "free" news to the masses.

It didn't take long for the Empire to strike back. Today a couple of News big guns took to the columns of its Australian flagship newspaper to defend their turf and attack Scott's assumptions. It was no surprise ABC’s own Media Watch would cover the “conflict” in its program tonight. As an ABC product, Media Watch is not entirely bi-partisan but it is considered an Internal Affairs watchdog and therefore usually not afraid to put the boot into its own employers.

Scott’s speech took on the challenge provided by paid content head on. His theme was end of empire. Taking his cue from Gibbons, Scott charted the progress of the media giants who are now struggling in these “desperate days” to cope with the new realities of Internet. According to media writer Margaret Simons, the Internet’s revolutionary intent is comparable to the printing press which changed religion, democracy and the organisation of societies.

Big Media still has a role to play in the revolutionary new world of the Internet but is hamstrung having has been subsumed into Big Business. There are very few people in the banks and private equity companies that understand how the media business works. In a time of crisis, they are all waiting for Murdoch because he is the only “newspaper man” left. And he is on the defensive. In Beijing he hammered the philistine bloggers and plagiarist aggregators that feast on News’s content. He also condemned the search engines that make their money from pushing around other people’s content without giving anything back to the creators. Murdoch’s son James went further and warned the public their ways must also change. It was essential for the future of independent digital journalism, he said, for a fair price to be charged for news “to people who value it”. The message was the Internet free ride was over.

But Mark Scott said that News “empire” no longer had the power to dictate terms over the cost of the ride. The audience has the power now he says, and media providers must engage with those audiences on their terms. For 15 years people have gotten used to the idea of not paying for online content and are unlikely to start wanting to pay now, he says. News Digital CEO Richard Freudenstein retorted today in Media Australia that Scott was “shielded from the commercial reality”. Freudenstein says people are willing to pay for journalism online but advertising alone won’t work on the Internet. People will pay for online content if it is relevant and delivered in ways they want, he says.

His article was accompanied by a Kudelka cartoon which shows an appreciative Prime Minister Rudd hugging Scott for thinking he had come up with a way not to require government funding. “Wayne's(Treasurer Swan) beside himself" gushed the wonkish and delighted PM, always thinking about red lines that might disappear from the $53b budget black hole. The cartoon Scott is increasingly distraught as the PM "misunderstands" what he means about free content.

But misunderstandings or not, the ABC is an important part of the culture and not likely to disappear anytime soon. News Corp can try to undermine its authority but will also have to be creative in their pay offerings. In the same edition of today's paper as Freudenstein and Kudelka's barbs, The Australian's media analyst Mark Day inted how News might implement their paywall. It would not be an old newspaper-model, he said. “They'll be more akin to social networks, a hybrid of news, services, commerce, information and entertainment designed for like-minded people or communities,” Day said. They will not be providing old content for “like-minded people” but new content. Basic news will still be free.

Simons said paying will work for some things but people will not pay for general news in countries that have strong traditions of public broadcasters (eg Australia and the UK). James Murdoch calls this issue the “dumping” of free state-sponsored content which makes it difficult for journalism to flourish on the Internet. Murdoch notes that the distinction between broadcasters and newspapers is irrelevant on the Internet and what we have now is an “all media market” (Keating’s “Princes of Print and Queens of the Screen” looks very dated 15 years later).

And if commercial organisations need to charge people for content in this new converged environment, they should not face competitors who provide the same content free courtesy of the taxpayer. James Murdoch says it is fundamental for journalism and the creative industries that public media “exist on a far, far smaller scale”. Or as the Times put it to the BBC in Chinese-fashion, they should get its tanks off our lawn.

Mark Scott says the public pays the ABC to provide distinctive content to them which they are entitled to view “free of charge”. Free to the user but not to the taxpayer. The ABC has a guaranteed $844.6m budget (2007 figures) that insulates Scott's decisions from his audience’s actual wants. The private companies must however live or die by their paid content. Media Watch says the signs are we won’t be asked to pay for what we are currently getting for free, but for new content.

Scott says one of the reasons the ABC is required is because of the abdication of news in commercial companies citing Channels Seven and Nine’s attenuated coverage of current affairs. ABC should not be crippled just to make private concerns wealthier, he says and crucially, he adds “there is no political sentiment to make this happen". Media Watch cited the $14m ABC got over four years to provide websites for regional Australia.

It interviewed APN Media boss Brendan Hopkins which questioned this strategy. APN is in direct opposition to ABC Regional as it owns 14 regional newspapers in northern NSW and Queensland (disclosure: this journalist has worked for APN and is hoping to do so again) and Hopkins says he cannot see the government supporting a model of the ABC where the cost “keeps going up”.

He says if APN think ABC is getting unfair treatment they will talk to Graeme Samuels at the ACCC and “hold them to account”. When asked whether after 75 years the ABC should even exist, Hopkins said “now is a good time to have that debate". With Margaret Simons agreeing that the ABC is now in a serious position to hurt the commercials’ business model, this argument has a long way to go. Maybe it is, as Hopkins says, time to honestly re-evaluate what is meant by “your ABC”. The Anglosphere has tended to scoff at Sarkozy’s 600m euro press interventionism in France, but how is our public broadcasting funding much different?

Mark Scott, the ABC and the future of Australian media

On Good Friday, Melbourne documentary maker John Safran went to the Philippines and emulated the feat of a more famous Jew when he had himself nailed to a cross. As well as making headlines, the stunt will also make good television for the ABC in a new series, John Safran's Race Relations to be aired later this year. It brought predictable howls of protest from vested interests in the crucifixion business. Catholic priest Gary Rawson hopes Safran did the stunt for the “right reasons” though did not specify what those reasons might be (dying for our sins? rebellion against the Romans?).

It is unlikely ABC Managing Director Mark Scott cared about those reasons (unless they were TV ratings) or indeed had Safran in mind when he gave a remarkable Annual Media Studies Lecture at La Trobe University in Melbourne on Wednesday. But perhaps Safran was reacting to one of his boss’s opening remarks: “Each month brings a new twist on this revolutionary road”. Scott’s lecture may not have been aimed at the extreme tendencies of his employees, but it was a wide-ranging and insightful look at how the “digital revolution” in the Australian media industry is playing out.

The Melbourne Age saw its own crucifixion in the speech. They said Scott’s speech painted “a bleak picture” as it predicted the death of newspapers in Melbourne and Sydney (with the Fairfax mastheads likely to lose out). And Scott should know, he worked for The Age for ten years before taking over the ABC in 2006.

But Scott’s speech was no more about The Age than it was about Safran. Scott saw three factors affecting commercial media in Australia. These were the parlous state of the global economy, the shattering structure underpinning the business model, and business blunders. The faltering economy has badly affected the media’s lifeblood: classified advertising. Normally in a recession media companies cut costs and ride out the tough times. When the good times returned, said Scott, “the staff came back, the travel plans were dusted off and the long lunch returned.” But he does not think this will happen after the current crisis ends. And that is because of the second problem: business structure.

In the past the commercial broadcasters were “remarkably lucrative oligopolies” with exclusive access to large audiences. Scott says the old style owners such as Murdoch and Packer could afford to sacrifice some profit in return for influence. Packer subsidised the Sunday program while Murdoch ran the loss-making London Times and The Australian. The trade-off was the political and cultural influence they brought to the owners. But now the moguls have lost exclusive access to the audience and fragmentation is rapidly eroding profits. “And that profit,” said Scott, “kept cover prices low, funded international and investigative journalists, cranky columnists, eccentric cartoonists…all the things that made papers great.”

The changing paradigm has led to the third of Scott’s market failures: business blunders. Private equity companies began buying up media entities when prices were still high. Fairfax has been loaded up with debt after its purchase of Rural Press. Poor media acquisition decisions have occurred overseas too. Billionaire Sam Zell purchase of The Tribune group saddled it with massive debt leading to savage cost‐cutting at iconic papers such as The LA Times.

But despite the “triple whammy” of the cyclical crunch, shattering structure and business blunders, Scott saw several grounds for optimism. He said there never has been more active debate around the future of media, the path ahead for journalism, and the search for sustainable business models. He noted initiatives such as Jay Rosen’s “Flying Seminar in the Future of News” and the ABC’s own recent Future of Quality Journalism seminar as examples as “active concern and engagement” in media issues.

Scott also says there is plenty of “bold and creative thinking” but it is happening beyond the mainstream where they are too busy “putting out fires”. But Scott was reluctant to predict too much. Newspapers face further rationalisation, he said. The fate of News Ltd may depend on the plans of Lachlan Murdoch. The proposed National Broadband Network will impact media delivery (media writer Mark Day agrees, calling it a “television killer” today) but says that Telstra will remain a major player. “It pays to watch the organisation that is set to dominate IPTV, owns half of subscription TV, and has the cash to buy a free to air channel at the drop of a hat,” he said.

Scott then spoke about his own organisation, the ABC. He described an organisation in rude health with iView, high ratings, digital channels, user-generated content and leading the way in podcasting. He pitched for further government money ahead of the ABC review and Triennial funding round later this year. “Everyone I meet in government speaks with optimism and enthusiasm about the ongoing importance of the ABC and stresses this in light of all that is happening to others in the media landscape,” he said. “I hope the dollars follow the noble sentiments.”

Scott concluded by praising the way Web 2.0 has transformed the media experience. Audience expertise is now being “injected” into the news process via Youtube and Twitter. The technological revolution means that users can exercise media choices anytime they like or on any device they want. Scott says that things may be lost as media organisations adapt to the revolution, but the effect will be “profound and transforming and empowering”. Scott ended his speech by calling the journey “a remarkable ride to an extraordinary place”.