Broadcasting endures new battering

By SELWYN PARKER

If public broadcasting in Australia and New Zealand was an infant, its parents would be up for abuse.

A few months ago the board of Television New Zealand was comprehensively beaten up and the channel implicitly given a new charter to become more Kiwi-friendly, with all the internal reorganisation that will probably entail.

Now comes the turn of TVNZ's counterpart in Australia.

The ABC is in for its third battering by management in less than a decade.

This time it is at the hands of Jonathan Shier, an expatriate Aussie who was appointed the ABC's managing director despite never having had a job in public broadcasting and not having worked in Australia for 23 years.

Shier is, however, an experienced manager in British and European commercial television, and a fan of the BBC.

Late last month, after 100 days in the job, Shier, who was described by a Sydney Morning Herald commentator as "tough, highly intelligent and a bully," delivered his preliminary conclusions about the future of the ABC to sceptical staff who feared yet another upheaval.

They were not disappointed.

Shier unwrapped a vision for a more creative, less bureaucratic ABC; it is a vision which might interest the management of TVNZ.

"I see myself as a plumber who will unblock the system. The idea is to let the creative juices flow," Shier told staff inspirationally.

So far, so good. No programme-maker could argue with that.

Shier is challenging "the creatives," as he puts it, to improve the quality of content and deliver more viewers to the ABC.

The public broadcaster's 16 per cent share of television ratings was a "disgrace."

Although any talk of higher ratings worries the purists within the ABC - "Aunty" to the media - who see themselves as an oasis of intellectualism in a desert of commercialism and fear their precious network will be dumbed down, that is unlikely to happen.

"Actually being more dumb than those guys at Seven, Nine and Ten? I'd have to really work at that," says Shier, who has not lost his Aussie bluntness.

Shier clearly wants to build a culture of excellence and confidence within Aunty.

That is why he is against the out-sourcing of programme-making which, he argues, dilutes the quality.

This is an opinion which might also interest TVNZ, who seem to out-source just about everything.

All this will inevitably require yet another upheaval.

To implement his vision, Shier will divide the ABC's 4200-strong staff into two divisions - content and operations, with the latter supporting the former.

"[The creatives] should be on a pedestal; everybody else should be helping," said Shier.

Blood has already flowed in the corridors of ABC power. Eight senior executives are out, including the head of news and current affairs, the head of television, the chief programmer and the director of corporate strategy.

More blood-letting is experienced than in most publicly listed companies.

It is only three years ago that the ABC last went through this.

When the bombastic Brian Johns, a former journalist and civil servant, was running the ABC, he was forced by the Howard Government's overnight $A65 million ($83 million) cut in the channel's $A500 million ($642 million) budget to develop a "One ABC" strategy, which rolled together the production arms of television and radio. Out went an entire layer of middle management.

Hardly anybody seems to think this did much for the ABC.

And before then, the silver-tongued David Hill tried his own reorganisation with all the usual upheavals.

Shier has already unravelled One ABC and brought in his new team, which includes New Zealander Lynley Marshall, head of New Media, the ABC's digital and internal television.

David Hill's vision is long gone.

The burning question is whether Shier is just another bright-eyed preacher man who sells a new gospel and then leaves without doing much for the ABC's content, ratings or morale.

Well, Shier just might be what the ABC needs. Aunty is often criticised for its public service-type ethic and, as a commentator in the Australian put it, its "traditionally messy and fractious" organisation.

By putting creativity on a pedestal and implicitly subordinating the bureaucrats, Shier is heading down the right track.

Leaving aside the initial blood-letting, the newcomer is proposing a devolved management style which is designed to make content the king.

"It's what's on the screen and what's on the air that matters," says Shier. "Everything else, everything else is secondary."

So saying, content has been sliced up into 21 "genres" - a new word for the ABC's programme-makers. These genres are distinct categories, each with its own department.

They are so interesting they bear describing in full: arts, literature and music; Australia and the world; Australian history; business, finance and economics; children; comedy and light entertainment; consumer affairs and the law; contemporary life; drama; education; environment and natural history; ethics and beliefs ("who else is going to talk about ethics in the Australian television environment?" asks Shier); media technology and communications; news and current affairs; population and indigenous; regional and rural Australia; science and health; social history; special events; sports; youth.

Shier regrets the identification of the ABC with current affairs, in particular its politician-baiting 7.30 Report and its high-profile presenter Kerry O'Brien, who is the ABC's Paul Holmes.

"The idea that, incarnate in this programme is the entire raison d'etre of the ABC, and that what everybody else does is sort of peripheral, is not something I'm prepared to accept," Shier told staff.

Like TVNZ, the funding of the ABC underpins the issue of content.

Here, Shier does not seem to have any ideas except a yearning for the BBC model.

As he points out, the BBC receives nine times the funding of the ABC to serve a population three times the size. Plus, the Beeb receives licence fees equivalent to about $A250 ($320) a year.

The jury is, of course, still out on Shier but in the meantime it is encouraging that he looks like one of the very few ABC bosses who wants to take a back seat and hand the programme-making reins to the people.

The latest reorganisation, he says, gives staff absolute power to reinvent the ABC.

And TVNZ will be watching closely.