The ABC is in crisis — again — caught between rushing into the future and jerking back into the past. And it looks like the corporation is trying to square that circle with a Back to the Future strategic remake.
It wants to lean into the “broad” of broadcasting — twentieth-century style — through either its linear radio and television frequencies or streaming through its apps, iview and ABC Listen. In comes “premium Australian screen content”, per managing director Hugh Marks, and more “high-end programs and political documentaries”, per news director Justin Stevens.
“Marks takes ABC back to basics,” crowed The Australian in not one but two editorials, with a call that “reflects the instincts of a career spent in commercial media”.
There’s a good rule of thumb at the ABC: if News Corp likes what you’re doing, it’s probably the wrong thing.
The strategy is, in philosophical terms, a category error — the sort you get when the national broadcaster puts a commercial hammer in charge of the delicate knowledge-making network that is the ABC. All of a sudden, diffuse cultural creativity becomes just so many nails to be hammered into the planks of a mass medium.
This is a global trend across legacy media. Call it the TikTok punt: a wager that audiences will congeal around compelling quality from a few mass channels — distributed via over-the-air broadcast or over-the-top streaming — rather than the rawer, interactive real or virtual communities that shaped the social web 2.0 of the early century.
Will it work? Maybe. But can it offer the “national campfire” — the “stronger sense of national community” — that chair Kim Williams says should be the ABC’s focus? Colour me sceptical, for news and journalism at least.
By axing the long-faltering Q+A — following the 2023 shuttering of The Drum on TV and the 2016 close of The Drum website — out goes the ABC’s two-decade experiment, spearheaded by former managing director Mark Scott, in platforming a diversity of opinion (other than the usual political and other elite talking points on high rotation on News 24).
In comes more broadcastable TV content (including more “commissioned” journalism), more broadcast-like streamables of podcasting, and more chasing audiences in linear metropolitan radio, er, sorry, “audio”. Oh, and fewer jobs, of course.
“Commissioned” is a tell. Back in the late 1980s, Williams was one of the key players in the film industry’s successful campaign to urge the ABC (under then managing director David Hill) to first co-produce, then outsource, its drama production. It worked creatively (think Brides of Christ) but not, for the ABC, financially (think Bluey, where profits go to the BBC rights-holder).
News has always been held in-house, particularly since a commercialisation scandal over lifestyle programming in the mid-90s brought the nascent Greens and Liberals together in a parliamentary inquiry to bash ABC management (and, in particular, Hill). That looks like it’s changing.
Hugh Marks’ play is a rewind to the split between chair Justin Stevens and managing director Michelle Guthrie back in 2018 (a couple of centuries ago in media disruption terms). At the time, Guthrie’s personal failings were widely leaked: not the sort of insider-y “good bloke” the creative workforce needed, apparently, while in a no-good-deed-goes-unpunished way, her clean out of the ABC’s top-heavy management left her isolated on the executive floor.
Strategy-wise, the fall-out was about a resource choice between digital distribution (and the sort of diverse fragmentary content it demands) and streaming (which largely time-shifts linear content). Context-wise, it happened as News Corp was re-cranking yet another war on the ABC, and Liberal extremists were urging its privatisation.
The result was funding a bit of both digital distribution and streaming, but neither with enough to compete with the increasingly desperate online plays by News Corp’s digital mastheads and Foxtel, or Nine’s Stan and 9Now.
The problem with doubling down on the mass-ness of your own proprietary channels showed up in last week’s 2025 Digital News Report: that’s precisely where most — particularly young — Australians aren’t. Most of us are over on social media getting our news. What does best there? The sort of programming (like, um, Q+A) that leans into cut-ups and viral moments that drive public debate.
In the media-everywhere environment we now live in, the ABC needs to engage with the fragmented, diverse communities that make up modern Australia, reaching audiences where they are. Trouble is, for the past century’s mass media mindset, fragments don’t scale. But if the ABC wants to get a sense of the power of the small, it could look no further than the impact of the ABC-adjacent, more-than-a-podcast Chat 10 Looks 3, presented independently by Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales.
The media world is in a tumult, and the ABC doesn’t have time to waste. If the broadcaster wants a real future, maybe it should start with Silicon Valley’s (in)famous “move fast and break things” mantra. The first thing to break? Hugh Marks’ contract. It’s not personal — it’s just not going to work.
Not many ABC heads last the distance, if that’s any comfort. Breaking Marks’ contract will just save some time.