One of the surprises of the Sydney Festival this year was the lecture by American public radio program maker Ira Glass. It lacked the spectacle of many of the other Festival events: just a man, a microphone and an iPad. But this presenter, of a niche weekly radio program from Chicago, packed the Sydney Town Hall two times over. How come?
Audiences for traditional information media, including the nightly television news, have been contracting for years. Yet here was a reminder that something as old-fashioned as documentary radio could find a large audience that crossed international boundaries.
Speculating on the failure of traditional media to maintain audiences, Glass wondered whether the voice of broadcast news was now too formal for a world in which so much information is delivered by social media and is conversational in tone.
There’s a compelling, and for mainstream broadcasters, life or death, issue here. How does the nightly news maintain its authority while competing with all the voices in the new media? Is the traditional idea of ‘authority’ in news delivery even important any more?
The first Australian television news bulletins aired straight after the nightly religious program. God, then news. Today the news is programmed to follow game shows, infotainments and drama. Television news has evolved with the medium. It’s faster-paced, more visual and yes, more conversational than ever before. The presenter is just as likely to be a woman as a man, sometimes more likely. But the format still owes much to the earliest broadcasts.
Which makes this year’s summer schedule a fascinating experiment. Six p.m. is traditionally news time. But switch on now and on two of the five main free-to-air channels you will see news-based chat. The Drum (ABC) and The Project (Ten) aren’t the first time channels have taken an irreverent or opinionated approach to news (think Graham Kennedy and Clive Robertson and now Jon Stewart in the US). But what’s happening here is something new, even allowing for the differences in intention and approach between the two programs.
These news-talk programs are interview-based and they draw on a diverse range of people and perspectives. They are loosely structured and entertaining. But, even when packaged as comedy, as The Project is, they are very informative, giving audiences the background to stories that traditional news programs, with their short items, often can’t fit in.
There’s already considerable evidence that young viewers prefer their news packaged in less traditional, less serious, more entertaining ways. Combine that with the fact that chat-based programs come relatively cheap, and this year’s summer news and current affairs schedule may have an impact that lasts well beyond the season.
Barbara Alysen has been a reporter and producer in commercial and public-sector radio and television. She is the author of The Electronic Reporter, third edition out now from UNSW Press.
