public broadcasting
3 Dec 2008
The ABC Closes Its Radio Eyes
Radio National says it needs to axe Radio Eye to move with the times, but by cutting some of the best content it owns it's actually moving against them, writes Ben Byrne
As the media landscape changes, the mantra of media organisations under pressure has been about the importance of innovation. This is especially true at the ABC which invoked the innovation principle to justify the cuts it has just made to a bunch of specialist shows on Radio National.But do cuts like these help or hinder innovation at the ABC?
One of the axed shows is Radio Eye, a program which has presented some of the most innovative and entertaining radio ever heard in this country. Radio Eye was constantly doing new things in new ways — it was at the cutting edge of research into what radio could be, and took its large and committed audience with it.
The interesting thing about this audience is that it contained a large proportion of exactly the kind of young people who ABC management think they are going to connect with better by axing the show completely. One of the things audiences young and old are starting to realise (again) is that radio isn't just a medium for presenting the arts, it frequently is an art form in itself. In Australia, Radio Eye was a genuine example of excellence in this form, and so far there is nothing to replace it.
In his article "The Price Of Creative Independence At The ABC", published here on newmatilda.com, Quentin Dempster investigated the ABC's rhetoric that the cuts are part of a new trajectory for the organisation, embracing new digital broadcasting and on-demand content delivery mechanisms. Dempster rightly pointed out that "this is where the ABC management needs to recognise that platform innovation and content quality are both crucial to its success".
It is apparent that Radio National listeners are now seen by management as split between those over 50 who listen to its content via broadcast radio and those under 50 who listen to podcasts and other online content — a brutal and imprecise way of looking at your audience. Yet surely the word "content" is the key here, and regardless of the technology involved the focus must still be on the production of high quality content which responds to and fulfills the demand of Australian audiences, whatever method they use to tune in to the ABC.
Currently over half of the ABC monthly average of 3.37 million podcasts comes from Radio National, providing clear proof of the value of special program production units which are able to provide expert coverage of specific areas. Here again, Radio Eye has been one of the most innovative and successful.
Radio Eye represents exactly the type of programming suitable for podcasts, and should be recognised as a valuable source of content in the ABC's quest to embrace digital broadcasting and online content delivery.
Perhaps part of the reason management has failed to recognise the value of Radio Eye comes from a misunderstanding of how the changes to media technology can only add to the appeal of shows like Radio Eye, and build their audiences. Too often radio is seen as the medium for those in transit, including those listening to the news while rushing around the kitchen in the morning or those with the music up loud as they try to forget their work on the trip home — but the shift to on-demand content emphasises radio's other lives.
Television may have, to at least some degree, replaced the image of a family crowded around the wireless but there is little that can compete with the intimacy of listening to a well produced radio feature as it beautifully entwines the aural tradition of storytelling via the human voice with the endless possibilities of sound for creating distant, perhaps nonexistent and yet intimate places for the imagination to explore.
Some commentators (and perhaps programmers too) seem to lazily accept the stereotyped image of the boffin radio-arts listener, imagining that programs such as The Listening Room, The Night Air and Radio Eye are only followed by an exclusive group of metropolitan "radiophonics chin strokers" and bear no relevance to the broader Australian community. But this is a mistaken and increasingly out-of-date perception. I could tell you countless stories, collected from ABC staff, the ABC's online comment streams and the wider community demonstrating that these shows attract a diverse, curious and committed listenership everywhere from the heart of the suburbs to the furthest reaches of the Australian outback.
Radio Eye itself has broadcast countless programs that investigate what it is to be part of the Australian landscape, and frequently does it in a surprising, innovative and moving way. One of my favourite Radio Eye programs was Listening To The Bridge, broadcast in March 2007 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The show was produced by Harvey Broadbent with the assistance of bridge listener extraordinaire Jodi Rose. It was a show that made it possible to literally listen to the "coathanger", as the real, intimate sounds this structure makes were broadcast around Australia.
Radio National's radio arts department has a long history of producing high quality features, documentaries and experimental radio pieces that are recognised internationally perhaps even more than they are here in Australia. In the last seven years no less than six programs produced in the radio arts department of ABC Radio National have received awards at the prestigious Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago, including an Honourable Mention in the Best Documentary category for "The Search for Edna Lavilla" produced by Sharon Davis and Eurydice Aroney for Radio Eye and a Director's Choice award in the same category for Before The War It Was The War produced by Anna Burns for Street Stories last year.
The Listening Room won the coveted Prix Italia award in the Radio Music — Composed Work category for Colin Black's "The Ears Outside My Listening Room" the same year that the show was axed.
The Radio National radio arts department, and in particular programs such as Radio Eye, serve as an important breeding ground for media professionals in Australia. If anything we should be pressuring the ABC to create more positions in the radio arts to keep the outstanding talent Australia produces in this area in this country, not accepting the axe falling on such programs. Already producers of the highest calibre have been lost to this country with Jodi Rose herself now based in Berlin, others such as Sophea Lerner also overseas and countless others like Jon Rose still based in Australia but rarely producing radio programs.
People tend to wrap their own narratives around changes like the recent program cuts at Radio National, but it is important that the fate of Radio Eye, in particular, is viewed as part of a history of cuts to radio arts shows on ABC Radio National, including The Listening Room and the Deep End, as much as it is a part of a concerning trend in the Australian media or as a step in Radio National's shift toward the digital.
Essentially, as I have mentioned, the only long form radio arts show that remains as part of the Radio National schedule is the The Night Air and it is important to understand it is a remix show rather than focused on the production and broadcast of new documentary and feature works. Although I admire that show's many virtues, it is nowhere near adequate if it is expected to serve as the only broadcast outlet for Radio National's radio arts department. So that there's no confusion about this, let's be perfectly clear: however management try to spin it, the loss of Radio Eye signals the abandonment of feature length radio arts production and broadcasting on the ABC.
Truly, these cuts are astonishing, coming at a time when the rhetoric from the ABC is about shifting the focus towards more channels and on-demand content. At the very moment that so many new possibilities are emerging, the engine of innovation is being cut.
We need to acknowledge the demise of Radio Eye because it signals the death of radio arts on ABC Radio National and with it the loss of an integral part of our national broadcaster. If you have never listened to a program on Radio Eye or any of the other radio arts programs on Radio National then I urge you to do so while you still have the chance. You don't know what you're missing.
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"One of the axed shows is Radio Eye, a program which has presented some of the most innovative and entertaining radio ever heard in this country"
Ben cites one example, I believe, and as an occasional listener to ABC I have to take him at his word.
All who are interested in the ABC’s future have only until 12 Dec to submit to the Government’s ABC & SBS Review.
This review will influence the type of broadcaster the ABC becomes - whether or not the ABC will remain commercial-free and accessible to all Australians without charge.
For more information and/or a form you can complete, add your own comment to and submit to the Review, go to:
www.fabc.org.au
Glenys Stradijot
Friends of the ABC (Vic)
great article thanks ben. the other strange thing is that the ABC only put radio eye pieces online for one month and then take them down again. you’d think if they were trying to encourage a digital audience they would would want to get as much mileage as possible out of this kind of content which takes a lot of time and money to produce
OK, I did a little research:
I used the drop down menu to tell me what Radio Eye had for us in the month of January, 2008 (picked at random)
Sat 26: Kalashnikov culture
Sat 19: Two Feet and a Heartbeat
Thu 17: Return to Arnhem Land - retracing the journey of Colin Simpson
Sat 12: Persona: the Parallel Lives of Charmian Clift
Sat 05: Born Free
"Born Free" was a program about prisoners looking after endangered fauna.
"Two Feet And A Heartbeat" has a blurb which goes thus:
"With a courteous nod in the direction of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, we take to the well worn and disciplined path of the pilgrim across northern Spain. But we’re also in the company of more restricted travellers, including one man who can only stride up and down a prison cell. Walks the walkers will never forget."
Eh?
I won’t go on, brevity is an underappreciated quality, but these subjects seem like a yawn. Yes, I know it’s what you do with it, but I suspect they weren’t that interesting because the chances of finding interesting writing in Oz are very small. The country abounds with technicians and assorted other knob twiddlers, but genuinely good writers are as rare as rocking horse poo.
Even if the programs were interesting, and even if they had all gone on to win Walkleys, how would the general Australian public be persuaded to tear themselves away from Deal Or No Deal to listen in (or download) "Persona: the Parallel Lives of Charmian Clift"?
How were these programs advertised, in other words?
On ABC National, of course.
Charmian Clift, as a subject in 2008, would need to be spruiked by ad Saatchi and Saatchi-standard copywriters to get anyone on board, and don’t anyone go on about her worth (or lack of) as a subject, that’s subjective and also not the point.
Metaphorically speaking, bums on seats is what secures a program’s future, and bums on seats require investment. The ABC should be the hothouse of future writing talent and fresh, entertaining ideas and that is precisely what the ABC is not.
Glenys, I will take a look at that site immediately.
Great article, thanks Ben and new matilda for keeping watch on this subject.
The other thing about programs like Radio Eye is that it seems to feature heaps of stories from people around Australia who dont work at the ABC and are not part of the ABC establishment. Freelancers, story-tellers. Radio Eye is probably one of the few places where community voices can be crafted into work that boasts high production values and reaches a discerning national audience. Seems ironic that its targeted for restructure, when its actually an example of The People participating Mark Scott’s national "conversation".
Leo, Your comments are the result of very inadequate sampling as well as inadequate understanding of the subject. Sorry!
Two supporting examples. Radio Eye about a year ago had perhaps my favourite RN program of all time, "The Last Touch" about Studs Terkel, the truly wonderful radio broadcaster and writer of documentaries about ordinary people under ordinary and extraordinary situations including the Great Depression and the bombing of Hiroshima.
Charmian Clift was one of Australia’s very very good writers. As the wife of George Johnston she appears in Johnston’s novels (under another name) and co-authored several books as well as writing her own novels - semiautobiographical (as Cressida Morley). She is the subject of an excellent biography by Nadia Wheatley. And she is the subject of one of the extremely good episodes of the fabulous series on RN, "Life and Times".
Radio Eye is all it is described as in this article by Ben Byrne, an extremely innovative presentation about really interesting topics. As I am told by RN management (to whom I wrote) Radio Eye is going to be merged with "Street Stories". This may mean a new very good program: we will have to wait and see.
Meanwhile the real issue is how the ABC management comes to these decisions and how they are communicated.
Reaching conclusions about issues requires appropriate sampling, not simply taking the offerings of one set of five consecutive programs.
Leo,
You are way out of line pal. If we wanted to swim with the Deal Or No Deal crowd we wouldn’t have joined the country club, we would just go to Granville Pool.
If the writing you are talking about is so fresh and engaging why has it not been showcased on the Triple M morning show or by that awful Sandilands fellow? There is no place for it on Radio Eye, which is the only radio program with elbow patches.
Here are some other great RE programs your hopelessly inadequate ‘research’ failed to discover.
‘Drinking Poetry’ - For the past eighteen years viniter Keith Wardell has been transcribing poetry and placing them in oak barrels of ageing Pinot. Writers and sommeliers discuss the differing flavours; from the fruitiest of Shakespeare’s sonnets to the heavily wooded Walt Whitman.
‘Through the Listening Glass’ - Traces the relationship between the music of Phillip Glass and the use of psychotropic drugs by Lewis Carroll. Was Carroll ahead of his time or Glass yesterday’s man?
‘Faberge Dog’s Eggs’ - Giving the lie to the much used expression, Sydney artist Elaine Wang produces fine art from carefully polished canine excretia. This delicate documentry gives us an unprecedented insight into the critical and hygenic issues that arise from this practice.
Each of these shows were masterworks of subtlety and intellectual rigour. When entering the hallowed studios of the ABC, Leo, please leave your impossibly populist ideas at the door.
Des,
I know of what I speak. I’ve dealt with the ABC over many years, and the BBC, and NBC, ITV and other networks. I’ll spare you my CV.
What I’m relating to you is as close to fact as opinion can be. The ABC is grossly underfunded, and as a result it doesn’t attract talent above cadet level.
The commercial networks are run by gangsters, and that is an insult to gangsters who, by comparison, run their affairs with a great deal more integrity and compassion.
So there you have it - who would you expect to source, nurture and blood the best writing talent? The gangsters who wouldn’t show a nanosecond of Australian drama if it wasn’t for their legal obligations under the Broadcasting Services Act, or the national broadcaster itself?
Writing, and the quality of that writing, is the wellspring of all future broadcasting successes, and that well is dry. Australian content quotas were introduced in 1961, but they were (and are) all about quantity, not quality.
Any idiot who can string thirty + pages together is being hailed as the Next Big Thing by the ABC as well as the AFC, NSW Film and Television Office, Film Victoria, the PFTC, and every other bunch of time-serving bum seat shiners the length and breadth of the land.
Radio Eye and its anodyne, uninspired content is not the cause, but yet another symptom of the malaise. The patient won’t be cured by bringing it back.
Doggie,
Have you ever tried submitting to the ABC? They badly need you!
;-)
i have to disagree with you, leo. the "talent" at the ABC is rusted on. cadets and young journalists are lucky to get a foot through the door of any department other than JJJ. perhaps you are mistaking it for SBS, which seems to be firing all of its good journos because ones straight out of uni are cheaper (and more willing to sign short term contracts)?
Maybe the ABC started going to shit when they became a truely national broadcaster. I remember going to the rally to save double j at Town Hall Sydney because they had fired Biggsy and stopped playing album tracks. We knew then, so we said, that this was the first nail in the coffin of genuinely innovative and alternative radio.
I retrospect this seems like a pivotal moment. Maybe we will not get interest, variety and diversity while the ABC is trying to be all things to all people. It has become the generic ABC and can satisfy neither the innovator nor the traditionalist.
Jack, I didn’t say anyone was getting in to the ABC, I said cadet level is the only rung where any talent exists. The ABC is the broadcasting equivalent of your local Shire council, you get in because you know someone who’s already in, and having even the tip of a finger on the pulse of popular culture singles you out as a raving maniac.
I remember listening to the ABC a few years ago when, during a phone-in segment, the presenter proved her impeccable political credentials by naming the most minor local government officials - even the local dog catcher.
She then went on to introduce a musical break "let’s hear ‘It Had To Be You’ by Harry Connerick Jnr"….
Ben,
Thanks for writing about Radio Nationals Arts programs.
The two teams of producers at Radio National who currently make the programs Radio Eye and Street Stories are joining together to make a new one-hour feature program (which you’ll hear in the Radio Eye timeslot next year) and to produce an increased amount of online content. That program and its website will have a new name. There are no cuts to staff or budgets.
Both programs’s websites have offered online content of various kinds for some time, including special sites like War and Peace and Writers Train (Radio Eye) and broadcast/online projects like Street Stories’ My Street (in collaboration with RN’s Pool website).
It’s content that listeners have responded to positively, and Radio National producers have been keen to do more of it. It was hard to see how two smallish teams could do this on their own - hence the decision to join forces on a new project, and to remove a half-hour feature program (Street Stories) from the schedule.
This means that the kind of features and documentaries that you’ve heard in both programs up until now will continue in the current Radio Eye timeslot, and the producers will be exploring ways to make more online content. We hope to discover and develop ways to present online content that truly suit the nature and quality of the work.
Radio Nationals Arts programs will keep making the long-form programs you value - not just The Night Air and the new show, but also Into the Music and Hindsight (music and history features), an hour of drama in Airplay, poetry features in Poetica, and more.
- Richard Buckham (Editor Arts programs, Radio National)
Well THAT was like getting a letter from your bank manager.
But to continue:
The underfunding of the ABC is deliberate policy. The funding of the national broadcaster could be doubled tomorrow. The hated GST poured previously undreamt-of riches into the government’s coffers, an nth of that money could have been used to cash-up Auntie, as well as lottery money, a couple of dollars on our electricity bills or even cutting funding to the state film and tv development bodies would do the trick.
There are a number of ways to better fund the ABC, so why hasn’t it been done? The answer is the Government doesn’t see it as a priority, whereas it continues to throw money at film and TV "development" in the states.
The biggest mistake Australia ever made was making oodles of public money available to filmmakers in a bid to "develop" the Australian film industry. Ask any filmmaker how crucial the AFC or Film Victoria were in getting their project up? Ask doco makers how many times they filled in hundreds of pages of government forms to secure a thousand dollars of funding then hopped on a flight to promote their product and walked down the aisle past Film Victoria or AFC employees flying Business Class.
One prominent TV producer in Australia had run drunk the well dry in his home state, so he opened an office in another one so he could qualify for millions in funding. He got it, too, and his show went down the toilet.
How many Australian film or TV projects owe whatever meagre success they achieved to some genius at the Pacific Film and Television Commission or SAFC or Screen West?
These agencies are staffed by pen pushers or unsuccessful "creatives" who only aspire to mediocrity and are the modern equivalent of the patrons so roundly condemned by Johnson:
"Is not a patron sir, one who stands and watches a drowning man, only to encumber him with help when he reaches shore?"
I wouldn’t mind so much, but the bastards are on $80,000 a year.
And yet, despite our Australian content quotas and our well funded state film and TV agencies, our most successful artistic export is Bananas In Pyjamas, a kids program which was not "spotted" by some razor-sharp creative or developed by an early talent identification SWAT team.
Not only that, our schedules are awash with American programmes, much better written, and which have made it to screen with no public money.
The answer is to abolish the state funding agencies or cut their budgets so that they’re results-funded. No constant junkets to London, Paris, Cannes, New Orleans, etc with nothing to show for it apart from some US company booking a shoot on the Gold Coast Hinterland because it looks like WWII Guam. That’s not building a creative TV and Film industry, that’s pimping.
Put the money where it will do the best for Australia, take it from the useless idiots I have mentioned and divert it to the ABC. Create a writers development unit there, import the best talent from overseas to train and lecture, create a national talent identification programme. Australia would do it for its promising athletes, why not for its writers?
Oh, and I’m not ignoring those who are presently in charge at the ABC. They would have to go. Their p*ss weak performances wouldn’t inspire anyone, writers included.
No, total clearout is necessary, and you won’t attract the best (and the best at the moment means overseas) by paying peanuts.
Get the money, get the best, get results.
So ABC Radio National closes its eyes - and then on reading down further I find out it is only blinking.
Another storm in a teacup and obviously not the reason to worry about the deterioration in the standard of content broadcast on Radio National’s programs. Why waste time discussing successful transformative programs like Radio Eye and Street Stories, that should be available exclusively online and probably going commercial anyway?
But what’s most important is to keep the debate going about what the ABC’s role is in our society.
I would have thought that RN as the only fully-funded, national, public broadcaster, should be a well-informed source of information, or source of good journalism first. Secondly it should be a forum for the debate of current affairs and past and present social issues relevant to all Australians.
Thirdly it must be a music connoisseur with a wide and eclectic taste.
And finally it could be a medium for the best innovations in creative radio production, if funds allow.
I think most of you are totally missing the point.
John Howard and his crew set out to totally destroy the credibility of the ABC, as he saw it as anti-conservative, and hence anti his Government. To this end he continued the policies of reducing funding ( the Labour mob always did the same, because they saw the ABC as biting them also, occasionally) and placed his own people on the Board and in Management. Most of these people are rabid anti-Labour, anti - progressive, ultra conservative, and indeed, pretty much rat-bags. They have done a good job for Little Johnnie, but saw with the election of Rudd, and his promise to continue their tenure for the terms of their contracts (a stupid thing if I ever heard of one) a chance to complete the job before they were turfed. To do so they get rid of any brave journalist, close down any programme which actually is intelligent and makes intelligent people think, and set up dummy goals targets.
This so-called research into the future of the ABC, the collation of ideas, is garbage, because we all know that they will not take the slightest notice of anything that they do not agree with, but may well go with the ideas of some of the ultra Right ratbags who will probably be the people most likely to contribute, knowing the set- up. I actually tried looking for this web site, and could not find it.
Until Rudd does something right, which would be unusual for him, and gets rid of this mob of nutters, the ABC is doomed. Already, it’s credibility is fairly close to ZERO! You only have to listen (the pain!) to Howard Fan Fran Kelly on Breakfast Radio on Radio National to see and hear just how down-market the ABC has come.
Or maybe Geraldine Dooge on Saturday mornings? She seems mainly concerned with the health or otherwise of her share holdings. Boring, boring, boring! Man, am I sick to death of hearing about people and their share holdings. They have brought the world to the edge of chaos with their greedy playing with fudged -up figures, and we are expected to feel ever so sorry for them. The "Lassais Faire" Capitalist System is totally UNSUSTAINABLE in a finite world. The sooner we wake up to this the better, but I can see no sign of it yet. Most are still acting like sheep, being led to the slaughter.
Dazza.