On a hot August night in Athens in 2004, I believe I witnessed the very moment when the Seven Network turned its fortunes around. I’m not doing a Forrest Gump, with his astonishing capacity to be on the spot at key junctures of history. But in the world of television, it was a fork-in-the-road moment.
The Olympic Games were playing themselves out on shore while network owner Kerry Stokes and his corporate guests were mingling on the Silver Whisper, a huge cruiser on which the network had reserved accommodation and entertainment areas for its corporate guests, including major advertisers, sponsors and a selection of media buyers, including me.
Chequebooks had been used liberally. Waiters circled with trays of drinks, luxury meeting rooms were allocated for the most important clients, black-tie events were turned on that featured what seemed like walls of fresh oysters and prawns. The ‘Thorpedo’, Ian Thorpe, and his swimming confrere Grant Hackett mingled with the corporates. All on a boat parked in the city that had the eyes of the world on it.
And if you were the Seven Network, why wouldn’t you put on the Ritz a little? When you’ve bought the rights to broadcast the Olympics it’s good strategy to look and sound confident, and spending up on a huge boat is one way of doing it.
But amid the excitement and glamour on the cruiser there was also an air of apprehension. The network was going through tough times. The year 2004 had been brutal, with Seven at times dropping to number three in the ratings and dramatically losing revenue share. Seven continued to choke on Nine’s dust and knew it needed something dazzling to turn things around.
Could that be the Olympics? The Games had been unofficially tagged by Seven as the springboard to success. The network hoped that it would retain the massive Olympics audience rather than see the numbers drop away the day after the Games ended, as had happened before. Audience numbers falling off a cliff after the closing ceremony was not only humiliating for the broadcasting network but also bad business. It was critical that, in this year of all years, Seven leveraged its advantage.
After all, so much turned on what happened after Athens. New CEO David Leckie had arrived at Seven having been terminated by Kerry Packer for a range of reasons, one of them his support for the new ratings system OzTam, which initially reported dramatic drops in ratings for Nine. Leckie was on a mission to rebuild his one-time rival. He had overseen the purchase of two American programs, Desperate Housewives and Lost, which had been hits in the USA. It was ready to launch a new light-entertainment program called Dancing with the Stars, hosted by Daryl Somers, a Nine Network stalwart whose program Hey Hey It’s Saturday had been cancelled, leaving him hungering to prove that he was still a star and ratings magnet. Knowing Daryl, and how much the axing of Hey Hey had hurt him, I knew that much rode on the new show’s success.
Everything was in place for the network’s rebirth. All it had to do now was hope like hell that Lleyton Hewitt made the final of the Australian Open for which Seven also held the rights.
For years Kerry Stokes and I had been friends. He had been loyal to me when I was starting out, and I to him when Seven was locked in at number two, far behind the then industry behemoth Nine. This mutual loyalty had been the basis of a strong and enduring friendship.
The network had had several managing directors in five years— Kerry had fired all of them—and now David Leckie, the bullish former Nine Network boss, had been given the job of restoring Seven’s fortunes. It was just the sort of challenge Leckie loved—especially as it afforded him the opportunity to shaft the network that had shafted him. In psychology, that’s called a negative waste of energy. In television, it’s got a shorter name: sweet revenge.
Kerry and I sat down for a chat in one of the cruiser’s bars, Kerry with his glass of white wine, me with my lemon squash. We chatted briefly about the Olympics and about the ratings the coverage was drawing back in Australia. Then we talked about the new chief executive, David Leckie. ‘I’ve told David I’m not going to fire him.’
I knew at that moment Seven would be a success. Leckie was going to be given time to rebuild. He wasn’t going to have to make knee-jerk decisions about next week with a guillotine poised over his head.
From that day, things seemed to flow Seven’s way. Desperate Housewives, Lost and Dancing with the Stars were hits. Seven’s news, always the bridesmaid, started closing in on Nine’s. Seven’s Today Tonight chipped away at Nine’s A Current Affair. And Little Lleyton made the tennis final, ensuring huge ratings. The network had turned a corner.
Two years after Kerry’s fateful comment, and after many years of Nine’s dominance, Seven took over as the number-one network, to much media fanfare. Nine was finally toppled. Its reputation as the unkillable cyborg of Australian television had been shattered, and so had Seven’s as the eternal bridesmaid. In free-to-air TV, there was a new world order.
There were several reasons for this changing of the guard. One of the most important was that Nine didn’t have as clear a direction as Seven did. It was going through management changes, and it started to look inward and to look at Seven as a competitor rather than concentrating on heading forward without worrying about anyone else, as it always had. It takes several years to turn a television network around. The business of media is a bit like skiing: it takes no time to go down, but it’s a long walk back up again. Nine was slipping down the mountain fairly quickly. Seven had spent a long time getting up the mountain, and once there it was going to be hard to push it off.
But all wasn’t bad news for Nine; advertisers stayed despite its troubles. Usually advertisers will stay on longer than they normally would and not join the emerging force as soon as they can, because they tend to be conservative. They have seen that in a downturn there might be a correction and that the company will fix itself.
The re-emergence of Channel Seven was mostly based on confidence. The network had for years felt as though it was in the shadow of the dominant Nine. Then, in 2003, things started to turn around.
At the very core of the success of the modern-day Seven Network is the fact that it built certainty into the management of the business and senior management acted like an owner, which is how the Nine Network had become and remained so dominant. Kerry Packer had been the owner for most of its time, and the staff knew where they stood.
At Seven, Kerry Stokes was acting like an owner. His executives knew they had time to rebuild the network. They didn’t have to panic or make short-term decisions. The only thing you can do in the media field is build on a strong foundation. They did that, admittedly using the techniques Nine has used—a strong, early evening format, which included news and current affairs. They had some luck with the American shows they bought, such as Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy, and luck happens from time to time.
They had a strong certainty as to who and what they were. And if you are up against someone who is in some disarray about what they really want to do, you will beat them. If you don’t have an organization that works together, you’d better have something else that is going to protect you, whether that’s a long-term protected industry, big longterm contracts, an isolated, almost duopoly operation or a very weak competitor.
The Seven Network’s revival is a colourful example of how the media world is changing. When I started working in the media in the 1960s, the most influential individual in the country was the chief political correspondent of the daily newspapers and, in the case of Alan Reid, magazines (he was a star on the Packers’ Bulletin). Alan Barnes on the Age and Laurie Oakes on the Sun News Pictorial were also hugely influential. These reporters set the news agenda and, while the public largely didn’t know them because reporters weren’t as well known as they are now, they wielded extraordinary influence. Who are their successors in the twenty-first century? Well, it’s hard to go past Channel Seven’s Mel and Kochie.
Two genial family types—Mel—Melissa Doyle, cheerful, pleasant, a proud mum—and Kochie—David Koch, part finance analyst, part daggy uncle at the family lunch—are possibly the most influential media figures in Australia. Why? Because their program, Channel Seven’s Sunrise, is watched by 1.2 million viewers every day. Because Mel and Kochie connect with their audience, so that news events filter through them giving the viewer familiarity, warmth and empathy. Because fewer people are reading newspapers and magazines and watching programs featuring actual news in them, at 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Mel and Kochie are break-out media figures, celebrity phenomena driven by whiz-kid producer Adam Boland, whose program famously caught up to and then outstripped Nine’s long-established Good Morning Australia.
It’s not an earth-shatteringly original or maverick program, and Mel and Kochie celebrate their own ordinariness. And that’s the point. In a way, it’s an extension of the celebrity machine at 60 Minutes in the early days, when George and Jana and Ray and Ian wandered around the world chewing up the scenery, with the reporter as star.
So where does that leave the rest of the media and the politicians who use it?
The smart ones realized the world had changed. Former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett was at the forefront of this. While politicians traditionally would convey their message through print journalists, Kennett realized that he could take the pesky reporter out of the equation by going on the radio and speaking directly to the audience. Sure, he had to face questions every Thursday from 3AW’s Neil Mitchell—his preferred interlocutor—but it was only one journalist. The rest of them were waiting outside 3AW to see what crumbs they might gather, or inside with 3AW’s permission filming his performance. Kennett, the control freak, loved it. It did his career no harm at all until his final days as Premier when he favoured Jon Faine of the ABC’s 774 with an interview and sat there sipping his tea and refusing to answer questions. It was a terrible look, and it probably hurt him at the election three weeks later. Kennett had bitten the hand that was feeding him.
During the 2007 federal election campaign, Kevin Rudd used the media brilliantly. His Kevin07 website looked sharp and funky. By contrast, Howard welcomed viewers to his website by saying ‘Good morning’. Formal, stiff. Rudd also agreed to appear on Rove McManus’s Channel 10 program during the course of the campaign. Again, this made him look less like the career bureaucrat he was and more like a human being. By contrast, John Howard, who could have used a few votes from young people, never opened himself to the possibility of being seen as anything but the earnest and effective politician that he was. Rove’s invitations were continually rebuffed. Rove even made a running gag out of Howard’s refusal to appear on his program by training a camera on Kirribilli House, Howard’s Sydney residence, and asking anyone inside who was watching to flash some lights. When they duly did, on live national television, the studio audience laughed. Howard’s reputation with his young constituency as a fuddy-duddy was reinforced every week leading up to the November 2007 poll.
When television began, the great fear was that it would kill theatre, even radio. It didn’t. When video-cassette recorders and video shops arrived in the early 1980s, many predicted they would kill film. They didn’t. When the internet insinuated itself into all of our lives from the early 1990s, the fear then was that newspapers and the so-called old media would be threatened. So far, this prediction is the closest, especially for newspapers, such as the Age, which for years have relied on classified advertising for their healthy profits. For the once-untouchable print media empires, the internet remains a clear and present danger.
When I started my business in 1976, television was all powerful. There was no internet, no VCRs. At that time, no one and nothing threatened TV, the king of the jungle, a beast immune to any predators.
It’s all changed now. Free-to-air television is a mature industry, under siege from new technology and changing attitudes to media consumption. There are no longer any certainties about audiences, except that, for free-to-air, they are declining. All the networks—and the advertisers—know that they can no longer rely on the massive captive audiences they once had to show their programs and sell their products. The audience has dispersed—to pay TV and to the internet. Viewers are demanding—and receiving—programs when they want them, not when the networks choose to provide them. The idea of scheduling your evening around a program on television is becoming increasingly anachronistic, especially to a new generation of media consumers with low patience and high expectations.
In 2006 I delivered the Hector Crawford Memorial Lecture, named after one of the great pioneers of Australian television and a champion of ensuring a high proportion of Australian programs on television. I spoke of the challenges facing free-to-air television and said that audiences are shrinking, with the most dramatic fall (16 per cent) in the under-forty age group and a small increase (4 per cent) in those viewers over forty. Internet usage by the under-forties is double that of the over-forties. The emergence of new technology will have a big impact on free-to-air television.
For the networks, this decline was being seen in revenue. From 1995 to 2005 total television revenues increased at a lesser rate than expenditure. The networks have to choose: arrest audience decline, or further cut costs. If they choose the latter, it would be likely to have a big impact on Australian drama, which is expensive to produce.
Print media is also facing huge challenges. Circulation and readership for newspapers around the world are in decline. In the United States, almost every newspaper has suffered readership and sales declines. Many are under threat because of readers increasingly choosing to get their news from the internet. In 2009 the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer abandoned its print edition in favour of internet-only publication. The term ‘old media’ has never seemed more apt.
Media companies have responded by making hundreds of journalists redundant. I don’t see that as a disaster. Rather, I read it as a failure by the media companies to rationalize their staff periodically, thus prompting mass exits at one time. Every business has a right to tailor its workforce to its requirements. The redundancies at Fairfax Media in late 2008—when the company shed 550 staff at publications in Australia and New Zealand—were seen by the public as symbolic of a once-dominant empire whose highly paid managers were caught wrong-footed and confused when the bad times came.
But there shouldn’t be panic. There will always be newspapers in some form. Newspapers are the conscience of a society. They are the only true medium for proper in-depth investigation. The electronic and digital world will never be able to do as much as newspapers can.
It’s true, though, that newspapers will have to adapt very quickly to survive. Newspapers will have to continue to improve their websites and work out effective ways to ‘monetarise’ them—make a buck, in other words. As more people get their news from computer screens, there’s a synergy in there somewhere between old-style newspapers and their website cousins. My prediction is that if media executives can find ways to use their staff effectively and efficiently on websites, then the newspaper and the website could coexist productively.
As football coaches say, out of crisis comes opportunity. There won’t be any opportunities unless the media companies have faith in journalism. It’s good journalism that people want, and it’s good journalism that will save the media companies. They won’t be saved by being dumbed down. It’s a matter of holding their nerve and of having people in charge who understand journalism and journalists.
Fairfax got it very wrong when it appointed Professor Fred Hilmer as its chief executive. Hilmer was an academic who sounded as if he’d swallowed a management textbook. He had no empathy for or understanding of the craft of journalism. In a piece for the Monthly magazine in 2007, Gideon Haigh reviewed The Fairfax Experience, Hilmer’s memory of the period at the helm of some of Australia’s great newspapers. It was an excoriating critique, touching on how removed Hilmer was from the process of journalism itself. Here’s Hilmer from his book:
Fairfax found that the stories were being filed by journalists at the end of the day, that most were being touched up to thirty times by the writer, editors and subeditors and that a lot of this work was being done between 5 p.m.–7 p.m. … Instead of just hiring more sub-editors and leaving the Australian Financial Review to operate as it always had, the paper redefined its processes to do more work earlier in the day and to touch stories less. These actions underpinned excellent cost performance for a number of years.
‘Journalists filing at the end of the day: who knew?’ Haigh wrote.
It was a superb example of management having no clue about journalism and how it works. No wonder there’s been rocky times at Fairfax in recent years. Yet Rupert Murdoch’s News isn’t without its problems either, with declining newspaper sales worldwide and talk of further job cuts across its empire.
The difficult times won’t go away for newspapers. But I think the new regime at Fairfax will see the value of encouraging quality journalism, and I see another a hundred and fifty years ahead for the company.
The winds of change that buffet the commercial networks don’t quite reach our ABC. But that could change depending on which government is bold—or foolhardy—enough to continue to commercialize the national broadcaster.
I love the ABC. And from a man for whom television and radio commercials and the revenues that flow from them seep through my arteries, that’s high praise. I try hard to be home in time to watch the ABC television news. I am in awe of ABC-TV’s range of programming, from Andrew Denton’s often excellent interviews on Enough Rope to some of the fascinating reports on Foreign Correspondent to its lightentertainment genius Chris Lilley’s work on We Can Be Heroes and Summer Heights High and the hilarious Kath and Kim. On radio I cannot start the day without tuning into Jon Faine on 774 ABC Melbourne. Smug know-all? Love him. I hugely admire the work of political reporter Fran Kelly on Radio National. On my long drives to and from St Andrews I will flick to Classic FM to clear my head.
Occasionally I tune into Sunday Arts, hosted by Michael Veitch (who I think does a great job), and I enjoyed watching my mate Virginia Trioli’s weekly interview with an arts identity. Sometimes I catch her hosting the breakfast news show on ABC 2. She’s as good as she was on local Melbourne radio, which remains the poorer for her absence.
I am a loyal ABC consumer. And I’m sure my consumption is replicated by many thousands of others across the country. Where I might diverge from many in this group is my belief that commercials should be allowed on the ABC in a bid to boost its revenue. I don’t know why introducing advertising causes such hysterics. You can’t turn on the ABC without seeing a raft of ads anyway. Sure, they are for ABC products in its shops and centres, or upcoming programs or those, frankly, cringeworthy, ‘personal’ homilies from Kerry O’Brien and Geraldine Doogue. And there is certainly quality control about the tone of this in-house advertising. But people have got used to sitting through a block of ads.
Sometimes I have—half-jokingly—said I would like to be chairman of the ABC. I think I would do a reasonable job, but it’s probably untenable given my commercial background. But if I were chairman of the ABC for a day, I would institute ads straight away. In 2007 SBS made the huge decision to place blocks of commercials between programs rather than bookending them. Managing director Shaun Brown took some heat about it, notably in some excoriating columns by the Australian’s media writer Errol Simper. Life went on.
Changes in the media will continue at warp speed. I’m looking forward to seeing the ways in which my grandchildren use the media, from the perspective of someone with fond memories of how the words that came out of a little transistor radio in a leather case changed his life.