Taxpayer-subsidised media outlets have emerged as winners from this year’s budget, with funding boosts for the ABC and SBS, and continued government support for The Conversation website. And arts and culture organisations will be glad to see the money for Simon Crean’s national cultural policy being delivered despite his political demise.

The last ABC triennial funding round in 2009 stood out for big funding increases for Australian drama and children’s TV programming. In this budget, news and current affairs gets its time in the sun — as do the tech heads in mobile and online development. The ABC will receive $69.4 million in extra funding for news and current affairs over four years and $30 million over three years to expand its digital offering.

ABC managing director Mark Scott told Crikey this morning: “In a challenging budgetary environment we’re pleased with this result.”

But Scott cautions the budget carries a “mixed message” for existing staff; Aunty’s base funding — around $2.5 billion over three years — is below inflation. “Yes, we’re getting new money but it’s tied to specific areas,” he said. “Staff internally will find that budgets are pretty tight. We’ll have to save money just to stay standing still in many areas.”

Scott says the new digital money will be used to develop more apps (including for Android users), create a speedier iView catch-up service and ramp up the live streaming of ABC programs. While ABC1 won’t be streamed live because of licencing issues, web users can expect to watch more individual programs live on their PC or Mac soon.

The extra news and current affairs money will be used to recruit more journalists outside the big cities and to develop “youth-focused current affairs programming”. Scott said: “For a long time at the ABC we’ve thought that only older audiences are interested in news and [Triple J’s] Hack has shown that’s not true.”

The funding boost for news includes the $10 million announced earlier this year that will pay for a fact-checking unit, more suburban bureaux and 64 new staff (including 39 journalists).

In his interview with Crikey, Scott also flagged the development of new state-based current affairs progams, although expanding the state 7.30 programs from Fridays to five nights a week is unlikely.

“If you look across our news and current affairs offering, we have excellent national programs across TV and radio,” Scott said. “But very significant stories happen at a state and local level — maybe not of huge importance to a national audience — and we want to make sure we have a suite of programming that allows us to cover them.”

The notoriously long “well-earned” summer breaks for ABC current affairs programs will also be shortened.

SBS managing director Michael Ebeid is also happy with the result: an extra $20 million over three years on top of the $95 million funding boost in last year’s budget.

“When you add the two funding announcements together, we’re doing proportionally very well,” Ebeid told Crikey. “There’s not a lot to be disappointed about.”

Ebeid says around 70% of the new money will go to screen content — including original drama programming and news and current affairs.

Andrew Jaspan’s The Conversation website — which publishes contributions from academics — will receive an additional $2 million over the next four years. On top of the “Grattan tax” and funding from universities, the site will also receive tax-deductibility status — a decision likely to peeve rival publishers who aren’t eligible for this perk.

There was little to surprise arts and culture boffins, with no significant new announcements on top of the Creative Australia policy released by Crean in March. But the arts sector will welcome confirmation of $75 million in new funding for the Australia Council, more money for elite arts training organisations and new initiatives to encourage private sector arts funding.