The ABC and Nine are showing their hand with their new appointments

How does the media code its message about itself? This past week we’ve seen one old practice at both the ABC and Nine. The outlets are using personnel as strategy, with senior appointments at each organisation flagging the big changes in Australia’s traditional media we can expect this year.

At the ABC, media watchers and staff insiders are parsing the federal government’s appointment of new chair Kim Williams, and over at Nine there’s scepticism about former Daily Mail and News Corp editor Luke McIlveen will run the once-were-Fairfax mastheads.

Both read like differing responses to the big question all traditional media face: what audiences do you want? How do you scale them, engage them and, in the case of commercial media, make money out of them?

Of course, both announcements came with the usual pabulum about quality and independence. While we should read the ABC announcement as a promise of more disruption and change, the Nine decision reads more like a reach back to its past.

The federal government plainly wanted the Williams appointment to be noticed. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was rolled out to lead a week of agenda resetting. The choice of one of the most experienced, if controversial, media renovators came paired with the usual palaver about “confidence” in the managing director David Anderson and the outgoing chair, Scott Morrison’s “captain’s pick”, Ita Buttrose. 

But step-by-step, the government has now remade the ABC board, with the Williams’ appointment following on from last year’s appointments of digital-aware board members Louise McElvogue (one of the leaders of the previous Labor government’s Convergence Review) and Nicolette Maury, along with the gift of the election by staff of Laura Tingle. 

It’s not done yet. There’s one more position to be filled later this year when the term of Malcolm Turnbull’s controversial 2014 pick of former commercial broadcast executive Peter Lewis expires. 

Albanese and Communications Minister Michelle Rowlands studiously avoided commenting on the organisation’s fumbling of the management of its younger, more diverse, staff highlighted by the Antoinette Lattouf brouhaha (although Rowland cautiously commented that “all media organisations should seek to foster diversity in all its forms”). 

Seems the PM and his minister are so “confident” in the ABC’s direction that they’ve appointed a notorious interventionist change-agent and outsider to help Anderson out. 

At the press announcement, Williams gave an early warning to the vocal change-resistant faction within the ABC, leaning on the broadcaster’s charter to point to “the necessity of being innovative and comprehensive in the approach that is taken across all of the delivery methodologies of digital media, broadcasting on television, and radio, and clearly in a lot of written information”.

Under Anderson — the only ABC insider to rise to the MD job — the organisation has been marking time on innovation, even axing some of the audience-diversifying initiatives made under former MD Mark Scott (think The Drum) in response to the continued cuts to ABC funding and the relentless bullying from both the political and media wings of Australia’s right.

For Nine, the Williams appointment had the benefit of drawing attention away from its outsider appointment of McIlveen to lead a newsroom that has (as Williams himself said of the 1990s’ ABC)  “a strong ‘antibody’ culture to new and unwelcome intruders”.

What makes McIlveen a surprise choice is in part his personal acculturation in News Corp (and Daily Mail) that sits at odds with the deeply serious Fairfax traditions. What’s more, it’s that his editing experiences of largely advertising-focused products sit at odds with the mastheads’ claimed decade-long pivot to subscriptions. 

It reads like the final triumph of the Nine mass market ad-driven culture over the traditional journalism-focused business model it inherited when Nine took over Fairfax in 2018 — or at least that’s the message it risks sending to its carefully built-up audience of 460,000 paying subscribers. 

The message: it looks like Nine reckons subscriptions have peaked. If so, it’s not alone. This weekend, The Washington Post’s new CEO Will Lewis broke free from managing a redundancy round to say publicly what plenty of masthead owners are saying privately: “My hunch is that the existing model is creaking.” (Like McIlveen, Lewis is an ex-News Corp, WaPo outsider.)

He told Semafor’s Ben Smith: ”We went from an advertising model to a subscription-based model, and that subscription-based model is now waning and then will enter a more significant period of decline.” 

According to Nine’s latest financial report, subscriptions for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age were already flat. Licensing fees from Google and Facebook courtesy of the news media bargaining code are up for review this year.

This week, the AFR reported the company was looking to sell its controlling share in Domain, the residue of Fairfax’s “rivers of gold” classified advertising business. Perhaps the message is that Nine has decided to do what it’s always done best: build mass audiences for mass advertising.