You’re so correct. The regional station groups in Australia have not evolved their thinking since 2000
They need to be more aggressive creating content they own and can sell, to metro stations, Foxtel, NZ, Fetch - anywhere (think travel shows, lifestyle shows)
They need to be more aggressive working with the networks to take a cut of revenue from 7+, 9Now and 10Play for revenue gained from broadcasting into their areas
They need to develop local news websites and become community hubs for information, news and info and monetize that
They need to negotiate that when they run local programming (Prime News, WIN News) that 50% of that revenue is NOT shared back to the network
In some markets they could combine newsrooms. For example Toowoomba, QLD or Ballarat, VIC could see Prime7 and WIN or WIN and 9 join newsrooms and share jounros, facilities and even some content - and push out individually branded news. This is very common in the US. Sharing all this saves money
They just don’t seem to think outside the box. Heck, here we have SCA launching and moving news to 5,30 for 6 million Aussies Monday - and there are no promos. Because there is no planning. No strategy. No marketing team. Nothing. They rely on Nine for everything.
You have such a good understanding of the US market
Can you help us understand how you can go to a metro market in the US or Canada the same size as say Adelaide (1.5 million) say New Orleans or Newcastle (800,000 - El Paso, Texas) and find 2-3 competing local morning shows running 4am-7am, plus local news at 5,6 and 11pm on 2 to even 4 stations?
How do markets of similar size fund these?
My take is that a much larger % of programming costs in Australia is taken up by primetime reality and Drama. Australian reality is expansive - $1.5m an hour or so - relative to market size per capita. The US spends maybe 3 times that for a market 13 times bigger
I think this leaves networks less money to dive up to the local stations to invest in say local Adelaide morning news on 10
And in turn as the affils are paying massive chunks of their revenue to pay for this too, they have no money left for local news
But I am curious - how does a market like El Paso - the same size as Newcastle - support 4 local morning shows? (they have one on ABC, FOX, NBC and CBS) plus 2 more on the Spanish channels!
Without turning this into a purely US discussion, labor is generally cheaper and less expensive to manage because of scale, some stations are able to scale newscasts for cheap to reap ads, political ad seasons are especially lucrative just based on volume, there is no domestic content quota because the USA makes everything, local stations have taken initiative to do The Morning Show-style programs for advertorial/integration verticals, there’s just a lot of crap down the pipe.
Remote-casting is what losers do. WNWO Toledo has long struggled being the third station in a two-horse race. It was acquired by Sinclair a few years ago and their newscasts got hubbed a couple hundred miles away in South Bend, Indiana. Talent can be clueless sometimes and the newscasts are prone to more technical problems for one reason or another. That’s what you call cutting losses.
WIN can’t possibly achieve any semblance of success, any positive trend line just by sticking it out for an affiliation fight and bleeding the operation dry. And yet, it will take mountains of money that I don’t even think Bruce Gordon has to do what would be needed in an Australian regulatory environment to copy the infrastructure and services that exist with local media in the US.
No. Australian regional broadcasters already have as much scale in terms of ownership as they can achieve under the current setup - the biggest factor here is that they operate a single (NNSW, SNSW, RQLD, etc.) license for a group of submarkets (Canberra-Wollongong-Orange-others).
What I mean by scaling is being able to exert that bulk when acquiring equipment, programming or other rights, deploying reporting resources, having a state capitol bureau serve reports to multiple stations, stuff like that. Scale is to achieve value adds across large areas with justified cost (less up front, profits over time, both). That presumes you already have certain assets that can be improved within a reasonable expectation in the first place. Otherwise, startup costs will make any initiative super-expensive - a station with two working shifts can’t broadcast news during the daypart they aren’t staffed. Staff is a big startup cost.
For as much cross-pollination we see in the sector when it comes to investment, Prime, WIN, and SCA would be damned to be co-operating and figuring out how to split duties and revenues unless they were forced to - funnily enough, some licenses are joint ventures or even monopolies by law because ACMA considers the possible revenue to be too small for a certain number of competitors. If anything changes on that front, count me surprised.
I could also go into my shtick about how ad rates in regional areas pale against metros with the whole “cost of returns” bit, but as that point has gone misunderstood the times I’ve brought it up, I’m not going to.
Stations in smaller markets in the US also run a lot of infomercials during the day and night. Cities lucky enough to O&Os are spared this, although they would probably be spared this anyway because they have enough people to support 4+ local stations with competing news services, chat shows, etc.
Something like the ITN model in the UK could work in regional Australia but I don’t know if the likes of Prime and WIN would consider it because they don’t want to break the mould.
It would certainly different if you had a news bulletin produced for Nine Canberra (SCA) at 5.30pm with one presenter and then WIN Canberra at 6pm with another presenter but the same reporters appear on each.
Well there’s zero chance of WIN NNSW becoming a Nine affiliate cause of … you know… NBN…
I guess the real question would be, how would this particular station brand itself should WIN pickup the Nine affiliation across the board once more. Probably just raw Ten branding once more
It would be interesting to see whether this would fly or not - having a single newsroom would in practice reduce the number of diverse ‘voices’ in any market, but may be legislatively acceptable.
It helps that the American TV markets are a lot smaller geographically - a city the size of Newcastle is a stand-alone market in the US. This will have significant operational savings
One thing that seems to get lost is that the less local content a local bulletin has, the more people start dropping off - the size of the news markets are such that its often difficult to get more then a couple of truly local stories in any news bulletin, a lot of news either doesn’t get covered or its coverage is delayed.
This issue doesn’t exist in a television-only bubble either, local newspaper readership is declining as radio listenership in many areas. Even our national broadcaster has wound back regional reporting across their services
Oh dear, now you’ve got me imagining Sky News presenters doing their own versions of those shows, while yelling down the barrel of the camera about how Play School and Behind The News on the ABC are full of left wing bias!
Uncle Alan’s story time would be something to behold. If his lurid suits don’t scare the kids to death, his fairy tales about dumping wicked witches out to sea in chaff bags certainly will.
