ABC Regional Stations begin restructure
31 May 2015 · News
ABC Radio has begun a process of consultation with its regional staff as the national broadcaster prepares to introduce a new regional division that will combine news, rural and regional programming s...
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Tags: ABC Cuts | ABC Radio | ABC Regional | Rural
One of the most annoying aspects of this website is the auto-refresh function which means you lose what you've typed if you're not quick enough to submit your content, encouraging hastily made comments. I shall try again:
It is ridiculous that the adjacent metro ABC stations such as 1233 Newcastle and the former Coast FMs based at Mermaid Beach and Maroochydore are lumped into this new regional hierarchy. These cities do not have the usual regional feel that is found in the next ABC area out from a capital city.
Being so close to a capital city creates a different community of interest as the generally good transport links encourage much travel between the metropolitian area and adjacent regions. The formats heard on those three stations also differ greatly to traditional regional ABC stations due to them finding a niche in what is a much more crowded media landscape due to large market size and metro signal overspill. These markets also do not take their state's midday rural hour, nor are they considered a rural area.
The number of flow charts and layers of management certainly have a touch of the MRN/FXJ radio merger, another poorly planned idea.
With the abolition of the Regional Content Directors (Bolts would be happy!), it seems there is not a loss of staff with there to be Chiefs of Staff in each station. Why not simply offer the RCDs the opportunity to transfer to this role or to move elsewhere?
There seems to be large focus in group radio and rural and no focus whatsoever on an increase in video content.
This is very poorly thought.
In an age where internet download demand is increasing expotentially due to video viewing and where commerical TV has cut local news coverage along with other cutbacks in local commercial radio news and newspaper reporting, here is a prime opportunity for the ABC to be doing exactly what they should be doing, filling the gap and going beyond it when there is market failure.
There should be a huge focus on more video news coverage, structuring radio news stories to double as video news packages (for internet or 7pm TV broadcast) which could be easily done and generally ramping up video news coverage and providing a platform to push such content to the audience so they could enjoy a short bulletin of sorts to replace the space that commercial operators have vacated.