ABC News 24 and BBC World: A study of limited resources and challenging newsgathering Murrell, Colleen. 2013. ABC News 24 and BBC World: A study of limited resources and challenging newsgathering, Australian journalism review, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 83-96. ©2013, Journalism Education Association Reproduced with permission. Downloaded from DRO: http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30053041 DRO Deakin Research Online, Deakin University’s Research Repository Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B ABC News 24 and BBC World: a study of limited resources and challenging newsgathering Colleen Murrell Abstract ABC Australia’s News 24 website proclaims: “ABC News 24 provides around the clock coverage of news events as they break at home and abroad. It’s news when you want it, on your platform – TV, mobile and online.” In this article, the station’s content is analysed across 24 hours of its programming and compared with the same 24 hours of pro- gramming from BBC World. The content is tested for four key values: range of stories; coverage of the big stories; competence in going live to breaking stories; and ability to add value through analysis, debate and context. The examination of the data against these four key values enables an analysis of the nature of the service and assists in assessing whether or not it is providing an enriched and different offering in a busy 24/7 media landscape. Introduction The top line of ABC Australia’s News 24 website states: “ABC News 24 provides around the clock coverage of news events as they break at home and abroad. It’s news when you want it, on your platform – TV, mobile and online” (ABC, 2013). This is the defining mission statement of the station’s values: conjuring up an ability to cover a wide range of datelines at home and abroad, and to go “live” to breaking stories at will. This mission statement represents two of the four key values which will be tested in this article, as the station’s coverage across its 24-hour news cycle is examined and compared with its older and better-funded “broadcast partner” BBC World. Due to the Australian media’s questioning regarding the financing of the station, this research also tests the ABC’s ability to cope with the big stories which consume a station’s resources; and it examines the station’s ability to add value by bringing what ABC managing director Mark Scott calls “a new depth of analysis” to 24/7 broadcasting by “building on the trust and authority of AJR 35(1) 83 ABC journalism that distinguishes it in a crowded news market” (ABC, 2010a, pp. 18, 27). This paper will harness these four values – wide range, live coverage, big stories and analytic depth – to calculate the overall “value” of this relatively new ABC service. Background and literature review ABC News 24 is a late entrant on to the scene of 24-hour news stations. The service began broadcasting in July 2010, more than 30 years after CNN, 21 years behind BBC World and 14 years behind Sky News Australia. According to a study by Rai and Cottle, there are now more than 120 stations which can be classed as 24/7 news channels (2010, p. 64). Set against an era of financial constraint following the Global Financial Crisis, the opening of Australia’s first free-to- air 24/7 news channel was an optimistic move. Sky News was unhappy with the sudden onset of competition (Idato, 2010) and a statement issued by its chief executive, Angelos Frangopoulos (2010), stated: “Australian taxpayers have a right to ask why more and more of their taxes are be- ing spent on services that the nation’s commercial media outlets already provide in greater depth, across more channels.” In an ABC online news story, news director Kate Torney argued that the ABC had to be in the 24/7 game to stay relevant to its viewer base: “Audiences now expect to see news when it happens” (ABC, 2010b). In answer to critics who had claimed the channel was a “waste of taxpayers’ money”, Torney replied that the service “had been funded through produc- tion savings, not new money” (ABC, 2010b). Part of the savings from production are understood to be down to the fact that fewer camera operators, technicians and media workers were needed due to the newly automated studio switching facility called “MediaHub” and the “Ignite” com- puter system. According to critics, it was this new technology which led to frequent technical on-air glitches in the new service in the early months (Media Watch, 2010). In reply, the ABC’s management was keen to talk up the savings and the windfall they provided for the introduction of rolling news. The ABC’s Annual Report (2010, p. 18) claimed: “Cost savings in production and distribution have been redirected to content creation for the ABC News 24 Service.” Talk of savings has not scotched the chatter in the media about the funding of ABC News 24. Hostile press coverage also continues to claim that the ABC news division has been slow to pull out of its set programming to switch to live, breaking news events – such as during the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan. ABC News 24 switched to the tsunami, not by ramping up its own news production, but by outsourcing and running large slabs of news pro- gramming from its broadcast partners the BBC and NHK. The ABC’s head of continuous news, Gaven Morris, argued on Media Watch that “using the resources available to it, ABC News 24 provided significant coverage of key developments in the story” (Media Watch, 2011). The in- structive words here are “resources available”, which reveal that ABC journalists understand that their jobs are constricted by their resources. These limited resources primarily affect newsgather- ing on the ground, and critics, including Media Watch’s Jonathan Holmes, have noted this when saying that the station is run financially “on a shoestring” (Media Watch, 2011). ABC reporters have also alleged that the station is leaching money from other parts of the ABC to achieve its goals. Former ABC foreign affairs editor Peter Cave said on retiring: “[News 24] is not only cost- ing us but it is also a voracious consumer of foreign correspondent material. I think at some stage … they are going to have to dispense with the lie that it is not costing us anything, and fund it properly” (Leys, 2012). Journalist and media academic Margaret Simons has attempted with limited success to get the ABC to give more detail about the financing of the new station, as the ABC insists that “not one dollar” has been diverted from other news services (Simons, 2011). In February 2012, an ABC spokesperson admitted it had a $2.5 million hole in its news budget, but said its problems sprang from covering big stories rather than from starting up and maintaining ABC News 24 (Meade, 2012). What has barely been covered in the press is the lack of newsroom personnel who are 84 Australian Journalism Review needed to keep stories developing and evolving across the day’s news cycle. Other news opera- tions with limited money for costly overseas newsgathering (such as SBS News) still maintain sufficient numbers of newsroom personnel so journalists can craft new packages using agency material, and then build on these over a news cycle to update stories and to cut new headlines, voice-overs (V/Os)1 and graphics. According to Chris Paterson (2010, p. 103) most viewers are unaware of the dependence of 24/7 news stations on international agencies Reuters and APTN, “for rolling channels depend upon the chimera that they are a global journalistic presence, bring- ing events to their audiences from the remotest corners of the world”. The BBC and ABC Australia have a great deal in common in terms of their shared history and sustained commitment to public service broadcasting and creating value for their audiences. The BBC has been better cushioned over the years from government cuts through the provision of its licence fee which delivers money directly from viewers to the corporation. The BBC has an annual newsgathering budget of $US501 million and operates 41 overseas bureaux (BBC, 2009). However, the BBC news division faces significant ongoing cuts which will impact on newsgath- ering in the future. The BBC is involved in a series of redundancies, newsroom relocations and other cost-saving measures under its “Delivering Quality First” initiative (BBC, 2011, pp. 11-13). Nonetheless it still has a global reach that only CNN and Al Jazeera English (AJE) can rival. The ABC, on the other hand, has had more experience of government cuts as “successive govern- ments of both sides of the political divide have slashed ABC funding, driving an internal culture of doing more with less” (Debrett, 2010, p. 91). The ABC has an annual budget of $150 million for news and current affairs and has 12 overseas bureaux (Lee, 2012). Methodology This project employs quantitative content analysis as a “research technique that is based on measuring the amount of something […] in a representative sampling of some mass-mediated popular form of art” (Berger, 1991, p. 25). In this project a purposive sampling method was chosen and a full 24 hours of a news cycle for ABC News 24 and BBC World was recorded in Australia from midnight to midnight on October 20, 20112. This represents a significant quantity of data as, in sheer size, transcribing and coding, it is equivalent to a project that samples 96 half- hour news programs across several months.