CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Australia’s two media most profitable media brands are coming into the new Financial Year at full steam, while every other new publisher undergoes brutal staff cuts.
In the past fortnight, Australia’s last remaining news organisations have finally started cutting the bone by laying off hundreds of reporters – with no real plan to combat a media cycle poisoned by misinformation and conspiracy.
While the ABC attempts to hold strong through waves after wave of right-wing campaigners begging for them to be defunded and stop reporting on things like Robodebt or car park rorts, not even public servants are safe from lay-offs in the current media landscape.
The issue of bang for buck is also very much affecting the public broadcaster – as they attempt to cling on to traditional audiences amid the disruption of social media’s sinister algorithms that distract Australians from traditional mediums like radio and TV.
But it seems commercial media is now closer than ever to having the life support switch turned off, as the once promising digital titans of youth publishing face the same redundancies as the old guard of 7, Nine and NewsCorp.
Today alone, Nine has announced 40 jobs will be let go at the youth and culture platform of PedestrianTV. Not even 5 years after paying close to $40m to buy the publisher.
It seems the online property magazines are the only brands that are surviving this brutal media collapse, which is a direct result of the lack of innovation that comes with an executive staff made up of people who are old enough to remember reporting on the Beatles tour of Australia.
Both RealEstate .com.au and Domain .com.au remain the most profitable media assets in Australia, cashing in on the lion’s share of a high-net worth audience obsessively clicking on new listings for potential investment properties.
It is perhaps for this reason that the nation’s major news mastheads, all of whom depend on the advertising revenue that comes through these once harmless property inserts, do not seem too keen to report on Australia’s catastrophic housing crisis.
Or the fact that you can’t order a beer after 10pm on a weeknight in most capital cities.
Or the fact that Sydney’s parklands are still very much covered in asbestos-contaminated mulch, a story that would otherwise attract a fair bit of media attention in a country that isn’t beholden to the rivers of gold that comes with hysterical property speculation.