Monday, October 16, 2006
Media Reform in Australia: Big Challenges Ahead
IT is not hard to imagine the main features of the Australian media scene in five years.
The big challenge for the Nine, Seven and Ten networks, Telstra, Fairfax, News Corporation and the many smaller Australian media players is to match their short-term actions to adapt to the new media laws with the long-term shape of the industry.
Whether you like them or not, Helen Coonan's laws give all media companies a chance to adjust their position to the big changes ahead.
Perhaps the biggest fundamental change is that a large chunk of the 2011-12 audience will rely on their broadband connection for television, the phone and the computer; the three effectively merge.
Although they have been given protection under the act, this basic change will create an avalanche of internet-based competitors for free-to-air TV companies and many new avenues for advertisers.
It will mean the only newspapers that survive will be those with clearly defined readership markets because classified advertising will be dominated by the internet and many brand advertising campaigns will reduce their newspaper and TV exposure.
And so newspapers that rely on classifieds will need to sell the virtues of their editorial product and develop new sources of income unless they have a big share of the internet classified cake. This change will foster greater local material in many newspapers and material that caters for special markets. Customised information vehicles will boom.
But those newspapers that do adapt will prosper because their main audience, the baby boomers and older people, have large amounts of disposable cash.
The big challenge for the Nine, Seven and Ten networks, Telstra, Fairfax, News Corporation and the many smaller Australian media players is to match their short-term actions to adapt to the new media laws with the long-term shape of the industry.
Whether you like them or not, Helen Coonan's laws give all media companies a chance to adjust their position to the big changes ahead.
Perhaps the biggest fundamental change is that a large chunk of the 2011-12 audience will rely on their broadband connection for television, the phone and the computer; the three effectively merge.
Although they have been given protection under the act, this basic change will create an avalanche of internet-based competitors for free-to-air TV companies and many new avenues for advertisers.
It will mean the only newspapers that survive will be those with clearly defined readership markets because classified advertising will be dominated by the internet and many brand advertising campaigns will reduce their newspaper and TV exposure.
And so newspapers that rely on classifieds will need to sell the virtues of their editorial product and develop new sources of income unless they have a big share of the internet classified cake. This change will foster greater local material in many newspapers and material that caters for special markets. Customised information vehicles will boom.
But those newspapers that do adapt will prosper because their main audience, the baby boomers and older people, have large amounts of disposable cash.
