I grew up watching Newcastle's NBN News - now it joins a long list of regional newsrooms that have been gutted
By Sophie Henderson
The axing of Newcastle’s local news bulletin mimics the broader story of Australia’s media landscape, writes Sophie Henderson.
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I appeared on television as a child on NBN News, when they reported on the Variety Children’s Bash my grandmother was participating in. Gathered around a small screen, my family and I did what we did almost every night: watched the six o’clock news. This night was special because for two seconds I could be glimpsed blurrily waving from a fake horse bolted to the top of a car. At the end of the program, Big Dog appeared, and my brother and I pressed a kiss directly onto the television screen as he wished us both goodnight.
On the 21st of June, the NBN News I remember aired its last bulletin. After more than sixty years spent telling the Hunter region’s stories, WIN Network - which acquired the station from Nine Entertainment in June - gutted the newsroom.
The team of ten local journalists is now four, the one-hour seven-day bulletin reduced to a thirty minute, prerecorded, weeknights only program at 5:30 - well before most working people will be home to watch it - followed by a live feed of the 9News Sydney bulletin. Local weekend news, including the all-important sports coverage is gone entirely (just as the Knights are finally out of contention for the wooden spoon). More than 6,700 residents signed a petition asking WIN to reconsider. WIN, to absolutely no one’s surprise, proceeded anyway.
The history of NBN, and its current diminished form, mimics the broader story of Australia’s media landscape. In 1962, NBN launched as a fiercely independent newsroom backed by approximately 2000 local shareholders. At the time, the independence quotient of Australian regional commercial television was 100 per cent. According to Dr Michael Thurlow, an expert on regional media from Macquarie University, that figure now sits at approximately eight per cent.
Like nearly every independent broadcaster, it has slowly but surely been consumed by an all too familiar tide of corporate greed, which insists on prioritising the bottom line over communities, its employees and the legacy of its origins. From 2020 onwards more than 350 Australian news outlets have closed or contracted.
A short list of tycoons, who have for decades collected and traded regional broadcast rights like Pokémon cards on the playground, are largely to blame. When the Sydney stations, Frank Packer’s TCN-9 foremost amongst them, were blocked from owning regional licences under the local ownership rules, they responded with an ultimatum forcing film distributors to choose between supplying content to wealthy metropolitan stations or their regional counterparts. The government, to their credit, attempted to impose licence conditions preventing the obstruction of program supply; the Sydney stations took it to the High Court. In August 1963, the Court ruled the government had no power to intervene. The rules designed to protect regional stations were beginning to crack.
Packer and Rupert Murdoch - who was at the time on the verge of launching The Australian - (as if this wasn’t enough influence) then struck a private deal resulting in a shared 40 per cent stake in NBN. Though this provided a commercial incentive to sell programs to the regional stations they had just spent two years trying to starve, it did little for the communities whose stations had just been carved up between the most powerful media interests in the country.
When this wasn’t enough, they lobbied. Bob Hawke’s 1987 ‘reach rule’ removed restrictions prohibiting any entity from owning more than two commercial television licences, instead allowing companies to broadcast to 60 per cent of the Australian population. Hawke fondly described Packer and Murdoch as “the only mates we’ve got in the media”
A series of cumulative policy changes all broadly backed by Australia’s few media oligarchs (well documented here) have led us to today. Turnbull’s 2017 decision to abolish cross-media ownership rules entirely was the latest nail in the coffin.
The same names have held a majority share in our media for the last six decades. When they die, it is not a sigh of relief that we will breathe, but merely acceptance of their children as their successors.
Local media ultimately serves as the bridge between democracy and the people it’s designed to protect. In Newcastle the loss of NBN is comparable to the collapse of Stockton bridge (Novocastrians will tell you this bridge is cooler than the one in Sydney harbour).
As Dr Thurlow states, without regional reporting “communities become less informed about local issues, which reduces their ability to participate in civic life and hold decision-makers to account”.
“Public scrutiny of governments and other institutions diminishes which increases the risk that poor decisions or misconduct go unnoticed. Opportunities for local people to share their stories and perspectives become fewer, while the shared experiences that help build community identity begin to erode”.
Gary Dickson from the Local and Independent News Association, argues that what local outlets offer cannot be reproduced by legacy publishers. “Journalists are part of the community,” he told Cheek. “That cannot be replicated by a larger media conglomerate.” A journalist invested in a community lives and works alongside the people they cover. They run into the council representatives at the grocery store. They have their hair cut alongside the school principal.
There is hope, however. The closure of traditional local news publications and the consequent surge in unemployed journalists has enabled something new - local online publications. These platforms face challenges, with small teams and minimal funding, but they are not burdened or controlled by corporate interests. They are, as the NBN was in 1962, fiercely independent. And all the better for it.
Some of the journalists who lost their jobs last month may well follow that path. Newcastle already has the Newcastle Weekly - an independent local outlet with the capacity to fill some of the gaps created by NBN’s restructure.
Though not all. Big Dog is all but confirmed to face retirement.
About the author
Sophie Henderson is a 22-year-old student at the University of Melbourne studying a Bachelor of Arts with a double major in English Literature and Media Communications. As a proud Novocastrian and an aspiring journalist, she felt compelled to write this piece. She currently works at Bunnings but would be willing to do just about anything else to get her foot in the door at an independent newsroom.
Awesome article! I miss Big Dog (and proper local media).
Great article Sophie. Thanks for calling out our gutless politicians and how Packer and Murdoch have changed our media; and not in a good way. I hope local online news gets the support it needs.