Anger over ABC’s decision to axe dedicated arts team in restructure
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The ABC decision to dissolve its standalone arts unit, announced as part of a sweeping restructure on Thursday, will see the organisation’s two most senior dedicated arts journalists made redundant, and the end of a distinct division dedicated solely to covering the arts and making arts-related content.
Namila Benson, host of the ABC’s Art Works program.Credit:
Onscreen arts content will be folded into a newly created Arts, Music and Events department. This new unit will have responsibility for the ABC’s sole arts TV show Art Works, as well as the music show Rage (which was previously the responsibility of the ABC’s audio team) and one-off events such as ANZAC Day, Gallipoli, the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras and New Year’s Eve.
The move has been slammed by the broadcaster’s former national arts correspondent, Michaela Boland, who left the organisation in 2020.
“ABC management’s degradation of the arts continues,” Boland tweeted on Thursday.
Journalist Jane Howard, who won a Walkley award for an arts story written for the ABC in 2019, decried the move as “a slap in the face to every artist and arts worker in Australia”.
An internal document sighted by this masthead reveals that “a Managing Editor Arts and an Arts Digital Editor role will be abolished” under the changes, which will see 120 redundancies across the organisation as a whole.
Those positions are the most senior in the ABC and dedicated specifically to the arts. The managing editor had responsibility for TV and online, while the digital editor managed a small team creating content specifically for the ABC website. The flagship Sunday afternoon TV magazine program Art Works is understood to be unaffected by the changes, while Radio National will continue to manage its own arts-related content.
Among the broader changes announced on Thursday, the role of political editor was scrapped with high-profile reporter Andrew Probyn made redundant. State news bulletins on Sunday night will be replaced with one national bulletin.
ABC managing director David Anderson justified the changes to staff in an email on Thursday as necessary for the broadcaster’s future, as the organisation needed to boost its investment in its digital transformation to meet the needs of its audiences.
A spokesperson for the ABC insisted that journalists currently employed in the arts team would be redeployed to the newly created Art, Music and Events department, but that was disputed by those with knowledge of the changes.
While Art Works staff will move to the new unit, the internal document sighted by this masthead makes it clear that the workload of what was the ABC’s dedicated online arts team will now be “managed from the Digital Innovation team”. ABC sources said that meant journalists from the general reporting pool will be expected to generate occasional arts stories, but without a specialist editor. It was unclear what the changes meant for reviews of films, performing arts and literature, which were previously managed by the standalone arts unit.
One insider, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the move was a bad result for arts lovers, as it left the ABC with no senior dedicated specialists in the area.
Arts coverage is ostensibly core business for the ABC. Under its charter, it is required to “encourage and promote the musical, dramatic and other performing arts in Australia”. A series of cuts over the past decade, however, have seen its capacity to cover the area vastly reduced. At the same time, audiences for its limited output have dwindled.
The most recent episode of Art Works, the ABC’s only regular arts program, was watched by just 108,000 people nationally on Sunday June 11, making it the 85th most-viewed program on the day.
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