Looking at the revamped ABC news website, I can see someone at Aunty is trying hard to not be staid and … boring. Design can certainly help to dispel; a stale image, so long as it doesn’t become stale in its own right. I do have to wonder how much of the new design is pitched at hand terminals rather than my widescreen monitor; surely I’m not the only one who doesn’t consume all my daily news as mobile phone factoids?
Even if I were to join in and dispel all reality by being permanently glued to a hand terminal, design isn’t really where the ABC falls down.
It is in the appalling lack of basic literacy by its ‘content creators’, eschewing grammar and syntax, possibly for some bizarre attempt at ‘sounding’ like the pidgin being spoken in our streets. This from a story today: ‘Her secondary aim in life, she often said, was to promote the virtues of apathy, which she insisted was unfairly maligned.’ We’re either talking several virtues (plural) that ‘were’ unfairly maligned, or we’re talking one virtue (singular) that ‘was’ maligned. This should not be too hard for people calling themselves journalists.
By thinking of the product of journalism and reportage as content in the first place, perhaps ditching in that process any focus on news or explanation. In that vein, there’s an entire section entitled ‘For You: Stories grouped to suit your mood’. My mood? Is that like offering me ‘content’ derived from my tarot reading, or my horoscope?
By patronizing audiences with insufferably bourgeois framing of age-based demographics and their permissible opinions; do young people really only care about pop music that could only appeal to some old and uncool duffer compiling JJJ playlists? Do middle aged office workers really only care about books and films no one actually ever reads or goes to see? Hands up everyone who can tell me who Abbie Chatfield is, and why I would possibly want to know?
By failing to deliver even a basic kind of journalism that provides facts and evidence. Which story by what journalist cited the supposed LGBTQ+ census questions—that is, quoted them word for word—or the new one the ALP now says will be included in 2026? And if they can’t be cited, which story told us why they can’t be cited?
Maybe worst of all, by surrendering a cultural value that we all aspire to be literate, to be educated and engaged, to be capable of forming our own judgements. Instead we get pre-digested pap, like a column that tells us an opinion poll explains why the Albanese government wants to avoid culture wars, rather than even hinting at the reality that both the government and the commentator are completely out of touch with the kind of realities faced every day by 80 per cent of the national population (back of envelope calculation based on median income). A population with very little interest in the preoccupations of politicians and media workers, and their alibis for their failures to do their jobs.
It seems to me, then, that the ABC could ace any design competition and still fail to deliver a worthy news service. But it could fail utterly in design and still succeed beyond all expectations by returning to quality journalism, and by not patronizing its audience.
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