The most unsettling thing about the closure of Network Ten's The Project is that it might come to be seen as the moment commercial network television gave up on young audiences for news programming.
Authors
- Andrew Dodd
Professor of Journalism, Director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne
- Matthew Ricketson Matthew Ricketson is a Friend of The Conversation.
Professor of Communication, Deakin University
If that's what's happening, it's a worrying thought. Bringing news and current affairs to young audiences is exactly what The Project has done so well over its 16-year lifespan, and it's hard to imagine how the channel will replace it in ways that work for audiences already disengaged with mainstream media.
The Project will be missed. Perhaps not by those such as a caller to ABC Melbourne's Drive program yesterday afternoon, who described The Project as Behind the News for grown-ups.
The caller's tone signalled an insult but that discredits both the long-running ABC program for schoolchildren and the goal of engaging young adult audiences in news and current affairs.
Declining numbers
In 2010, a year after the program launched, it was rating 1.1 million in the country's capital cities, which made it competitive with other commercial TV news services.
By last weekend, the program was drawing an average national audience of 270,000 across the regions as well as the capital cities, according to media commentator, Tim Burrowes', Unmade newsletter. Even allowing for the overall decline in the number of people watching television since 2010, those ratings figures are dismal.
Burrowes, the author of Media Unmade: Australian Media's Most Disruptive Decade , suggests the controversial hiring of former Nine Network star, Lisa Wilkinson, in 2017, to present the program's Sunday edition may have unsettled The Project's internal harmony after the Bruce Lehrmann defamation trial she was involved in.
A winning format for younger audiences
The Project's formula of combining news with comedy emerged from the success of The Panel, the weekly show produced in the late 1990s by Working Dog and featuring the D-Generation team of Rob Sitch, Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner, along with Kate Langbroek, Glenn Robbins and, for a while, Jane Kennedy.
It was edgy and topical. It bounced off current events with short piss-take scene-setting video grabs, followed by wry observations and silly gags.
It was just as much comedy as it was current affairs, and it was all about appealing to young and disenfranchised viewers.
The Panel anticipated the exodus away from the po-faced solemnity of commercial terrestrial TV news well before streaming had taken hold.
Rove McManus and his production company saw its potential, as did Ten, which knew it needed to try new things. It could not compete with Seven and Nine, who were then - and in many ways still are - locked in a perpetual ratings war while being almost identical to one another.
The Project's producers knew they had a winning format. They ensured the show was rarely boring and avoided the predictability of worthiness. They weren't afraid to ask the non-PC question, or laugh at themselves, or debate or discuss or delve.
But that didn't mean they resorted to meanness or took pleasure in others' misfortune. Admittedly, Steve Price did need to be reined in from time to time.
The format encouraged audiences to stick with them and in the process they actually learnt stuff. Young, disengaged kids saw politicians discussing matters of substance, with the show challenging assumptions.
News for the social media era
As increasing numbers of young people stopped turning on TVs, The Project became consumable in bite-size chunks on social media.
The show's producers cottoned on to this earlier than most and began crafting segments that could be easily shared. Waleed Aly became an Instagram star for his impassioned, informed editorialising about racial issues, along the way earning nominations for several Logie awards, and winning the Gold Logie in 2016 .
Peter Helliar, Dave Hughes and Charlie Pickering made audiences laugh. And another Gold Logie winner, Carrie Bickmore, made them care, especially in 2013 when she broke the fourth wall of television to talk about the need to improve public awareness of brain cancer following a story about a potential cure for the disease in ten years' time. A few years previously Bickmore's husband had died of the disease.
The loss of another media town square
While The Project was on air, the network was at least making an effort to inform a section of the market that had long been under-served by the news media.
With relatively recent entrants, like the Daily Aus, stepping in to that gap, perhaps Ten thought it was becoming too crowded?
We'll have to assess what the network does next to see if it thinks investing in current affairs is no longer worth the effort.
With the ABC threatening to walk away from Q&A , it looks like commercial and public networks are coming to the same view: that panel-based current affairs programming is a turn-off for audiences, regardless of whether they're young or old.
This is especially troubling because the closure of each program means the loss of another media town square, where the capacity to listen to, and learn from one another, in civil ways also disappears.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
