‘Preachy': The truth behind The Project and Q&A's brutal axings

Once hugely influential within Australian culture, The Project and Q&A at their heights were able to make headlines and not only spark but also further conversations within society.
Sadly for Channel 10 and ABC, those days are long behind them, and this week, both networks finally decided to put the ageing shows out to pasture.
Launched in 2009 as The 7pm Project with co-hosts Carrie Bickmore and comedians Charlie Pickering and Dave Hughes, the panel show won Gold Logies for Bickmore and for co-host Waleed Aly.
By the time Covid-19 had the world in its grasps, viewership had begun to crumble, and year-after-year Network 10 was forced to deny that its once ratings behemoth would be coming to an end.
When the news finally became official last week, it was hardly a surprise to many. But that doesn't make it any less devastating for the hundreds whose jobs are now in question at Channel 10, as well as those at ABC now that its own long-running current affairs show, Q&A, is also being axed from the airwaves.
'ABC has a fixed budget, it has to go begging to the government if it wants more,' said media analyst Steve Allen, director at Pearman Media Agency.
'It has to run everything on the smell of an oily rag, they're running multiple radio and television networks all off a smaller budget that most commercial networks, apart from maybe 10, don't have to operate off,' he told news.com.au.
'But the common theme here is that programs have to perform,' Mr Allen continued. 'They have to attract an audience; for entirely different reasons if we're talking Channel 10 and ABC. But at their core they have to be popular. It's more than a decade since The Project was at its height of viewership. Seven and Nine, their news shows are ratings behemoths. They're in the top five programmes every night of the week.
'It's incredibly hard for anyone to compete in that hour or hour and a half, whether that's SBS, ABC or Channel 10. And that's the problem The Project faced. Its ratings aren't going up. Since its stellar cast faded away bit by bit they've tried all sorts of personality and host combinations none of which really worked,' he added.
As advertising dollars have continued to decrease over the years, forcing free-to-air broadcast networks around the world to tighten their purse strings and shift their entire business models to compete with streaming, Mr Allen explained that it's likely Channel 10 saw The Project's timeslot as an untapped revenue stream.
'It's contracted out to Rove Productions and one has to assume that they were making money out of it. So I would imagine that Network 10 thought if they take it in-house then they can use the profit margin that was being made to spend on something different.'
Some critics have suggested that the death of shows like Q&A and The Project is down, at least in part, to audiences growing tired of having a so-called 'woke agenda' being pushed onto them. But this theory feels narrow-minded, reeks of political point-scoring and fails to look at the real issues behind their demise.
After all, The Project featured Steve Price throughout almost its entire run, who regularly butted heads with the likes of Waleed Aly and Sarah Harris over hot-button issues.
And we can't forget the storming victory Labour had in the elections last month, dragging the Liberal Party over hot coals on their way to a hugely historic victory that demonstrated very clearly that social media echo chambers aren't indicative of the wider Australian culture.
While shows like The Project and Q&A have floundered, more straight-news based current affairs shows like Nine's A Current Affair and ABC's Australian Story have continued to succeed within the shifting landscape.
Living within a world where we're bombarded with unsolicited opinions across social media on everything from our own lives to those of celebrities, perhaps the fundamental crux is that when viewers tune into a current affairs shows, what they desire more than anything is news presented to them without any form of bias along with it, regardless of the side they personally stand on.
As the demise of The Project became clear, some corners of social media blamed it on the show being 'too left-leaning' and desperate to 'push the woke agenda', while others on the polar opposite side tweeted that it was just a mouthpiece 'to push right-wing agendas to a left-wing audience'.
It seems clear that this is why these shows are failing, doomed to be just another relic of TV's past. They hark back to a period in our culture when nuance was not only integral to conversation but valued.
We live in a world nowadays where everything is so black and white that it's made merely flirting with the grey area nigh impossible. Shows that attempt balance now feel doomed to try and court both sides, only to end up being abandoned by both.
'Both shows had become stale and lost the essence of what they once were,' said TV Blackbox's Rob McKnight. 'The Project turned from a light show to a preachy show and Q&A left behind the core of what it stood for.'
It seems Network 10 have come to the same realisation, with their announcement of The Project's replacement 10 News+, making very clear that one thing viewers won't get when tuning in is any form of opinion from its presenters.
'At the heart of everything we do is delivering news and current affairs that matter to you,' said the announcement. 'No filler. No opinion. Just the facts.'
All that's left to see now is whether that sentiment can resonate with viewers so Channel 10 can finally bag themselves a win.
As more and more legacy shows begin to fall into obscurity, all eyes are slowly turning toward morning television, an institution for many around the world, including here in Australia.
Once a pioneer of the format with Good Morning Australia, Channel 10 has failed to achieve success in the timeslot since the show ended in 2005. Its follow-up show, Studio 10, was brutally axed at the end of 2023.
While its rivals have continued to succeed with shows such as Today and Sunrise still regularly reaching millions every weekday, some critics have suggested that it could be the next timeslot to face struggles.
Mr McKnight.disagrees, insisting that Australia's morning shows have 'nothing' to be concerned about, at least for the time being.
'The audiences for Sunrise, TODAY and ABC News Breakfast are very strong and both TODAY and Sunrise generate plenty of revenue,' he said. 'These shows also help the networks have local programming and connect with audiences.'
While initially it may seem all doom and gloom for Channel 10 when it comes to its numerous cancellations over the years, from The Project to their failed attempts at The Traitors and bringing back Gladiators where other broadcasters like the BBC succeeded, media analyst Steve Allen says that the ailing network appears to have finally hit bottom, and now the only way is a slow climb back up.
'Peak night audience across Seven, Nine, Channel 10 and SBS has actually gone up for the first time in a decade,' he shared. 'Not by much, but that's unheard of in recent times. If it has finally bottomed out, then crucially, it means the dollars that these networks have to spend won't erode any further.'

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This is the column I never wanted to have to write

The Age

2 hours ago

The Age

This is the column I never wanted to have to write

Allow me, this one time, to peel back the curtain. My editors for this column wanted me to write about Channel 10's announcement this week that the sun would set on The Project after 16 years, nearly 14 of which have involved me. I didn't want to do it. What would I say that was of any use? Would I identify the things I felt made the show special, perhaps accompanied by a catalogue of highlights? Too self-serving. Would I detail the full maelstrom of emotion which engulfs you in a moment like this? That gets dangerously close to self-indulgent pap; a glorified journal entry, not an opinion piece. And anyway, as a general rule, I don't commentate on my own work. So, no, I'd write something else. My editors urged me to reconsider, then left me to it. Improbably, then, here we are. But only because there are bigger things at stake than the fate of this or that television show. That matters to the people involved – often viscerally – but shows have always come and gone. The difference now is that this is happening in the context of an industry staring into the abyss, trying desperately to find the formula for its continued survival. Of course, that is not entirely new, either: industries too, have always come and gone. What matters in this case – what is of genuine social concern – are the reasons for the collapse. Some of them have been frequently rehearsed. The rapid emergence of streaming services and social media has cannibalised free-to-air television audiences. Hereabouts you will find endless statistics about declining television ratings, year on year. Some shows might periodically buck that trend, most don't. Some moments in time might disrupt things, such as when television ratings exploded at the onset of the pandemic, but they end up as aberrations. Whatever exceptions you wish to adduce, the direction of travel has long been clear. But ratings have only ever really been an indirect measure of television success. To the extent television is a business, what really matters is revenue. You could be forgiven for thinking that's the same thing because, roughly speaking, that's been true for about 50 years. Higher ratings means greater demand from advertisers, which means more expensive ads, which means more revenue. The fall in television audiences, felt most sharply among younger viewers who may never have watched free-to-air television in their lives, is therefore a direct attack on revenue. So far, so obvious. The twist is that now, revenue is falling much faster than ratings. Indeed, there are tentative signs that television audiences are beginning to stabilise, but revenue has continued to plummet. Hence the reports this week that commercial television networks across the board are poised to ask many of their stars to take pay cuts. They may not be losing viewers as fast as they were, but that doesn't mean the money is there to keep paying them. Loading That's not because social media provides superior content to television. The quality of the content is mostly beside the point. What matters is the quality of the advertising product. And social media companies like Meta or Google, having harvested frankly unconscionable amounts of their users' personal data, offer a far more sophisticated, better targeted advertising product than free-to-air television can. That will remain so for as long as television doesn't turn the camera on you and monitor your every move. What has inevitably followed is a flight, not so much of audiences, but of advertisers to these tech giants. This, I think, is a major problem. Not because free-to-air television is uniquely precious, but because that amount of data collection in the hands of a select few tech moguls simply shouldn't be allowed to exist. We've seen the dangers this poses for democracy, in the form of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for instance. And that's to say nothing of the algorithmic destruction of people's physical and psychological health as lots of us are filtered towards a wild west of misinformation spanning everything from news to beauty, to health.