These are the words of the Chief Executive of the Newspaper Publishers' Association, Mark Hollands in the Sydney Morning Herald recently. A complete waste of money he called it. Finance that would be better spent encouraging and enhancing the nation's talent in TV acting, scripting and production he thinks.
How funny is that? Someone who represents an industry that has done an epic job at running print journalism into the ground busts a nut when another form of media decides to step up their news service as opposed to laying off reporters left, right and centre as newspapers have done.
Newspapers have been struggling to reinvent themselves in the digital age and rather than reinforce their journalists and reporters, they've downsized, made people redundant and made news more entertainment focused than anything else.
Mr Holland claims there has been no failure in the market. One might disagree with that statement based on the too-often poor level of reporting that today's news brings us.
Will the ABC's news channel be the saviour to news services? I don't think so. But in a time when every other news agency seems to be cutting things back to the bare bone, it's inspiring to see the state broadcaster doing the opposite.
I've thought for a long time that someone needed to do this. Anyone who invests in news reporting now is only going to create a stronger and [hopefully] better news service. While everyone else cuts back and runs out of resources, people will leave in droves to find their news elsewhere.
Well done, I say, to ABC for having some foresight.
Simon
I quite like the idea of a free to air news station. If you've got FOXTEL, that's all well and good, but for those who don't, This gives those people a News Channel as well. ABC is a great Television Station and Has 3 SD Channels as Well as it's HD simulcast of ABC1. The number should be 24 on set top boxes and 6?? on FOXTEL when it arrives.