Episode Details

Commercial television is under pressure, newspapers have had to reinvent themselves, audiences are splintering across platforms, and the algorithms are doing their best to turn everyone into a partisan.

Into that comes Hugh Marks - a career commercial media executive, former Nine boss, and now the man running the ABC.

He joins to talk about the future of traditional media, whether commercial TV can still make money in a world of apps, short-form video and shrinking ad pools, and why he thinks the ABC’s great advantage is that it can be “agnostic” about where audiences find its content - even as staff are stretched across far more platforms than before.

There are reflections, too, on the ABC’s “mistakes” - including the decision to remove Antoinette Lattouf from ABC Radio Sydney - and perhaps its failure to take a risk on global success Bluey.

And then there are the more fun questions: whether Married at First Sight helped Nine pull off the Fairfax merger, whether the ABC needs its own version of it, and whether Hugh Marks can persuade Australians - and politicians - that the ABC is not just worth funding, but worth backing into the future.

ABC managing director Hugh Marks joins Alan Kohler to unpack it all on That's Business with Alan Kohler.

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