Why so few female voices?
Reality and research don’t support the status quo on commercial talk radio. With women ruling the podcast world, why are stations like 4BC living in the past?
There comes a time in every business when a reset is in order. History has shown us, again and again, that innovation informed by changes in the market is the key to corporate longevity.
Marketing books are full of examples of companies that turned themselves around by tapping into the zeitgeist. Those that go down often do so because they are pitching the same product in the same way to a market that no longer exists.
In the media, despite huge changes in the audience profile, the broader market and the delivery technology, many companies have defiantly stayed the same.
This is very clear when you look at commercial talk radio and its dominant player, Nine Radio.
Certainly, 3AW and 2GB continue to do well in the ratings in Melbourne and Sydney respectively, but that’s not doing a lot for the parent company’s financial bottom line. The really big advertisers and their agencies don’t get especially excited about those stations, because they don’t attract the listeners they want to pitch their products to.
That’s one reason why Nine Radio is, reportedly, on the block with an asking price that, so far, nobody is prepared to pay. (One rumoured buyer, John “Singo” Singleton, said he wasn’t interested, even though it would mean buying back, at a substantial discount, assets he and others offloaded many years ago.)
You’d think the obvious move for Nine would be to bring the radio product up to date.
Yet in Sydney, it’s been a pattern of replacing one stuck-in-the-past male talking head shaking his fist at the clouds with another, who ends up being not quite as popular or influential as his predecessor. It’s a spiral of diminishing returns.
At 4BC in Brisbane, it’s worse because Nine Radio has yet to find anybody, or any formula, that can attract and sustain a substantial audience share.
The managers at any other successful enterprise might say, “Well, let’s do some proper market research, see what the potential customers want and mix things up a bit.”
But at Nine Radio, they’ve just doubled down on a formula that, in Brisbane at least, has demonstrably failed. Audience numbers have declined steadily after an initial uptick when the station relaunched with a local line-up five years ago.
Now, the next ratings results (in a fortnight) might make a liar of me, but even if the rock-bottom numbers go up, I really doubt 4BC is going to be troubling the market leaders anytime soon.
Why? Because, to use a railway analogy, it’s running a steam train on tracks designed for a Shinkansen.
One problem is its insistence of doubling down on right-wing commentary, which works in America because of its huge population along with social and political reasons that don’t exist to the same extent here. All it does here is disenfranchise at least half of the potential audience.
(The glib assertion — in some cases, a mindless mantra — that commercial talk needs to be right wing because the ABC is left wing doesn’t hold up to objective scrutiny. The ABC is far from perfect, but it invites voices from across the political and social spectrum on air and lets them have their say. Its critics — from all sides — choose only to hear the part of it they don’t like.)
In the case of 4BC, the pragmatic business decision would be to have a good look at the Brisbane demographics and tailor its shows accordingly, rather than stick to a philosophy and formula that (for now) is working for someone else somewhere else.
One big reason 4BC is failing to connect with audiences in 2025 is the fact that there are so few female voices on air.
The station employs just one woman in a full-time announcing role: Sofie Formica on the Afternoons shift. Deb Knight hosts the syndicated Money News program four nights a week, and … well, that’s it. The rest of the time it’s back-to-back blokes.
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When any of the regular weekday line-up (Peter Fegan, Bill McDonald, Formica and Gary Hardgrave) goes on holiday, they are replaced by Ben Davis, Dean Miller or Luke Bradnam. Olympia Kwitowski used to host the Weekend Breakfast show, but she’s been replaced by the blokiest of blokes, Paul Burt. (Who, as regular readers know, has a few issues to deal with at the moment.)
Nine Radio has very few women on air around the country — and as the above roll call indicates, none coming through the pipeline.
Its management apparently subscribes to the discredited theory that audiences, including women, prefer listening to male voices. (If you want to know more about this subject, check out highlights of Spencer Howson’s thesis on women in radio starting here at RadioToday.)
Regardless of personal belief, a sensible person in radio management would look at the current ratings results and global media trends and think, “Hmmm, if we want to survive, maybe we need to do things differently.”
A look at the competition might be instructive.
All but one of the stations rating higher than 4BC (and there’s a lot of them) have women on their local Breakfast shows. Think Abby Coleman at B105, Margaux Parker at Triple M, Robin Bailey at KIIS and Nikki Osborne at Nova. Over at the ABC, there’s not only Loretta Ryan co-hosting Breakfast, but also Kat Feeney, Ellen Fanning and Kelly Higgins-Devine anchoring shifts across the day and evening. On Triple J — which also beats 4BC in Breakfast — there’s Concetta Caristo.
Commercial radio has a long history of dismissing what the ABC does, but it’s madness to avoid the simple fact that more people in Brisbane are listening to women on the ABC than to men on 4BC.
It’s also a fact that younger Boomers and all of Gen X — the people 4BC presumably covets as listeners — grew up hearing female voices on air. It’s not novel or weird to them.
It’s as if the ABC, and all the FM music stations, got the memo about women making up half the population but Nine Radio did not.
And if we’re thinking about the future, let’s look at who’s kicking goals in the podcast arena …
According to Triton, the number one show in Australia is the Mel Robbins Podcast (and that’s Melanie, not Melvin). Second is ABC News Top Stories, which has a variety of readers, then Hamish and Andy (yes, both blokes, but in the minority here), followed by Mamamia Out Loud, with Mia Freedman, Jessie Stephens and Holly Wainwright, and Shameless with Zara McDonald and Michelle Andrews.
It seems to me that Nine, which doesn’t appear to have a problem with female anchors on television — a big shout out to the brilliant Melissa Downes! — ought to get with the program when it comes to radio.
Weekend and night shifts are the perfect place to develop talent, so why are those gigs going to men as well? Misogyny seems to be the only possible answer.
Disclosure: Brett Debritz used to be a producer for 4BC Weekends and probably never will be again. Which is a shame because he grew up listening to 4BC, is very fond of the station, likes many of the people there and really wants it to succeed.
I also think they complicate or micro manage stories, consequently it gets long winded and you turn off