What's New
BY Sarah Patterson June 29, 2026
What's New November 4, 2025
Media Watch unpicks SCA’s AI news aspirations
Media Watch has laid into SCA‘s aspirations to make more of its news content across Australia AI scripted and voiced, with host Linton Besser saying the organisation ‘couldn’t give a rats’ about delivering local news to regional listeners.
You can watch, listen to and read the whole segment here: https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/sca/105966556
The show went on to say that Chief Operating Officer Stephen Haddad had even declared at a staff briefing that the company only did news because it’s required to by law.
Newsreaders like Tessa Randello and Breanna Redhead were shown to be doing as many as 39 bulletins a day across four or more local regions. AI additionally is being used to source local news from the internet and compile and write the bulletins with one former SCA executive saying of the time it takes for a journalist to phone police and hospitals and obtain court documents:
“The aim was to automate all of that … and generate it using AI and then you create scripts, use synthetic voices, so it’s all ready in the morning.”
Even Sydney news editor Amy Goggins has a digital clone of her voice providing weather.
A statement from an SCA spokesperson said in response:
“All bulletins continue to be fact-checked, edited, and read by journalists based in our provincial and metro hubs across the country. This new approach allows us to increase the number of regional bulletins we deliver each day and strengthen local news coverage.”
But a time will come where sources of news that AI can mine from sit behind copyrights and paywalls, factually incorrect stories are unwittingly broadcast or emergency information provided is not up to date. Linton said to wrap up that trust in the news is becoming a ‘quaint relic of the past.’
Related report: Journalists beware: fake content surges in times of disaster
Shame on you SCA !!
What a disgrace first we see the centralisation of radio station programming & the demise of local content & the arrogence of SCA by stating they only provide local content because it’s law, This is simply contempt for the listening public & now the use of AI looks to be the serious reduction of actual human announcers on air. With the merger between SCA & 7 West Media It will be Interesting to see If the AI trend will continue but sadly I wouldn’t be surprised If this continues.
Why is this not bigger news? This website drags Nova and ARN whenever there is sniff of cost cutting at those networks, yet it took media watch for you to write an article about it?
On top of SCA recently making HUGE redundancies across its production group – No articles.. What is with that?
2Day continues to under perform for its 10th YEAR, yet more is written about KIIS Melbourne.. Why is that?
@Michael: 2DayFM continuing to underperform isn’t exactly news. No doubt when both the current brekky show and “Hits Before They Hit/Today AF” station format meet their eventual demises we’ll be reading reports about it here. But in the meantime, what can you say that hasn’t been already?
KIIS Melbourne’s ratings struggles probably garner a bit more attention (across all media it should be said) because of the massive publicity push Kyle & Jackie O received ahead of their launch into Melbourne. Not to mention the reported $200 Million price tag for the duo, the success KIIS-turned-Nova brekky duo Jase & Lauren have received in Melbourne since being dumped by ARN, etc.
It’s like watching a snake eat its own tail. These big networks keep cutting localism, local jobs, networking more, one announcer talking to multiple markets at once, killing off the one advantage local radio stations have over Spotify etc, the ability to talk about what’s happening outside the studio window in the local community. This includes local news. They’re killing off the ability for a presenter to make the listener actually feel something because, God forbid, they’re actually able to talk about what’s happening in their local community. When you’re talking to an entire State through 15 transmitters it’s impossible to be local. These companies roll out the same tedious nonsense like “we had no choice, advertising income is dropping (gee I wonder why #1?), listeners are moving away (I wonder why? #2)”. Management and the beancounter’s instant response is to cut even more local staff and the beast just gets smaller and even more irrelevant to their local communities, and the death spiral continues. Eventually, what was great local radio (and a great training ground for new talent) is a husk of itself and then gone. It’s a disgrace what the SCA’s of the world are doing to local radio stations. Instead of leaning into the one thing that keeps them relevant and important to local communities, they react by repeatedly killing themselves by a thousand cuts (jobs). It’s painful and heartbreaking to watch in equal parts. Listeners are not as stupid as these big networks seem to think they are.
There are just somethings AI shouldn’t replace. Haircuts, Medical Professionals and the Objective reporting of the news.
AI is only as good as its knowledge base. So SCA scraps other peoples content, shifts the cost of verification to other people, other businesses presumably without paying them anything and then… produces audio and passes it off as Journalism?
Yikes, the number of hallucinations that AI has… What guardrails are in place to ensure it isn’t scraping propaganda or planted articles?
Radio continues to destroy itself , meanwhile the big knobs calling the shots are topping up their super getting ready for their rich exit
However they do it now, I don’t hear a change in the quality. I feel equally as informed now as I did 5 years ago.
I dont have a problem with it .
Sounds fine to me.