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There was a time when half the country watched The Project after dinner. Now, most people under 35 wouldn’t know what time it airs—if they know it’s still on at all. And that gap? It’s not just about changing media habits. It’s about what happens when shared formats start to fade out of our culture entirely.
After 16 years on air, The Project is coming to an end. A finale is planned later this month, and its departure has sparked plenty of reflection — within the media, and among audiences who grew up with it.
There’s no scandal driving it, no big ratings collapse. Just a shift in direction.
When it launched, The Project offered something different: a nightly current affairs panel that felt accessible. It featured headlines and human stories, interviews and commentary, delivered by a rotating crew of journalists, comedians, and cultural figures. It wasn’t always perfect, but it was rarely boring. And it held its own in the TV landscape, sitting between hard news and entertainment.
That kind of format is harder to sustain now. Not because people don’t care about the issues — The Project proved they do by tackling mental health, racism, domestic violence, climate policy, and political accountability.
But the media environment has shifted. We’re consuming differently. And the appetite for a show that tries to speak to everyone, every night, is dwindling.
Today, more than half of Australians aged 25–40 use social media as a primary means to access news.
They’re watching explainers, swiping through subtitled reels, or listening to niche podcasts on their own terms. It’s personalised, filtered, and fast.
Even if The Project adapted its content to meet those shifts, the format was never built for fragmented attention.
That matters, because The Project was one of the last national shows that tried to hold space in the middle. To be a place for news that was serious but not sensationalised, accessible but not dumbed down.
That’s a hard position to hold. Within a media cycle that rewards polarisation, balance can be misread as weakness. Efforts to understand both sides can get painted as fence-sitting. And if you present a view that challenges your audience, they might go elsewhere.
But when the middle disappears, something goes with it: the space where people encounter ideas beyond their own. Formats like The Project tried to bridge generational, ideological and regional gaps — not always perfectly, but with intent.
By its final years, the show’s viewership had dropped below 300,000 — down from more than a million a decade earlier.
That kind of decline doesn’t mean failure. But it does show how much the media, and our expectations of it, have changed. We’re quicker to tune out. Quicker to criticise. Less willing to sit with nuance, even when we say we want it.
The Project wasn’t perfect. But it gave airtime to issues that mattered. That counts for something.
The country it was made for might have changed. But the need for what it offered — for curiosity, clarity, and common ground—hasn’t.
Lanna Hill is founder and director of Leverage Media Group
There was a time when half the country watched The Project after dinner. Now, most people under 35 wouldn’t know what time it airs—if they know it’s still on at all. And that gap? It’s not just about changing media habits. It’s about what happens when shared formats start to fade out of our culture entirely.
After 16 years on air, The Project is coming to an end. A finale is planned later this month, and its departure has sparked plenty of reflection — within the media, and among audiences who grew up with it.
There’s no scandal driving it, no big ratings collapse. Just a shift in direction.
When it launched, The Project offered something different: a nightly current affairs panel that felt accessible. It featured headlines and human stories, interviews and commentary, delivered by a rotating crew of journalists, comedians, and cultural figures. It wasn’t always perfect, but it was rarely boring. And it held its own in the TV landscape, sitting between hard news and entertainment.
That kind of format is harder to sustain now. Not because people don’t care about the issues — The Project proved they do by tackling mental health, racism, domestic violence, climate policy, and political accountability.
But the media environment has shifted. We’re consuming differently. And the appetite for a show that tries to speak to everyone, every night, is dwindling.
Today, more than half of Australians aged 25–40 use social media as a primary means to access news.
They’re watching explainers, swiping through subtitled reels, or listening to niche podcasts on their own terms. It’s personalised, filtered, and fast.
Even if The Project adapted its content to meet those shifts, the format was never built for fragmented attention.
That matters, because The Project was one of the last national shows that tried to hold space in the middle. To be a place for news that was serious but not sensationalised, accessible but not dumbed down.
That’s a hard position to hold. Within a media cycle that rewards polarisation, balance can be misread as weakness. Efforts to understand both sides can get painted as fence-sitting. And if you present a view that challenges your audience, they might go elsewhere.
But when the middle disappears, something goes with it: the space where people encounter ideas beyond their own. Formats like The Project tried to bridge generational, ideological and regional gaps — not always perfectly, but with intent.
By its final years, the show’s viewership had dropped below 300,000 — down from more than a million a decade earlier.
That kind of decline doesn’t mean failure. But it does show how much the media, and our expectations of it, have changed. We’re quicker to tune out. Quicker to criticise. Less willing to sit with nuance, even when we say we want it.
The Project wasn’t perfect. But it gave airtime to issues that mattered. That counts for something.
The country it was made for might have changed. But the need for what it offered — for curiosity, clarity, and common ground—hasn’t.
Lanna Hill is founder and director of Leverage Media Group
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