ShareFacebookX (formerly Twitter)TranscriptAnd now, to the gorgeous NSW town of Coffs Harbour where FM radio lovers were delivered this midday bulletin last Thursday by Triple M’s local newsreader:TESSA RANDELLO:Hey I’m Tessa Randello with your local headlines …TESSA RANDELLO:A mid north coast nurse is in the running for the Senior Australian of the Year …- Triple M Coffs Coast, 30 October 2025She also brought the NSW Riverina its midday news some 900 kilometres away:TESSA RANDELLO:Hey, I’m Tessa Randello with your local headlines …- Triple M Riverina, 30 October 2025And miraculously, three-and-half hours up the highway in the NSW town of Orange too:TESSA RANDELLO:Hey, I’m Tessa Randello with your local headlines. A driver’s been charged after a collision with an ebike …- Triple M Central West, 30 October 2025Yes, last Thursday Southern Cross Austereo newsreader Tessa Randello, who is actually based in Sydney, voiced as many as 39 bulletins across four local regions.The day before?She was bringing the news of North Queensland to Townsville:ANNOUNCER:Townsville’s 102.3 …TESSA RANDELLO:Hey I’m Tessa Randello with your local headlines …- Triple M Townsville, 29 October 2025And Cairns:TESSA RANDELLO: …Rangers have trapped and removed a crocodile after a teenager was attacked at a beach on the weekend …- Hit103.5 Cairns, 29 October 2025For the past few weeks Tessa Randello has been made to voice more bulletins in more regions and she’s not the only Southern Cross Austereo newsreader doing so because the company’s razor gang has been busy slashing staff across its brands including Triple M, the Hit Network and on-demand audio platform Listnr, leaving the few remaining newsreaders to voice scores of regional bulletins:ANNOUNCER:… Karratha’s Triple M …BREANNA REDHEAD:Hey there, Breanna Redhead with your local headlines …- Triple M Karratha, 29 October 2025ANNOUNCER:Broome’s 102.9 Triple M …BREANNA REDHEAD:… Breanna Redhead with your local headlines …- Triple M Broome, 29 October 2025ANNOUNCER:Esperance’s 747 …- Triple M Esperance, 29 October 2025ANNOUNCER:Geraldton’s 98.1 …- Triple M Geraldton, 29 October 2025ANNOUNCER:The Goldfields …- Triple M Goldfields, 29 October 2025BREANNA REDHEAD:… Breanna Redhead with your local headlines …- Triple M Esperance 0.21, Triple M Geraldton 0.25, Triple M Goldfields 0.36, 29 October 2025But if you’re stressed out just listening to Breanna Redhead’s output, don’t be because at staff briefings last month Southern Cross executives unveiled their secret weapon in the fight against, well, labour costs.Yes, artificial intelligence, of course!Which requires staff only to:STAFFER:… select what you were interested in, how long you’d like the broadcast to be … and it would populate a couple of lines for each story …- Phone, Fmr SCA Journalist, 29 October 2025The tool, promoted by management as a panacea, scrapes local news from the internet, compiles bulletins and yes writes stories:STAFFER:The way it was explained to me was that it would be scripting for us … spitting out stories for us that we would then check …I don’t think any of us trust it … but we don’t have much choice …- Phone, SCA Journalist, 28 October 2025And what of the company’s pride in delivering local news to regional listeners?Nah, SCA couldn’t give a rats.With insiders telling us that at one recent staff briefing chief operating officer Stephen Haddad announced the company only did news because it’s required to by law.The Broadcasting Services Act, which requires SCA’s regional radio stations to broadcast at least 62.5 minutes a week of local news, is considered such a pain in the arse that SCA has been looking to replace its cumbersome journalists with robots for some time:That was always the plan. One of the things we tried to work out was how much optimisation of AI can there be … the outcome was a head count reduction.- Phone, Fmr SCA Executive, 29 October 2025Because real people filing real news have to:… phone the 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.- Phone, Fmr SCA Executive, 29 October 2025Southern Cross Austereo’s AI ambitions date back to at least 2021 when the company laid out millions of dollars to take an interest in three separate AI plays — SourseAI, New York company Frequency and Melbourne AI outfit Sonnant.The radio company has been making steady progress into a synthetic future with AI already driving its fuel watch segments and with many of its weather reports voiced not by Sydney news lead Amy Goggins, but by a digital clone of her voice:AI CLONED VOICE:Mostly fine for the rest of today in Mackay …- Triple M Mackay, 31 October 2025The company’s formal AI policy assures us human connection remains at the core of its audio output, which is a great comfort — particularly as SCA’s management is all-a-lather at the prospect of yet more clones:SCA has plans to create podcasts using AI content and voices … and aspirations that if the talent can’t make it in for a last-minute VO change or weekends or public holidays, then to have the talent’s voice cloned … it’s already thinking about how to structure employment contracts to get voices cloned.- Phone, Fmr SCA Executive, 29 October 2025Some SCA insiders are horrified at the roll-out of the AI tool, fearing breaches of copyright and unwitting defamations.But of course the company offered us this rather soothing assurance:All bulletins continue to be fact-checked, edited, and read by journalists based in our provincial and metro hubs across the country.- Email, SCA spokesperson, 31 October 2025The job cuts come as SCA prepares the ground for its proposed Seven West Media merger, with pledges to squeeze even more serious savings from the combined business.The media game is so tough these days that AI must indeed appear like a holy grail to bean-counting executives especially, looking to do away with expensive and often mouthy journalists.But anyone who really believes audiences will blithely accept the undeclared use of AI voices as an acceptable replacement for trained journalists is living in a fantasy land and helping, by the way, to hurry-on an information apocalypse where trust in the news is but a quaint relic of the past.Australia's largest radio network, Southern Cross Austereo, crosses the AI Rubicon, using a robot to source and script the news.Read astatement from an SCA spokesperson here.3 Nov 20253 Nov 2025Mon 3 Nov 2025 at 9:30amShareFacebookX (formerly Twitter)Appears InFaux dinkum; AI pipedream; Ten+ minus 303itemsIn this episode1of3Ep 39 - Faux dinkum2of3PlayingEp 39 - AI pipedream3of3Ep 39 - Ten+ minus 30Back to top