October 14, 2009 – 6:30 pm
ABC Managing Director Mark Scott is, at this very moment, getting to his feet to give the AN Smith Lecture in Journalism at the University of Melbourne. Titled The Fall of Rome: Media After Empire, it has been billed as a landmark statement. It fulfills that promise, while not containing any earth shattering revelations or [...]
October 8, 2009 – 11:45 pm
At the beginning of this week news broke that the doyen of Australian investigative journalists, Chris Masters, had a new gig at the Daily Telegraph newspaper. It’s a significant move in Australian journalism, so how did it happen and what will follow?
Masters, for those who have spent the last few decades under a rock, had [...]
March 26, 2009 – 10:51 pm
ABC Managing Director Mark Scott has appointed his two new members of senior management from inside the organisation.
Kate Dundas is the new Director of Radio, replacing Sue Howard, whose departure was one of the first news stories I covered on this blog. Dundas’s appointment is no surprise. She has been acting in the post since [...]
March 17, 2009 – 10:32 am
Is it just me, or has the ABC Media Watch program improved this year? I don’t think they’ve had a dud so far. Whereas last year I felt the scripts were sometimes a bit long and flabby – as though there wasn’t really enough content to fill the time – this year one feels they [...]
The ABC must be feeling confident. Or confident enough to get cheeky in any case. Last night the ABC trotted out its goods in a funding pitch at Parliament House, at which Communications Minister Stephen Conroy made an encouraging speech.
Among the showings was a clip from the Hollowmen, that anticipated how the funding bid might [...]
Last week I posted a link to this amusing spoof of the Freeview ad, put together by comedians Dan Ilic and Marc Fennell, and posted to YouTube as a teaser for their show about the death of television, which will be part of the Melbourne Comedy Festival.
Last week, to my amazement, the industry trade journal [...]
Just last night I commented on ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s new Twitter presence, and indicated that so far he was a relatively bland Twitterer.
Well that has changed. This morning he tweeted thus:
“Only the ABC can deliver what we are offering in new channels”
and linked to this article from today’s Australian, in which he is [...]
The nation’s public broadcasters are in a bit of a holding pattern at the moment, waiting to hear whether their triennial funding submissions will find favour in the Budget.
There has been plenty of cause for pessimism in the last few months. Funding public broadcasters isn’t normally seen as a way of keeping blue collar workers [...]
February 26, 2009 – 11:29 am
Yes, John Cameron is going. I have written all the background for the Crikey email today, but here are the memos that Cameron and ABC Managing Director Mark Scott sent to staff this morning.
From Mark Scott:
Dear Colleagues
The ABC’s Director of News, John Cameron today has announced to his News division that after nine [...]
February 25, 2009 – 5:33 pm
A former head of the ABC’s Religion unit has accused management of being “ideologically driven” in downgrading the place of religion at the national broadcaster.
In an article published by Eureka Street, Paul Collins also takes a personal dig at ABC Managing Director Mark Scott, saying: “it would be ironic if a discrete religion unit disappeared [...]
