Departure of David Anderson
David Anderson: ‘Inoffensive but ineffective’ – and his journos let him down
David Anderson was the least polarising managing director in ABC history. Perhaps that was the problem, reports The Australian’s James Madden.
He is highly intelligent, loyal, well-liked and a team player, but he was a safe pair of hands at a time when what the ABC really needed was a leader who would not cop any moves to bastardise the key tenet of the public broadcaster’s highly cherished charter: that is, to ensure that the gathering and presentation of news and information is impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism.
“David was inoffensive but ineffective,” one ABC insider said on Thursday.
Anderson’s main failing, according to some senior figures who have worked closely with him over the past five years, is that he wasn’t able to adequately stamp his editor-in-chief’s authority upon certain programs – and certain journalists – that referenced the charter as an afterthought.
Read the resignation release: David Anderson resigns as ABC managing director
Kim Williams’ ‘harder, faster, bolder’ ABC plan claims first casualty
Kim Williams has never lacked the courage of his convictions, reports The AFR’s Sam Buckingham-Jones.
When asked recently about the lessons from being sacked as News Corp chief executive after just two years in the role, Williams said he “should have gone harder, faster and bolder”.
Williams was dumped by Lachlan Murdoch in 2013 for upsetting the powerful group of editors that ran News Corp’s publishing mastheads such as the Adelaide Advertiser and Herald Sun with a radical plan to slash costs and focus on digital subscriptions (plans that have been largely adopted by News Corp in the years since).
Now, less than six months into his tenure as ABC chairman, Williams finds himself in the midst of pushing a different sort of cultural change in a large media organisation. It is a mission that claimed its first casualty on Thursday in the form of managing director David Anderson.
Anderson, a 30-year veteran of the ABC, sent staff a 1400-word email saying it was his decision to resign. Williams also told staff “David has made the decision” in a separate note that explained a search for a new MD would begin “in the near future”.
It may be the case Anderson, who still had four years of his $1.2 million-a-year contract to run, did hand in his notice. But his days appear to have been numbered as soon as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced Williams – the son-in-law of former PM Gough Whitlam – as chairman in January.
Laura Tingle slams treatment of outgoing Managing Director David Anderson
The ABC’s star reporter Laura Tingle has defended outgoing Managing Director David Anderson following his sudden resignation from the national broadcaster and slammed Anderson’s “treatment” during his Senate Estimates appearances, reports Sky News’ Reilly Sullivan.
Tingle complained Anderson was often “subject to treatment by Senators which would not be tolerated in any decent workplace” during his appearances at estimates.
The outgoing managing director, who also acted as the ABC’s editor-in-chief, regularly faced tough questions from politicians during those appearances.
Inside David Anderson’s ABC exit, with chairman Kim Williams now free to call the shots
The writing was on the wall for David Anderson the moment Kim Williams stepped through the doors of the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters, reports The Australian’s Stephen Rice.
A veteran media executive, Williams was pledging an unshakeable commitment to editorial impartiality at the national broadcaster. Nothing – and no one – was going to stand in his way.
The mild-mannered Anderson had captained the ABC in a benign, steady-as-she-goes manner that had failed to quell the coterie of high-profile personalities flexing their muscle on social media in defiance of directions – and in clear breach of the ABC’s founding charter.
That doesn’t suit Williams’ style or intent. The one-time professional clarinetist and arts lover may cultivate the air of a public intellectual but don’t be fooled. Williams is a strong-willed, sometimes ruthless player determined to force change at the ABC.
One for the fact check unit: ABC’s ‘human shield’ David Anderson claims chair Kim Williams wanted him to stay
ABC managing director David Anderson has surprisingly resigned just one year into his second five-year term, ending a tumultuous tenure in which the public broadcaster weathered heavy attacks on its editorial standards, experienced an alarming drop in its radio audiences, and faced internal unrest over allegations of racism and sexual harassment, reports The Australian’s James Madden.
Anderson will formally step down in early 2025, and insisted on Wednesday that the national broadcaster’s recently installed chairman, Kim Williams, tried to convince him several times to stay in the role despite his publicly stated desire to “re-imagine” the ABC’s direction.
Business of Media
Google joins $250 million deal to support newsrooms in California
Google, a news industry trade group and key California lawmakers announced a first-in-the-nation agreement on Wednesday aimed at shoring up newsrooms in the state with as much as $250 million, reports The New York Times.
Through a mix of funding from Google, taxpayers and potentially other private sources, the five-year deal would let Google avert a proposed state bill that could force tech companies to pay news organisations when advertising appeared alongside articles on the tech company’s platform.
The announcement was packed with praise for the effort to stabilize the news industry, which has faced layoffs and shuttered newsrooms as readership has shifted online.
Google has regularly said it is “one of the world’s biggest financial supporters of journalism.” Publishers get traffic from its ubiquitous search engine, it has said, and can monetize their businesses with Google technology that lets them find advertisers.
But the company has usually drawn the line at government regulations that have tried to force it to compensate publishers. Google fought bills in Australia and Canada that would have compelled such payments, arguing that paying for clicks went against the spirit of the open web. In 2021, the company threatened to leave Australia if it went ahead with its news media bargaining code.
Eventually, the company found a compromise. It rolled out News Showcase in Australia, a program in which it selects publishers to team up with and pay on its own terms. Google said it now had more than 180 publications on board in the country.
Twitter alternative? News publishers see potential in Bluesky, better than Threads?
Microblogging platform Bluesky may still be a relative minnow among the social media giants, but several news publishers appear to see potential in it as an alternative to Twitter/X, reports Press Gazette.
Bluesky says it has 1.9 million monthly active users – far short of the 200 million monthly active users claimed by Meta’s product Threads and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), which was reported in March to have 174 million active users every day.
But numerous publishers post daily to Bluesky, varying in size and reach from commercial powerhouses like The New York Times and CNN to independent or local titles such as The Intercept and Alaska Beacon.
Television
Jessica Rowe reveals offensive request by former TV boss
Jessica Rowe has shared an offensive request a former boss once made of her during her days as a news presenter on TV, reports news.com.au’s Christine Estera.
The veteran journalist opened up about her experience on The Kyle & Jackie O Show on Thursday morning while celebrating the 3rd birthday of her podcast, The Jess Rowe Big TalkShow.
In a lighthearted chat about Botox that segued to snorting, Rowe recalled a moment in her career when her distinct laugh, which she says sounds like a snort, was not favoured by a former employer who asked her to stop doing it on-air.
“The snort is part of me! Do you know with the laughter, years ago when I was on TV, a boss told me to quit that snorting laughter,” Rowe, 54, told hosts Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson.
Art and life collide as Marta Dusseldorp hits Tasmania’s back roads
In her first presenting role, arranged by Back Roads regular Lisa Millar, following a Bay of Fires publicity interview, the Sydney-raised Marta Dusseldorp discovered a magical part of her adopted home state. She moved to Hobart in 2018 with her husband, actor Ben Winspear, and their two daughters, where the couple set up stage and screen company Archipelago Productions.
The episode, which features an entire region, rather than a single town, touches diplomatically on the locally contentious issue of logging.
Back Roads is on Tuesday, August 27, at 8pm on the ABC.
People are tired of nastiness. Made in Bondi aims for warmth and love
It sounds like an espionage drama, but as Alex Ristevski tells it, casting the new Australian reality series Made in Bondi was simply a matter of careful research, reports Nine’s Publishing’s Craig Mathieson.
Albeit surreptitiously. Ristevski is the head of unscripted development at Matchbox Pictures, the Australian production arm of the American multinational NBCUniversal, and it was his research staff who fanned out across Sydney’s eastern suburbs to find the young, fabulous, and affluent whose lives could be shaped into the show’s narratives
“Unlike other reality shows, we don’t do any advertising. We send our casting team undercover within the area to get a sense of who’s who. It’s through these meetings that you start to get a real sense of who is important, who has strong links, who has friendship groups,” Ristevski says. “They have to have genuine connections – you can’t throw 12 cast members together. We try to find genuine friends with great stories. You can find great-looking people, but do they have genuine connections and how will their story arcs play out?”
Sports Media
Test cricket to be saved by multimillion-dollar fund
An Australian initiative aimed at creating a fund worth $15 million or more to keep the game’s best players in Test cricket looks set to be adopted by the International Cricket Council, reports Nine Publishing’s Malcolm Conn.
Most major cricket nations are unable to compete with the financial pulling power of lucrative T20 competitions such as the Indian Premier League, prompting Australia – working closely with India and England – to devise a strategy to bolster the longest form of the game.
The fund would ensure a minimum Test payment for all players, thought to be $US10,000 (almost $15,000), and pay the costs of overseas tours for struggling countries. The West Indies spent $1 million sending men’s and women’s teams to Australia last summer.
Pat Cummins earned about $3 million from Cricket Australia last year as captain of the Test and one-day teams. Most regular Australian players earn between $1 million and $2 million a year.