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The Weekly Beast



Weekly Beast: Sydney siege shows cost of ABC cuts; Fairfax confused about Waleed Aly





Amanda Meade








The Age loses its Focus; Derryn Hinch on Sky; Andrew Bolt on ... ?; Mark di Stefano and Melissa Doyle’s siege reporting; SMH loses against Corby family














Anton Enus has spoken out about his decision to front The Project. Photograph: Shaney Balcombe/AAP





Wednesday 17 December 2014 20.47 EST







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Siege reveals cost of ABC cuts
The ABC’s audience wouldn’t have heard of Jennifer Evans but she wasthe assistant chief of staff in the Sydney newsroom for many years, ahighly skilled job in which she coordinated and organised dozens ofcrews, journalistic assignments and reporters on any given day. But onMonday, when the biggest news story in recent history – the siege inthe Lindt cafe – broke in the heart of Sydney Evans wasn’t therebecause her position had been made redundant. The restructure of ABCnews after the Coalition’s $254m budget cut led to the position ofassistant chief of staff disappearing. Sources say the ABC newsroom wasin chaos on Monday as news executives scrambled to coordinatethe rolling coverage across platforms without her expertise, leadingto tempers flaring. 
Setting the pool rules
Complicating matters on Monday, the ABC had to appear beforethe Fair Work Commission to argue that its redundancy process wasfair. The ABC’s acting head of people, Alan Sunderland, wrote to staffto bring them up to date after the hearing. “This is a really busy andconfronting day, and much of our focus and concern is on the unfoldingsituation in Martin Place, and the people caught up in that terribleevent,” he said. Despite complaints from the unions that the processwas grossly unfair, the commission gave the ABC the go ahead toprogress with the selection pools, with one concession. No one wouldbe made redundant before Christmas unless they chose to go. “If youare potentially redundant and you do not want to go, consultation willcontinue and no one will be forced to leave or forced to make adecision about leaving before the end of the year,” Sunderland said.By Thursday morning 100 staff had been told if they had been selectedfor “potential redundancy”. We say “potential” because the concessionmeans no one will be forced to walk out the door before Christmas – abad look for a public service broadcaster.
Curtis skips the pool
Lyndal Curtis, who announced she was leaving the ABC after 21 years as a widely admired political reporter, wasn’t put in a dreaded redundancy “pool” and she certainly wasn’t made forcibly redundant. As her announcement coincided with the day 100 people were tapped for redundancy, ABC management was keen to stress that it was her choice to leave. But it is also true that the Canberra newsroom where Curtis worked was undergoing a separate restructuring and she took the decision that was in the best interests of her family.



Indira Naidoo is to move to The Project as the new host.
Photograph: Bianca De Marchi/AAP


Who are our celebrities?
Next year is going to be wall-to-wall reality on our television screens and the biggest will be the first Australian version of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! being produced by ITV Studios Australia for Network Ten. ITV is keeping the celebrities under wraps for now but we can tell you former the Fleet Street photographer Nigel Wright is joining the show’s production team as unit photographer, working on location in South Africa. Wright has worked on all 14 UK seasons of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. While the Aussie version is being filmed in Africa, the UK version has always been filmed in northern New South Wales. Wright, who has lived in Australia since 2000, has covered the release of Nelson Mandela, the marriage and funeral of the Princess of Wales and the Boxing Day tsunami in Aceh in 2004.
Losing Focus
The Age’s feature section Focus has folded and will not return in 2015. While the Age confirmed the section would end this month, editors contacted by Weekly Beast declined to say why. We believe the freelance budget for contributors has also been cut.



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Nazeem Hussain has left the Drive program at Radio National


Doyle quick on her feet
Although Seven was across the road from the Lindt cafe and in the prime position to film the ongoing action, it also had a huge disadvantage as it had to relocate its entire newsroom shortly after the crisis began. Seven had to evacuate its Martin Place glass studios and relocate and build a temporary Sydney newsroom and TV studio in its corporate Pyrmont offices, all while staying on air and providing rolling coverage. Reporter Chris Reason, who began on air with Larry Emdur and Kylie Gillies on The Morning Show soon after 10am, was evacuated and then allowed by police back into Martin Place studio with a cameraman, Greg Parker, at 5.30pm. Melissa Doyle took over hosting at 3pm and went live till midnight, proving once again how good she is at thinking on her feet after all those years on Sunrise.
 



Benjamin Law is a frequent commentator on Australian Muslim affairs.
Photograph: Shaney Balcombe/AAP


Sunburnt star
Newcomer BuzzFeedOz received accolades for its breaking news coverage of the siege. Mark Di Stefano, a former ABC journalist, provided what has been described as a textbook example of how to cover a breaking news event via social media. While much on social media was highly speculative, Di Stefano’s fast and accurate tweets from the scene saw him put on 3,500 Twitter followers over 17 hours. The poor chap did get a very burnt forehead from all the outdoor reporting.
Whittaker wasn’t there
So it turns out Paul Whittaker is not to blame for the Daily Telegraph’s much-maligned late-afternoon edition on the day of the siege. The editor of the Tele was on leave on Monday while critics were blaming him for the “IS takes 13 hostages in city cafe siege”. The front page, which got key facts about the siege wrong, was edited by the deputy editor, Ben English. On Wednesday night News Corp editors dined with their boss, Rupert Murdoch, in Sydney. We can’t say for sure whether English was welcomed.



The illustration for the Daily Telegraph’s “slackers and slouch hats” article, which was the subject of a recent Australian Press Council adjudication.
Photograph: Screenshot


Offensive comparison
A Daily Telegraph front page which claimed that New South Wales disability support pensioners (DSP) outnumbered Australia’s total war wounded by more than 44,000 has been ruled offensive by the press council and found to have breached the media watchdog’s standards of practice. The Australian Press Council ruled on Friday that the headline and other material on the front page “collectively imply that a high proportion of DSP recipients are ‘slackers’ and should not be receiving DSP”. Published on 22 May, the headline Slackers & Slouch Hats attracted a lot of negative attention and was the subject of a complaint to the council. The council found the implication that a high proportion of DSP recipients are “slackers” and should not be receiving DSP was “offensive to an extent not justified by the public interest”. The article is still online here but now carries a link to the adjudication, which was also published in the newspaper.
Hinching his wagon to Sky
There has been a shuffling of the talking heads on Sky News Australia for the new year. The Australian’s associate editor Chris Kenny has lost his 9pm Friday Night Live show because Paul Murray Live will air every weeknight in 2015. The Sky News chief executive, Angelos Frangopoulos, has hired the “human headline” Derryn Hinch to host his own show on Saturday and Sunday nights, extending the Live format across seven days. 
Hinch Live starts on Saturday 31 January and will be broadcast out of Sky’s new Melbourne studio, which this year became home to the former ABC presenter Jim Middleton when the Australia Network closed down. Hinch said: “I’m really excited to join Sky News for Hinch Live. I came very close to being dead there not so long ago – so this is really special.” Frangopoulos said Kenny’s other regular gig on Sky’s Viewpoint would now run on Sundays and Fridays at 8pm.
Whither Bolt?
One rightwing commentator who will not be appearing on Sky News in the new year is News Corp’s columnist and prolific blogger Andrew Bolt. Sky has confirmed there are no plans for Bolt to host his own show on the pay TV platform in 2015. We wanted to tell you whether The Bolt Report would be back for a fifth year on Ten next year but neither Bolt nor News Corp would confirm their plans. Bolt’s employer, News Corp, produces and funds his TV program for broadcast on Ten, so even though Ten is keen to have him back, it’s not Ten’s call.



Waleed Aly is at the centre of an embarrassing caption mix-up in the Age. Photograph: flickr


Commercial men go public
The former newspaper journalist Steve Bibb has been named as the ABC’s new head of factual and will take up the role in January. He is now the executive producer of factual at Cordell Jigsaw Zapruder. Bibb’s track record includes Great Southern Land and Two Men in China for the ABC, Hardliners and MegaTruckers for the A&E channels and the true-crime series Wanted for the Ten Network. The appointment was made by the ABC’s new head of content and creative development, Adrian Swift who worked with Bibb at Nine. Swift, the man behind The Voice Australia for Nine, recently moved to the ABC where he will oversee all new development. The industry is keenly watching to see what impact these commercial producers will have on Aunty.
Copyright board appointment announced
The journalist and author Helen O’Neill has been appointed to the board of the Copyright Agency, replacing the children’s book author Libby Gleeson. The Copyright Agency chair, Sandy Grant, said O’Neill arrived at a time when there are “exceptional challenges in the copyright arena and her expertise as a journalist and author will contribute enormously”. A former writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian and Vogue staff writer, O’Neill is the author of the award-winning biography Florence Broadhurst – Her Secret and Extraordinary Lives, as well as the more recent titles A Singular Vision: Harry Seidler (HarperCollins) and David Jones’ 175 Years (NewSouth Books). 
Corby ruling against the SMH
An online news story about the Corby family’s deals with the media, published by the Sydney Morning Herald in January, has been found by the Australian Press Council to have breached its standards of practice. “Bidding war for Schapelle Corby’s first post-jail interview” claimed that the Corby family was in negotiations with TV networks for the first interview with Corby upon her release from a Bali jail and that her mother Rosleigh Rose, “even allowed the [Seven] network to fly her to Bali”. According to the press council adjudication, a Corby family supporter complained about the article and Rose claims to have left a message with the Herald denying that the network paid for her to go to Bali, but she received no reply. The council found that the paper should have taken further steps to contact Rose to give her an opportunity to comment.
Where’s Waleed?
The Age was ridiculed on Thursday on social media after publishing a photo of the comedian Nazeem Hussain to point to a story about its own columnist Waleed Aly. There were complaints that the mix-up was a serious case of colour blindness.


— Nazeem Hussain (@nazeem_hussain)
December 17, 2014
Well, we are kinda the same person... pic.twitter.com/FC3d0NQiFO



• This article was amended on 19 December 2014. The original version said Whittaker dined with Rupert Murdoch.



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