Extract from The Guardian
Bosses forced to plead for staff to fill gaps in the news roster. Plus: Rupert, Sharri and the mother of all acceptance speeches
The
ABC’s Sydney newsroom has put out an urgent call to all state news
directors for staff who can fly in to fill “significant gaps in the
production roster”. This is on top of regional staff who have already
arrived to fatten up Sydney’s skeleton staff. Chiefs of staff, news
gathering producers and line-up producers are all needed to put out the
7pm TV news bulletin between 30 August and 28 September, the memo says.
“Please give me a shout out if you have any suggestions or smart ideas.”
Hindsight is a wonderful thing but we do have a suggestion and a smart idea for ABC news boss Gaven Morris: don’t make too many chiefs of staff, chief subs and producers redundant. Don’t lose eight experienced hands from one newsroom in one fell swoop. The crisis comes four months after Morris announced 22 jobs in the ABC’s newsrooms across the country were to be made redundant. Eight of these were in Sydney.
Morris said in April that traditional broadcast roles had to make way for digital-first journalism roles, and people were put in pools, classified as to whether they had digital skills or not and then decisions were made. “While our newsrooms do great work, the current structures do not fully support our people to meet modern audience needs,” he said.
After three chiefs of staff, three chief radio subs, one reporter and one TV executive producer took redundancy, Morris found himself without enough journalists to put out those pesky traditional services such as TV and radio bulletins.
For the past two weeks, sources tell Weekly Beast, the 1pm, 2pm and 3pm Sydney radio bulletins have been produced, subbed and read out of the Newcastle bureau. There simply weren’t enough bodies to do the job and all the scripts had to be sent north. The director of media for the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Katelin McInerney, said: “This is what ABC members and staff have been warning about when they’ve said there is no ‘fat’ left to cut – this is clear evidence that the cuts to the ABC in the latest budget go far further than ‘driving efficiencies’ – they are now impacting directly on the coverage and services the ABC is bound by its charter to provide to all Australians.”
An ABC spokeswoman said there was a “short-term rostering issue”. “No one has been or will be brought in from interstate; colleagues in other NSW offices are filling in as needed,” she said. “The ABC is currently hiring for new editorial roles, and at the end of this process the NSW newsroom will have the same number of editorial roles as before. This will all be completed in a few weeks.”
Hindsight is a wonderful thing but we do have a suggestion and a smart idea for ABC news boss Gaven Morris: don’t make too many chiefs of staff, chief subs and producers redundant. Don’t lose eight experienced hands from one newsroom in one fell swoop. The crisis comes four months after Morris announced 22 jobs in the ABC’s newsrooms across the country were to be made redundant. Eight of these were in Sydney.
Morris said in April that traditional broadcast roles had to make way for digital-first journalism roles, and people were put in pools, classified as to whether they had digital skills or not and then decisions were made. “While our newsrooms do great work, the current structures do not fully support our people to meet modern audience needs,” he said.
After three chiefs of staff, three chief radio subs, one reporter and one TV executive producer took redundancy, Morris found himself without enough journalists to put out those pesky traditional services such as TV and radio bulletins.
For the past two weeks, sources tell Weekly Beast, the 1pm, 2pm and 3pm Sydney radio bulletins have been produced, subbed and read out of the Newcastle bureau. There simply weren’t enough bodies to do the job and all the scripts had to be sent north. The director of media for the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Katelin McInerney, said: “This is what ABC members and staff have been warning about when they’ve said there is no ‘fat’ left to cut – this is clear evidence that the cuts to the ABC in the latest budget go far further than ‘driving efficiencies’ – they are now impacting directly on the coverage and services the ABC is bound by its charter to provide to all Australians.”
An ABC spokeswoman said there was a “short-term rostering issue”. “No one has been or will be brought in from interstate; colleagues in other NSW offices are filling in as needed,” she said. “The ABC is currently hiring for new editorial roles, and at the end of this process the NSW newsroom will have the same number of editorial roles as before. This will all be completed in a few weeks.”
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