From the top: ABC set for radical change under Michelle Guthrie

Extract from The Guardian

Amanda Meade

Managing director’s recently promoted chief of staff, Sam Liston, tipped to be among the big winners

Former Google and Murdoch executive Michelle Guthrie wants to completely transform the way the ABC is run – from the top down. Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP

Friday 27 January 2017 11.30 AEDT 

The ABC managing director, Michelle Guthrie, is about to announce a major change to the structure of the public broadcaster, probably as early as next month.

Guthrie’s recently promoted chief of staff, Samantha Liston, the former director of ABC People who joined the ABC in 2013. She is said to be the big winner in the new structure with many members of the existing executive demoted or made redundant. The chief operating officer, David Pendleton, was the latest executive to quit on Friday.

The biggest losers in the power stakes may be ABC content heads – radio, TV and news – who are set to have less autonomy in the new-look ABC. What that means for the public is yet to be determined.

When Mark Scott handed the reins of the ABC to Guthrie last year he was, according to sources, surprised at how little interest she had in picking his brains. Nine months on from Scott’s departure it is becoming clearer that may have been because the former Google and Murdoch executive wanted to transform the way the ABC is run – from the top down.

Unlike her predecessor, Guthrie did not fully engage with her heads of department early on, cancelling one-on-one meetings with directors and deciding not to chair her own executive meetings. Instead she sought outside help in the form of consultants to reshape the organisation and took advice from Liston, shunning almost everyone else. Guthrie, sources say, is not impressed with the ABC’s “mad bureaucracy”, saying it is too big and unwieldy. Views like this may win her some fans, particularly in the government and among ABC critics at News Corp.

Pendleton did not have Guthrie’s ear and nor does news director Gaven Morris or radio director Michael Mason. The people she is listening to include trusty lieutenant Liston, consultants Jim Rudder and Deb Frances and a handful of other suits from Price Waterhouse Coopers.