Photo: Tracey Nearmy/ AAP Image
INEVITABLY, much of the media coverage in March 2009 about the appointment of Kate Torney to the lofty position of director of ABC News emphasised the historic aspect of her promotion as the first woman to lead the ABC’s news division. Perhaps that preoccupation veiled the more pertinent facts of her solid credentials as a journalist and news executive, managing director Mark Scott’s role in appointing her and the immense challenges of change management he and she now face every day.
Six months into the job and on the sidelines of the Media140 Conference on real time social media and journalism at the ABC’s Sydney Centre, Kate Torney told Peter Clarke how she was perceiving and meeting those challenges.
Stream or download the audio here (42 mins 46 secs)
• ABC managing director Mark Scott’s speech, The Fall of Rome: Media After Empire
• Mark Scott’s speech, Soft Diplomacy and the World of International Broadcasting
Peter Clarke is a Melbourne-based broadcaster, writer and educator who teaches at RMIT and Swinburne universities. He pioneered national talkback on Australian radio as the inaugural presenter of Offspring (now Life Matters) on ABC Radio National. Podcast theme created by Ivan Clarke, Pang Productions
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[...] there’s also a radio interview with ABC News Director Kate Torney on Inside Story from around the same time, as Margaret Simons has pointed out. Worth checking out to get more sense [...]
[...] In this interview, ABC Director of News Kate Torney answered this question by saying that the ABC broke many stories at a local level that did not necessarily register on the conciousness of media commentators. Perhaps. [...]