The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has announced plans to restructure its eight capital city newsrooms with 20 positions to become redundant.
Director, News, Analysis and Investigations, Gaven Morris (pictured) said the proposed changes would make the newsrooms “fully fit for the modern media environment”.
Mr. Morris said the changes would enable the ABC to deliver “more in-depth coverage and a faster breaking news service to local audiences across television, radio, web and mobile”.
“As Australia’s major public broadcaster, the ABC is continuing to provide news on traditional platforms at the same time as developing our digital presence to be as accessible as possible for all Australians,” Mr Morris said.
“While our newsrooms do great work, the current structures do not fully support our people to meet modern audience needs.”
Admitting that around 20 positions would become redundant, he said he knew this would be painful.
“Against this, new senior editorial roles will be introduced to add to the expertise and skills in the newsroom. At the end of this process we anticipate having the same number of editorial employees,” Mr Morris said.
He said proposed changes included reshaping the editorial leadership and newsroom structure; creating some new editorial roles and changing others to better integrate digital and broadcast responsibilities, and streamlining workflows to enable local newsrooms to be more responsive to news as it happened.
“The proposed changes directly respond to changing audience demands,” he said.
“While broadcast audiences soften, in the past two years the ABC News’ audience on web and mobile grew by 12 per cent to almost million a month. The smartphone audience jumped almost 30 per cent,” Mr Morris said.
