Peter FitzSimons guest reporter spot divides ABC staff opinion

Even ABC staff are divided in their opinions on Peter FitzSimons’ appearance as guest reporter on Foreign Correspondent.

Leak’s view. Illustration: Johannes Leak

Outgoing SBS chief executive ­Michael Ebeid will shortly announce his new job and at this stage it is more what can be ruled out rather than in. The NBN rumour is incorrect and Google, while undoubtedly in need of Ebeid’s charm in Canberra (who can forget how he turned hard-bitten senators into Eurovision groupies at Estimates?), doesn’t seem the right fit.

Outgoing SBS managing director Michael Ebeid. Picture: Kym Smith

Ebeid planned to leave SBS a year ago, but his partner’s burgeoning luxury travel business made it the wrong time. Expect an announcement this week; the new job is said to be a multi-billion-dollar legacy business in need of a digital transformation. As one wag put it: “that’s just about everything”.

The one and only Sam

They buried Samuel Hewlings Chisholm AO on Friday. St Swithun’s on Sydney’s upper north shore was thick with executives but light on the stars he made. David Leckie, Chisholm’s successor at Nine was there, as was former News Corp executive chairman John Hartigan, and Peter Meakin, now a consultant at Ten News. Legendary Nine Sydney newsreader Brian Henderson was there, as was Midday Show music man Geoff Harvey, 60 Minutes’ Ian Leslie, and famed crooner Kamahl. Even in death anecdotes tend to follow Chisholm around, so it’s nice to be able to present one where the irascible Chisholm, who died on July 9, aged 78, was served his comeuppance by a mouthy woman who not only didn’t give a crap, but certainly wasn’t prepared to take any. After Chisholm left Nine, he moved to the UK and undertook the painful task of making the merged and failing satellite TV operators Sky and British Satellite Broadcasting into a success.

The order of service for Sam Chisholm’s funeral.

Seven’s Bruce McWilliam, who worked at BSkyB, recalls that the call centre was in Dunfermline, Scotland. It was a huge centre and rejuvenated the old town. They chose the site in part because of the nice Scottish voices that were meant to be user-friendly. There was a rule that the phone had to be answered in three rings. One day Sam did a test. And it was answered on the fourth ring. So Sam gave the person who answered the call a blast. She gave it right back. “I am Sam Chisholm the chief executive of BSkyB,” said Sam. “To hell you are, you impolite pig,” said the call centre operator. A memo went around that from then on all calls purporting to be from Sam Chisholm were to be taken at face value.

NOW without Tracey

Tracey Spicer is no longer fielding inquiries about the day-to-day running of NOW Australia, the Me Too organisation she founded aimed at combating workplace harassment in March. It launched in a blaze of “it’s time” publicity helped along by Sacha Horler, Clare Bowditch, Missy Higgins, Ella Hooper and many others.

LJ Loch is the chair of NOW and Kristine Ziwica was recently appointed part-time executive director. NOW has raised $120,000, well short of its $250,000 goal. One issue was that DGR status, (tax deductible gift recipient status) has still not been applied for, holding up donations. NOW is assessing its next steps. “We are currently in the process of obtaining advice regarding which category we would be best advised to apply under and drafting our application. In the meantime, auspicing arrangements are in place,” Loch says.

Tracey Spicer. Picture: Darren Leigh Roberts

Everyone is keen to deny there has been any disharmony. Spicer says she remains at NOW as founder but always planned to step away and return to investigative journalism. But Diary has heard of dissatisfaction among some members. Loch is keen to point out that NOW is a collective endeavour. “As founder, Tracey played a critical formative role in bringing together a diverse board and steering committee who are bringing their broad expertise and commitment to the issue. Tracey has never held a board or management position due to her already significant commitments including investigative journalism and making a documentary.”

Spicer certainly deserves a lot of credit for helping Australian women tell their stories to the media, or to the police, or to counsellors. But some once active NOW members are becoming inert, disillusioned and questioning the capacity of the organisation to realise its aims. “It is just not going to achieve anything,” one said. “Most of the feminists I know are keeping well away from it.”

Fitz splits critics

Guest reporters on the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent are not new. But few proved as controversial as Peter FitzSimons, the former Wallaby and current Fairfax columnist roped in by the program, despite cutbacks over the years, to present last week’s episode about the deportation of Kiwis with criminal records. The program paid one of Fairfax Media’s highest-paid columnists its standard fee and FitzSimons told us: “They paid me bugger-all and for what it’s worth I donated every cent to charity anyway — The Footpath ­Library, which gives second-hand books to homeless people.”

The program divided opinion, even among ABC staff. Former ABC Middle East Correspondent Sophie McNeil, who is joining Four Corners, tweeted it was great to see the program back. “Not a fan of ‘celebrity’ guest reporters though. There’s enough great foreign correspondents at the ABC. They should be given the time and resources to do long form.”

Former AM presenter Tony Eastley commented: “Really is this what #ForeignCorrespondent is supposed to be about? Objectively (sic) out the window.”

The program attracted 500,000 viewers across the capital cities, which would have pleased the ABC as the previous Fitz­Simons-less episode scraped by with a mere 389,000 viewers. The big guy is in no way competitive, so he wouldn’t have noted that his ratings that night exceeded those his wife Lisa Wilkinson brought in that week to the Sunday Project on Ten, a mere 432,000 viewers.

Look Mum, no money

An idea for a fancy new coffee table-style book containing letters written by mums to their children has upset some writers. The idea, from the website The Grace Tales, founded by former Vogue deputy editor Georgie Abay, is to publish a book with global giant Bauer Media, just in time for Mother’s Day 2019. But the idea raised the ire of writer Clementine Ford, who posted on Facebook: “When I asked about payment, of course I got the ‘we don’t have a budget to pay but contributors get to be a part of something beautiful they can show their kids one day’.This book is being released by a fancy looking mother website and they definitely have money. Are they paying the printer? The distributor? The typesetter? THEMSELVES? I don’t need the commission but other women will take it and not question the ‘opportunity’.” Bauer says it has held talks with The Grace Tales, but there is no formal agreement and it has not approached contributors to work for free.

Mini Walkley shocks

And so to the Aussie version of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences technical awards, otherwise known as the Mid-Year Walkley Awards. Diary has never been to an awards ceremony that wasn’t excessively long, apart from the 2013 New Zealand Wine Awards, but that was because each of 17 category winners was delivered direct to our table for sampling. Anyway, the idea of a mini Walkley awards to give the arts and youth awards a chance makes sense. The big shock from last Wednesday’s function: Jane Caro, now has a Women’s Leadership in Media Walkley Award. But the team from Fairfax Media and the ABC who broke the story about Don Burke ’s alleged harassment does not. Diary thinks the Burke story had a greater impact than Caro’s pieces in The Saturday Paper, ABC Online and the University of Queensland Press. Speeches were not allowed, but host Laura Jayes from Sky News graciously decided that she could not deny a talking head of Caro’s calibre her moment in front of the microphone. “I am a jumped up copywriter from advertising and I feel legit,” a clearly surprised and grateful Caro told the audience.

Laura Murphy-Oates in action: Picture Justin Brierty

The star of the night was SBS and NITV journalist Laura Murphy-Oates who won three awards, including young journalist of the year. “Laura’s body of work was outstanding,” said the Walkley Advisory Board, which unanimously named her the winner. “We couldn’t look away.” Murphy-Oates, a 27-year-old Ngiyampaa Wailwan woman, won for reports on The Feed and Dateline about being young and black in Kalgoorlie. She already has a Logie nomination and NSW Multicultural and Indigenous Media Award. But not everyone was paying attention. As Murphy-Oates took to the stage to give her acceptance speech, a noisy group video interview was taking part on the landing just outside the open doors, where a group including Caro, the ABC’s Lorna Knowles and Jo Puccini, Fairfax Media’s Kate McClymont and Tracey Spicer, apparently reconciled since the latter’s criticism of Fairfax in The Saturday Paper, talked feminism and Me Too. Guess the baby-boomers have always been more interested in themselves than millennials.

Tower block of soap

The ABC is getting back into soap operas. The makers of the 30-episode The Heights, set in the fictitious inner-Perth neighbourhood of Arcadia Heights, might bristle at that suggestion, but in Diary’s mind a new “slice of life serial drama series” is exactly that. Diary loves a soap, and this series set around a tower block community starring Marcus Graham and Shari Sebbens and produced by Matchbox Pictures and For Pete’s Sake Productions, sounds ambitious to say the least. ABC head of drama, comedy and indigenous Sally Riley says the show “will broach complex social issues faced in the reality of our lives today”.

Some sample storylines have been forwarded to Diary: The local cafe, Michelle’s, is forced to halt trading when it runs out of keep cups. The neighbourhood centre is thrown into turmoil when its interpretative dance project about a popular uprising against the US president, Dys(trump)ian Times, is banned by the local shopping centre. Year 12 kids cancel plans to go to schoolies in Bali because the carbon footprint is deleterious to the environment.

Facebook mission

A very significant media figure will shortly be on our shores. That person is Campbell Brown, the former NBC News and CNN anchor who is Facebook’s head of news partnerships. Brown will jet over in August to meet a variety of media companies. The New York Times reports that she has a $US90 million budget to commission partners to make Facebook-specific news programs. It recently asked “Is Facebook’s Campbell Brown a force to be reckoned with? Or is she fake news?” Facebook is still reeling over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and is finding it tough nutting out what to do about fake news and conspiracy websites. It is thought to be considering putting up paywalls for publishers on Facebook, enforcing greater curation including the playing down of low-quality news, beefing up Facebook as a breaking news destination. Then there are the recent changes to the algorithm that created chaos among digital publishers when Facebook downplayed news in its main feed to boost posts from families and friends.