ABC boss Michelle Guthrie: ‘We can do better’

Michelle Guthrie’s at the helm of the national broadcaster. Where will she take it?

New ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie. Picture: Harold David

There are five reasons Michelle Guthrie should not have been handed the top job at the Australian Broadcasting ­Corporation. One: she’s been out of the country for 13 years. Two: she has zero experience in journalism and public broadcasting. Three: she spent 14 years with News Corporation. Four: her most recent job was at tech giant Google. Finally, no woman has held the position in the public broadcaster’s 84-year history.

It’s a damning inventory. Surprisingly enough, it was compiled by Guthrie herself, and she didn’t keep it in her head either. In what seems a clear case of self-sabotage, the 50-year-old lawyer and media executive presented these five reasons to international headhunters Egon Zehnder when they came looking for someone to succeed ABC managing director Mark Scott. “This tells you a lot about women [and] the way they view their likelihood of success,” she says wryly, when we meet in the almost comically large office she’d moved into just three days previously, on the top floor of the ABC’s headquarters in Ultimo, Sydney.

The fact she has offered this anecdote, in her first in-depth interview since taking on the $900,000-a-year job, could also be a handy way to pre-empt the naysayers’ objections to an untraditional ­candidate. Especially when she goes on to say that, at the end of a successful interview process, she was told that her five objections were the very ­reasons she was hired. Take that, naysayers.

Prior to her official start on May 1, Guthrie spent a four-week handover period visiting ABC offices in each of the capital cities, accompanied by her predecessor and a team of executives. She broke the ice with staff by asking them about the first rock concert they attended, confiding that hers was The Police, and she reports being deluged with warm welcomes and sausage rolls. So far, so cosy. But even as the new boss delivers necessarily generic projections on operational and strategic matters, the prophets of doom are circling.

The former Google and Star TV executive comes in as an outsider, a corporate player whose experience is largely overseas, to a public-service body with discrete sensitivities and, yes, eccentricities. The ABC is an institution famously riven by politics and exacting egos, and she takes up the reins at a time of massive upheaval in the media sector. Beyond the broad structural issues thrown up by digital disruption, a looming federal election ensures an elevated level of scrutiny and political pressure. Two days into the job, Guthrie was given the news that a budget cut meant the annual loss of $6.5 million in recurrent funding for some news operations; 14 jobs were axed earlier this month as a result.

Two days after that she fronted her first ­Senate Estimates inquiry, where the grilling ranged from questions about the ABC’s perceived left-wing bias and “Sydneycentric” culture to its decision to commission its own typeface. The phrase “baptism of fire” was liberally employed.

Challenges? There’ll be a few. There’s a rumbling of rebellion in the bush. A decline in new local content. Guthrie’s five-year term will be hampered by a $254 million reduction in operational base funding to 2018-19, yet the ABC will be expected to sustain the quality of its offerings if it is to be perceived as a worthwhile $1-billion-a-year investment for the nation. There have even been dark mutterings about monetising content.

The 4300 ABC staff and the millions of Australians who turn to the national broadcaster for edification, entertainment and, in a sense, a neat paraphrasing of what it means to be Australian, have two questions. What sort of leader will Guthrie be? And what will this worldly, Mandarin-speaking mother of two do to Our ABC?

The echoing expanse of her new office, with a phalanx of assistants to protect its occupant from intrusion, is discomfiting after the quirky fun park of Guthrie’s previous workspace. “At Google, I just had a desk within an open plan office,” she says, searching for a place amid the spartan ­furnishings and empty bookcases where we can get comfortable. Guthrie collects contemporary ­Chinese art. Most of it has been placed in storage while she and her husband, chef Darren Farr, renovate the heritage-listed apartment they own in Singapore, where she was based with Google, but she’d like to bring over a few pieces to liven up the place, “a scroll and a fantastic collage of a woman”.

Conservatively chic in a charcoal and blue shift, with a black Fitbit on her wrist, Guthrie is immediately engaging; chatty, warm and direct, often illustrating a point with a personal anecdote about her daughters, her media-savvy “focus group of two”. Bella, 20, is studying at New York University’s Shanghai campus and Ali, 14, has been boarding in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Both are fluent in Mandarin and “terrifyingly capable and smart”, according to Guthrie’s good friend Janine Stein, a media executive in Asia.

Various friends and former colleagues have told me I will like Guthrie. “She’s a considered, thoughtful person and very good company,” says executive powerhouse Wendy McCarthy. She radiates “intelligence, warmth and charisma”, according to former News Corp executive Andrew Butcher (News Corp is the parent company of News Corp Australia, publisher of this magazine). Seven Network commercial director and close friend of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Bruce McWilliam, who worked with Guthrie at Sydney law firm Allen, Allen & Hemsley and again at BSkyB, says she has “a winning way about her”. She is also, according to former Foxtel chief ­Richard Freudenstein, “a tough executive”. “She’s survived and thrived in a lot of companies where you have to be strong to do well,” he says.

Most commonly, she is described as “a good ­listener”. “She’s the type of person who is comfortable in her own skin so that she doesn’t need to dominate the room and talk over people or do the majority of the talking,” says former IBM boss Glen Boreham, who served with Guthrie on the board of non-profit networking group Advance.

“I must admit, I’m more a listener than a talker,” Guthrie says when I ask her whether she leans more toward being an introvert or an extrovert. It’s a question prompted by a reference to Susan Cain’s 2012 bestseller, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, but also by the fact she’s so unexpectedly soft-spoken. Though she doesn’t consider herself an introvert, she values their input. “Just because people don’t speak up doesn’t mean they don’t have something to say,” she says, adding that her experience of East Asian cultures was that both men and women were often hesitant to come forward with opinions. This troubled her then, and the ­prospect of it troubles her now.

“I feel that, particularly in a senior role, if you talk then everyone assumes [they have to do what you say] rather than anything else. I’m not the repository of all great ideas, I can tell you. I really feel that the ideas are all in there — you can see the work that’s being done in each of the [ABC] offices. I just need to get out of the way.”

So ABC staffers should feel free to say no to the boss? “I don’t want people to agree with me, I want different views,” she says, adding that she enjoys playing devil’s advocate in meetings. “I think you end up with much better decisions when you have different views. I want to make sure that is there throughout the organisation.”

Different views. It’s part of the diversity push the Chinese-Australian Guthrie flagged in an email to staff on her first official day in the job, effectively making it her mission statement. “I think diversity is just the way she looks at the world; it’s in her DNA,” says Stein. On his way out the door, Scott belatedly voiced his regret that the ABC did not reflect the ethnic diversity of modern Australia and, indeed, the news and current affairs face the ABC turns to the public, in the form of presenters such as Tony Jones, Leigh Sales, Barrie Cassidy, Sarah Ferguson, Michael Rowland and Virginia Trioli, is predominantly white.

“There were other things in my statement!” Guthrie laughs, before going on to explain that diversity in staffing and content is “hugely important” to her. “Australia has fundamentally changed in terms of cultural diversity,” she says. “If you really think about making sure we are relevant to all Australians, then that requires us to be reflective of all Australians.”

The ABC has copped flak from various quarters for being overly “reflective” of left-wing opinion. “I don’t see that as true at all,” Guthrie says. “People view any organisation from their own biases and my sense is that we do a very good job in covering the gamut of opinion. But I always think we can do better. That’s why I’m very conscious of making sure we are very reflective of the Australian population. I feel we do have a lot of editorial processes in place and we just need to make sure we adhere to them.”

Guthrie arrives at the ABC with a background quite different to that of Scott, a newspaper ­veteran and a former chief of staff to NSW Liberal minister Terry Metherell. Her CV meets the ABC board’s criteria on a number of fronts and she was said to be chairman James Spigelman’s strong recommendation. Spigelman’s good friend, former News Corp Australia boss Kim Williams, was not in contention, an insider tells The Weekend Australian ­Magazine, even though he “dearly wanted the job”.

Guthrie’s commercial background suggests she will take more of a deal-driven approach than Scott; this, says one media executive, will be valuable in forging channel and content partnerships, perhaps bringing in much-needed revenue from overseas sales. At Google, Guthrie was deeply immersed in the digital technologies transforming the media landscape. She has no experience in content creation, yet is intensely aware of its value and will undoubtedly do her best to maximise it. She won’t, however, charge for it. In her first week, Guthrie told the Senate Estimates committee she had no plans to alter the ABC charter to allow for advertising or subscription services, shutting down rumours she planned to implement a user-pays strategy for iView and downloads.

Her lack of content experience has again raised the question of whether the roles of managing director and editor-in-chief will be split, as recommended by then communications minister Turnbull in 2014. “I think the current structure seems to work very well,” is all she will say.

Media organisations around the world are having to do more with less, and concerns have been raised that the ABC’s digital push will stretch resources at the expense of its core TV and radio operations. But this is no longer your aunty’s Aunty, and Guthrie responds like a true 21st-­century executive, referencing the Google philosophy known as “10x”, in which things are improved, not by 10 per cent but tenfold. “One thing I really took away from Google was to be very ambitious around goals,” she says. “We talked a lot about 10x, that idea of not incremental change, but huge, ambitious leaps.

“We need to see digital as an opportunity to connect with many more people than we currently do with existing platforms, and think about it as a way of connecting beyond Australia as well. Look at the number of international podcast downloads we get and the number of people who buy from the ABC shop online outside Australia.

“I think of it as unleashing, rather than this incremental approach. This is very early days, but the way I think about it is, how do we make something once and distribute it everywhere, rather than making 10 different versions? That doesn’t mean that happens tomorrow — that’s just the principle, the way I think about things.”

Talk of “unleashing” anything is bound to unsettle the less adventurous factions at the ABC, particularly as it sounds like the kind of upheaval that raises the spectre of job cuts and centralising of services. Guthrie says it’s “very, very early” to be making any pronouncements about efficiencies, but “based on what I’ve seen, the organisation is incredibly efficient”. Her month-long getting-­

to-know-you tour of the country revealed “an extraordinary sense of optimism and passion”, she says. “I think there are a lot of misconceptions. I was in every [capital city] office and I never felt a sense of anything other than optimism for the future, a sense of purpose and the increasing importance of us as an organisation.”

Guthrie began her career in Sydney at Allen, Allen & Hemsley, where she specialised in media and technology law, before moving to ­London to work as corporate counsel for BSkyB. It was the beginning of a 14-year association with Rupert Murdoch’s global empire. After four years, she returned to Sydney as Foxtel’s director of legal and business development, before moving to Hong Kong where she took over from James Murdoch as chief executive of News Corp’s pay TV business, Star. It was a big job, with Star reaching 300 million viewers across 53 Asian countries. “I loved Star, it was a great experience; it was very full-on,” she says now.

She resigned from Star in 2007, moving on to become managing director of media-focused private equity firm Providence Equity Partners in Hong Kong. Guthrie says that, after four years of juggling near-constant travel with a young family, her exit from Star “was really about trying to find a role that kept me in Asia but wasn’t managing 5000 people”. She says she takes the long-term view when it comes to “the big jobs”. “I had four years of craziness as CEO of Star but I knew it wasn’t for life. Once you take that overall perspective you become much more willing to drop into the big jobs.”

At Providence, she worked with Lachlan ­Murdoch (now News Corp co-chairman) on a deal to privatise Consolidated Media Holdings with James Packer but the deal did not proceed. In 2011, she joined Google as managing director of partner business solutions for the Asia Pacific region, essentially a marketing and client relationship role.

Guthrie says her enthusiasm for TV was stoked by media hard man Sam Chisholm, her boss at BSkyB. “He once said to me, ‘You’re in television. Watch television’,” she says. “It became a habit after that to always have the television on.”

Her management style tends towards being inclusive rather than directive. “It’s much more important to unleash people’s potential rather than say, ‘Do this’,” she says. “It’s not a one-man band. I feel deeply uncomfortable about the idea of having this kind of figurehead role. The ABC’s an organisation that is doing great things and my job is to help the team figure out what the future might look like, what the consequences of that might look like and how we adapt to that.”

This is the biggest challenge or, as Guthrie spins it, “opportunity”: meeting the changing demands of a 21st-century audience while ­protecting the enduring legacy of an Australian icon. Scott’s 10-year tenure was marked by an aggressive push into digital; he oversaw the introduction of podcasting, online catch-up service iView, a 24-hour news channel and an expansion into online analysis and commentary.

Though Guthrie has clearly been brought in to continue, even intensify, the ABC’s push into digital, she’d rather talk about content than platforms. Perhaps mindful of the criticisms about her lack of editorial experience, she returns often to the importance of quality programming. “The way I think about it is, ‘What are we really good at?’” she says. “We’re really good at being the home of ­Australian content, conversation and stories … being part of the national debate in news, making sure we’re part of every Australian’s life, whether that’s around information, entertainment or ­education. As commercial media organisations come under more pressure, whether it’s in regional areas or others, I think that content becomes even more valuable and even more important. So we’ve got to make sure that we encourage a creative ecosystem so people are coming to us with great ideas and then how it gets distributed is … who knows?

“The challenges we face are no different to those faced by any global media organisation in terms of fragmentation of audiences and massive availability of content. It means our content needs to be even more distinctive to hold people’s attention.”

As for the objections of commercial operators, who accuse the ABC of growing beyond its designated role to compete in the space of mainstream media: “I guess I always go back to the charter and nowhere does it say we are a fill-in-the-gaps service,” she says. “I understand that commercial media are under their own pressures but that doesn’t mean we don’t have to do our job, which is to be relevant to all Australians with programs of general appeal as well as specialist appeal. It would be extraordinary to think we as a national broadcaster would be constrained in terms of platforms that we can use to reach the audience — the taxpayers who are funding the organisation.”

She has had conversations with Communications Minister Mitch Fifield — “He’s very supportive of the ABC” — and has yet to meet with Turnbull, although she’s looking forward to it. “I think he understands pretty acutely the way technology has fundamentally changed many industries, let alone the media, so when we do meet hopefully it will be a great conversation,” she says.

When Guthrie was 15, she wanted to be Jana Wendt. Indeed, if not for the intervention of her mother, Rose, she might have added journalist to her CV. But, upon hearing that her daughter planned to stray from the career path as a doctor or lawyer she envisioned for her, Rose arranged through family connections for her to do work experience at ­Sydney’s afternoon tabloid The Sun. “She wanted to disabuse me of the notion that I would just walk into 60 Minutes and be on air,” Guthrie laughs. A few weeks of pre-dawn police rounds — “I was horrified at the glee with which any form of disaster, car accident or fire was met” — killed off that dream and she duly enrolled to study law and arts at the University of Sydney.

Guthrie is the eldest of four and her upbringing embodied the diversity she champions. Her mother was born in Papua New Guinea to ­Chinese parents but went to school in Australia, and later met her husband Brian at the bank where they both worked.

The dial on the family’s television set in the eastern Sydney suburb of Kingsford was habitually turned to the ABC. From Mr Squiggle (“Try explaining that one to your daughters,” Guthrie laughs) through to The Inventors and This Day Tonight, she was, she admits, “a complete TV junkie”. In particular, she was a news and current affairs junkie; Bill Peach and the ABC’s Sydney news presenter James Dibble loom large in her memory. (Today, she likes the made-for-iView cooking-show parody The Katering Show.)

The Aussie accents on the TV complemented the Cantonese her mother spoke. Although Guthrie began learning Mandarin when she moved to Singapore in 1992, she grew up speaking her mother’s Cantonese dialect before English “as that was just the language I spoke to Mum in, particularly if I didn’t want Dad to know [something]”. ­Holidays were spent at Surfers Paradise. With those fond memories to the fore, Guthrie was determined her two daughters would also have a touchstone in Australia. She and Farr bought a getaway at Palm Beach, in Sydney’s north, for $1.7 million in 2003 and, five years later, put down $4.8 million for a harbourside apartment in Pyrmont, where Guthrie now resides.

Farr, who goes by the nickname Fuzzy Chef, will remain in Singapore, on the pans at his ­two-year-old Aussie-inspired eatery, The LoKal. “I have put my heart and soul into [it] so I’m going to continue to run and grow the business,” says the former Tetsuya chef, who started dating Guthrie in 1984 when she was in her final year of high school at the exclusive Kambala girls school in Rose Bay and he was supplementing his apprentice-chef wages by working as an attendant at the carpark where Guthrie parked.

Neither has any qualms about managing a long-distance relationship — they’ve endured ­bigger strains, particularly during the Hong Kong years. While working at Star she found herself travelling three-and-a-half weeks of the month; Farr became a house husband, taking care of their two girls. It was a highwire act that Guthrie says makes their new arrangement seem a piece of cake. “We’ll see how we go,” she laughs. ­“Singapore’s not that far away!”

Guthrie’s family will serve as ­ballast when the hot winds of judgment and insult start to howl. There are flurries already. Her friend Janine Stein recalls Guthrie’s bemusement at a recent story in Australian media pointing out that her shoes were scuffed. “I called her and said, ‘What are they talking about? You’ve never worn scuffed shoes in your life!’” Stein says. “She said, ‘Janine, I can’t even talk about it, but they were suede and maybe from that angle …’ She finds it really weird that people are talking about her shoes.” (Guthrie’s husband has also generated column inches with his newly acquired “f. k” tattoo, which caused some consternation within the family.)

But it’ll take more than a dig at her footwear to rattle Guthrie, associates say. “She’s worked in worlds of alpha males and she strikes me as very resilient,” says Wendy McCarthy, who was deputy chair of the ABC for eight years. “I don’t think she’ll be available for any political bullying.”

Bruce McWilliam adds that her experience dealing with the “bureaucracy-ridden” Indian market for Star will stand her in good stead. She had also dealt with “the foibles and eccentricities” of News Corp’s various international markets. “I’ve been in lots of fraught negotiations with her and she’s firm on things that are important to her but she also listens to the other person and tries to negotiate a way around any obstacles,” he says.

Over the years, Guthrie has developed a number of strategies to decompress. She does yoga; before starting the ABC job she spent three weeks in India on a meditation retreat. Intriguingly, she also likes to crochet and sew, particularly traditional Japanese embroidery. “I’m not remotely skilled but I do like to have a project,” she says.

She is sanguine about the prospect of the high-profile character assessments that will surely start rolling in. “It comes with the territory,” she says. The floor-to-ceiling windows of her immense Ultimo eyrie frame a postcard-perfect view of Sydney Harbour, cobalt blue under an autumn sky. It’s good to be home. “If taking on this role means that I have to manage that, then …” She trails off. “I think the great thing Mark [Scott] pointed out is how much support there is for the ABC and I really feel that. Everyone has an opinion; everyone feels about it very deeply. There’s something great about being relevant, right?” l