Criticism hot on heels of glamorous take on ABC’s women

ABC investigative reporter Sarah Ferguson might feel she dodged a bullet when she didn’t turn up for a photo shoot for Fairfax magazine’s Sunday Life cover story “Powerhouse Women of the ABC: How the ABC’s Female Journalists are Changing the Newsroom”.

Ferguson had gone straight from making the brilliant political documentary series The Killing Season into working on her next project, a challenging three-part special on domestic violence, and was simply too stretched to keep the commitment.

Sunday Life writer Erin O’Dwyer explained her absence from the early morning photo call thus: “Four Corners reporter Sarah Ferguson cancels at the last minute, amid good-humoured ribbing that the Gold Walkley winner would rather be on the road than in a make-up chair.”

Given the ribbing that has gone on since the ABC high-fliers appeared in the magazine spread, we are sure Ferguson was happy to be on the road. But seven of Ferguson’s female colleagues did turn up, including Annabel Crabb who, O’Dwyer reports, needed two hairdressers to get her curls ready for the shoot.

The shot chosen for the cover featured 7.30 host Leigh Sales, ABC News Breakfast co-host Virginia Trioli and Lateline host Emma Alberici – glamorously styled and elaborately coiffed – posing like Charlie’s Angels in front of a Hollywood-style mirror.

“Historically, the news business has been a man’s game,” O’Dwyer wrote. “But there is a quiet shift underway at the ABC: more women are driving the news agenda, in senior and executive positions, than ever before.”

ABC managing director Mark Scott was delighted with the positive publicity, tweeting on the weekend that it was a great article and a great cover.

The cover certainly got people talking, with some questioning the decision to dress journalists in designer clothes as if they were models or actors. “Sorry, but I find this silly & demeaning,” one Twitter critic said. “Where is the fluff piece with Uhlmann & Jones et al in tux?”

Inside the ABC there were plenty of critics, most pointing to the fact that the two most powerful positions in the newsroom are held by men: the head of news content, Gaven Morris, and the head of news gathering, Craig McMurtrie, and that the vast majority of female journalists were paid a fraction of the salaries enjoyed by the stars and executive producers and certainly would not say their workplace was a utopia. “Not one of those women pictured even works in the newsroom,” one furious ABC reporter told Weekly Beast.

But it was the depiction of the ABC as a model workplace for women and mothers in particular that rankled because the flexible work hours mentioned in the article are not open to everyone. And certainly the idea that the boss would deliver home-cooked meals to new mums as head of news Kate Torney reportedly did for Sales was just laughable. Former ABC presenter Whitney Fitzsimmons spoke for many when she wrote in Crikey that the photos were “deeply disturbing” and sexist.

Fitzsimmons said there is a two-tiered system in place at Aunty. “From allowing for flexible work, to employment appointments, to how salary is negotiated, the ABC is not all things to all people, even though it pretends to be. Some people are allowed to negotiate a market rate salary, whereas others are stuck in the public service band and point system.”

The timing of the puff piece could not have been worse, with 100 people in the news division losing their jobs this year, many of them women and indeed mothers. “Two women lost their jobs while on maternity leave,” one reporter told the Weekly Beast. “It is just so insensitive.”

Press gallery rules Labor Herald cannot pass

Alex Brooks, the editor of the Labor Herald, which went live this week, is annoyed the press gallery committee refused to issue her website a press pass. The reason given was it is funded by the ALP and “openly biased”.

Brooks told Weekly Beast: “Seems archaic that a journalist who works for a political party can’t get access to the democratic institution we would be most likely to cover.

“The AFL and Cricket Australia employ their own journalists and these staff certainly manage to cover the games and sport – yet the federal parliament doesn’t allow that same access.”

Brooks questioned why people who had worked for the Liberal party such as Niki Savva were held to be be “bias-free” and able to obtain a press pass.

“The Labor Herald is absolutely clear about who and what it stands for and who it represents – surely an open bias that our readers would never mistake and we would never try to mislead over. I suspect the parliament and press gallery aren’t quite ready for the reality of a modern, fragmenting media environment where new entities like political parties are also becoming publishers and traditional media outlets compete with Google and Facebook just as much as other media brands.”

A sheepish backdown

In late May my colleague Michael Safi and I reported that the ABC’s story about shearers who were under fire for swearing at sheep was highly misleading.

A few days later the ABC’s own Media Watch also took aim at the ABC rural department’s report, which had spread internationally, leading to the ridicule of Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) for complaining about farmers using swear words in front of animals. The ABC stood fast, telling us it had reviewed Cherie von Hörchner’s story and did not agree that the approach taken was sensationalist. Well, last week the ABC backflipped, acknowledging the story was inaccurate and misleading and that three complaints by Peta had been ignored.

“Due to a lack of context, and the undue prominence given to the claims of a farmer, the stories would reasonably lead audience members to believe that verbal abuse claims were central to Peta’s complaint against the sheep station; which was demonstrably not the case,” the correction said.

The sheep story, which had been the most popular rural story online that week, has now been taken down from the website and corrections have been broadcast. With ABC reporters under increasing pressure to file for online, and in particular to aim to be in the top 10 most popular stories, this kind of beat-up may become more regular.

Weekend away for Naparstek with SBS online role

We wish Good Weekend editor Ben Naparstek all the best in his new job at SBS as head of editorial, online and emerging platforms, but we admit to being more than a little surprised by his latest move. After three years at Fairfax’s Saturday magazine, Naparstek will be in charge of innovation at SBS, his first gig at a digital operation. Colleagues of Naparstek, who was made editor of the Monthly at just 23, say he is still developing his familiarity with the intricacies of new media platforms.

The Weekly Beast hears he has been encouraged to open a Twitter account for himself and the magazine editor and is more comfortable with a book than a social media network.

“While I’m sad to leave Fairfax, I’m thrilled to be joining an organisation that’s at the cutting edge of digital innovation while serving the nation’s diverse communities with first-rate journalism,” Naparstek said in an SBS release this week. “This is an exciting time for SBS, and I look forward to maximising the audience for the network, across different platforms and devices, by experimenting with new ways of telling and delivering great stories.”

It been quite the month for Naparstek, and the job announcement did not go down well with Australian actress Caitlin Stasey.

In a series of inflammatory posts on Twitter, Stasey accused Naparstek of spiking a planned feature on her because she refused to pose in her “panties”. Naparstek rejected the accusation, saying he understood her objection to posing nude and he had merely put the feature on hold to time with her TV appearances. Stasey, the founder of the herself.com website has written an account of the saga in Jezebel.