By igniting the commercial debate, new ABC boss Guthrie fails her first leadership test
The next managing director of the ABC will be Google executive Michelle Guthrie. Her first public appearance was unimpressive, argues Mumbrella’s Tim Burrowes
This week, we got our first look at the ABC’s new boss Michelle Guthrie when she sat down for a live interview on News 24.
It was hard to tell who was more nervous – Guthrie, or her future employee Joe O’Brien.
And despite it being a soft interview, she made a hash of it.
As a result, the ABC’s 4,000 or so staff will spend the months until she officially starts, anticipating a plan to bring ads to the public service broadcaster.
While she may be that way inclined, I doubt she’s got any such plan. If she did, she wouldn’t be telegraphing it in advance.
Instead, it looked like a lack of media training. About four minutes into the interview, she was asked about funding.
Rather than playing a straight bat and saying it was too early to discuss and leaving it there, she fulminated on being open to all options, and talked about international areas where the ABC takes ads.
As a result, most of the headlines weren’t about the appointment of a smart, digitally savvy new boss – they were about non-existent ABC plans to take ads.
It even made it to the ABC’s own airwaves. Yesterday morning saw ABC 702 summer breakfast presenter Dan Ilic spend an hour or so sharing with his listeners a series of spoof ads to give them a sample of what life under Guthrie might be like.
“Shade: Brought to you by non-transparent objects”
“Time: Think about buying a machine that measures it.”
“Have you ever thought about buying stuff? Then why not try shops?”
(It was an imaginative and entirely legitimate way of engaging with listeners on a topical news item of the day in an original way, even if it did happen to be about the ABC. Given the broadcaster’s commitment to independence, I hope Ilic’s ABC career remains as bright as O’Brien’s despite today’s headlines about his activities …)
Guthrie’s problem is that the narrative adds up. Her early career was spent in the Murdoch empire. More recently, she’s been helping Google flog ads to agencies. She’s already going to face a battle to persuade staff that she’ll be on their side.
And now, this will be the defining issue of her first few months.
By the way, even most of the ABC’s enemies don’t really want it to be ad-supported. Its commercial rivals certainly don’t want to be fighting the ABC for ad share – they just wish it was weaker.
But as a result of this clumsy interview, that’s the story.
Scott: Calm in a crisis
Since the interview, I’ve been thinking about outgoing MD Mark Scott’s decade in charge.
While the broadcaster has its share of crises during his tenure, I can’t think of a time when a problem landed on his desk and he made things worse. Quite the opposite, I think.
And surely the first test of a good boss is whether their involvement makes things better or worse for the organisation they lead. Guthrie has left her comms people with a problem before she’s even started.
She also seems to have telegraphed more than she intended about her dual role as boss of the organisation and also editor-in-chief. Clearly it’s not going to work. Having a person without editorial experience making big journalistic calls is untenable. You only get the necessary judgment through experience that she doesn’t have. They’ll have to split the role.
And Guthrie knows it – hence her answer to the question: “The current position is that I will have ultimate responsibility.”
The current position, huh? So the ABC board will change that then.
In this role, every word Guthrie says will get intense scrutiny. She’d be wise spending the coming months preparing for that.
There’s still time to improve. But it’s not been a great start.
- Tim Burrowes is content director of Mumbrella
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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This is really the result of journalists who know full well that the ABC can’t run ads on tv or radio writing stories that don’t make that clear. She’s talking about iview, online or perhaps paying for old material that’s currently not available.
She was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.
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ill equipped, ill conceived & badly executed.
OMG!
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The neoliberalisation of the ABC has begun …
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She had all the talk and displayed none of the understanding of what a public broadcaster is all about.
Ads? Don’t be crazy, that is the last thing the commercial stations or other media (ie News and Fairfax) will accept for ABC “old” media or digital.
But keep talking about it as a real prospect and watch the government reduce its funding using the excuse. A bad time to be MD coming up.
And where were the editor-in-chief concerns when Russel Balding, a pure bureaucrat was MD – and did an excellent job calming and re-organising the ABC after the Shier nightmare.
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wow just watched it. how disappointing.
loved mark scotts tenure – he did brilliantly
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People with no idea about the future imbue those who work at Google with some form of superpowers rather than seeing them for what they are: sales reps for AdWords. Seems the ABC is the latest to fall victim. Welcomes to Jonathan Shiers the sequel.
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Yes, not a good start.
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Michelle Guthrie may lack media training, but I doubt that she was fulminating: (“to complain loudly or angrily, to send forth censures or invectives; from Latin, to strike with lightning”).
Give her a month or two in the job, and perhaps she will fulminate the immortal lament of one of her predecessors: “I’m supposed to be runnin’ the joint!”
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Guthrie is surprisingly inept. Scott is a good politician/bureaucrat. What the ABC desperately needs a a really strong creative leader. To get the picture, just imagine its schedule is a few years, when BBC content is OTT/VOD and there has been no hard work done on the ABC output. In journalism its strengths are shrinking, exemplified by the fact that The Bicycle Thief is in any way prominent. Its drama is too often lame and much of the comedy is tired. Documentary is virtually non existent and in general it produces very little beyond kids programs that achieve value internationally. Scott put no creative pressure into the place. In fact news24 and the digital plethora are both indulgences. His diminishment of rural and regional and special interests, especially in radio, is the opposite of good strategy for a digital world.
Guthrie’s first steps suggest nothing of clear priority and hint at a messy future.
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Hardly fulminating, more like fanning the flames if the hand movements were anything to go by.
To many, Google seems to be the new holy land, the centre of all that is wise and innovative.
This appointment may be a mistake, it may be a potential disaster; one thing is an almost certainty, it will be of little or no benefit to the ABC or the future of Australian Television.
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I saw that interview… it was cringe worthy. Is the fact that she used to work for Murdoch have anything to do with her appointment. A swing to the right perhaps for Aunty?
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