Fairfax appoints HuffPost’s Tory Maguire as national editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
Fairfax has appointed Tory Maguire, formerly editor-in-chief of HuffPost Australia, as national editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
The joint venture between HuffPost Australia and Fairfax unravelled in November, with Fairfax looking to redeploy some staff members into the metro publishing business.
Following the end of the JV, Josh Butler, formerly associate editor was appointed as HuffPost Australia editor in February, however a month later he announced his defection to Ten’s new publishing venture, Ten Daily, as senior reporter.
Maguire’s redeployment to the senior Fairfax role means she will be responsible for leafing federal politics, business and world coverage across the company’s capital city mastheads.
She will report into group executive editor, Australian Metro Publishing James Chessell, who said the news rooms will benefit from the appointment.
“Tory is an outstanding journalist with around two decades’ experience editing and reporting news and federal politics. She is a proven leader in digital publishing with an excellent track record of leading news rooms and producing engaging journalism. Our news rooms will benefit greatly from Tory’s expertise.”
Fairfax said Maguire’s digital skills meet the papers’ editorial objectives of breaking news and producing high-quality, agenda-setting journalism.
Prior to her two-and-a-half years at HuffPost, Maguire held senior editor and journalist roles with News Corp , including as political reporter in the Canberra press gallery, night editor of The Daily Telegraph, editor of The Punch and national roles in online publishing and innovation.
Maguire begins her tole on 16 April.
I am barely able to find an actual news story in either Fairfax masthead. Yet they can afford to have this bloke Chessell being executive editor or whatever. And now a supposed editor overseer as his underling. In my (long) experience these jobs usually don’t involve any editing. Nor any journalism. Much meeting. Lunching. Researching and strategising. The interesting thing is that neither of these people has a career background in management or in any substantial journalism.
Fairfax is being slowly suffocated by the weight of wallets sitting on top of the people left doing the work. Says much about the leadership, or lack of it.
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As I left journLism in 2010i noticed the rise of the shiny people. All fun, privilege and soooo Smart about the new media. I have watched from a safe distance (private equity!) as the shiny people have flimmed and flammed while once important social institutions become horrible corruptions of their purpose.
In Australia Fairfax was the important bulwark against manipulative and greedy media. It’s gone, nutted by the the shiniest bunch of execs and board members I’ve ever witnessed.
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Two very prophetic comments here. They elucidate what I see as valid cause and effect predictions for the future. I wonder how they think they will deal with the outcome of today’s hedonistic world view. viz The Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire. They don’t think it can happen again? Add to that the ultra nutters we see around the world today, and western civilisation as we know it could be headed for a very dark time indeed. That is if the planet survives. And if ‘journalism’ can’t call it like it is, we don’t have much to fall back on, do we? [The Fourth Estate?] Mmmmmmmmmmmm
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