Lisa Muxworthy joins Nine Publishing
Lisa Muxworthy, who drove record readership numbers at news.com.au, has been appointed to the newly-created role of head of growth content at Nine’s metro mastheads.
Confirmed on Friday, Muxworthy will drive a growth content strategy to attract new audiences to The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Brisbane Times and WAtoday.
She will take responsibility for a new Growth Content reporting team and editor, social media teams, as well as search, audio and video content.
“I am thrilled to join the talented team of editors and journalists at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and have the opportunity to execute strategies for growing audiences and push the boundaries of content discovery and distribution,” Muxworthy said.
Lisa Muxworthy
Executive Editor Luke McIlveen said: “Lisa is the complete package when it comes to digital publishing.
“Under her editorship, News.com.au won the Gold Walkey in 2022 for the Britanny Higgins story and Lisa was part of the team that drove important editorial campaigns including Let Her Speak, which led to the abolition of sexual assault victim gag laws in Victoria, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
“Lisa is respected across the industry as an exceptional leader who builds high-performing teams with incredible culture and has a proven track record of growing audiences and engagement.
“She’s a passionate editor who puts the audience first and I’m delighted to have Lisa on my leadership team.”
Muxworthy was made redundant at News Corp in late May, in a series of sweeping staff cuts and major restructures made by the publisher. Her axing was seen as particularly shocking, given she was credited with rebuilding news.com.au’s traffic after the public turned to the ABC during the pandemic.
Muxworthy was named editor-in-chief in December 2020, and rebuilt news.com.au into the country’s most-read news site shortly after.
“It was definitely a tough road,” she told Mumbrella last year. “Did it keep me up at night? From time-to-time, sure. But really, I’m probably thinking about news.com.au 24-7 anyway. It was a tough time.
“We had to ask ourselves some serious questions. Are we telling the stories people want to read? Are we in the right places, in terms of where people are consuming news? Where do we need to put our focus? What do we need to change?
“It made us look at what we could do differently and where the opportunities are.
“I think losing our number one spot for that period of time wasn’t a bad thing. You’ve got to be able to look critically at yourself and try to be better, always.
“You’re not challenged to do that if you’re always at the top.”
Muxworthy left News Corp in June, and the following month, news.com.au’s readership again slipped behind ABC News.
She will commence her new role at Nine on February 3, 2025.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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Still can’t believe news let Lisa go! Such a great hire for Nine.
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Nine really needs to get some experience in their editorial leadership. It seems to be really thin, especially in the top jobs, and too many people making decisions seem to have extremely limited knowledge and awareness.
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