Monica Attard joins Wake Up as foreign affairs contributor
Former ABC journalist and five-time Walkley Award winner Monica Attard has taken a role as a contributor on foreign affairs to Channel Ten’s breakfast show Wake Up.
The show was launched in November by Ten with the intention of appealing to a younger demographic and features news teams based around the country, with Nuala Hafner anchoring national news from a studio by Federation Square in Melbourne.
However, it debuted to soft ratings of 52,000 viewers despite an extensive marketing campaign and has struggled to get traction, dumping host Natasha Exelby after less than a month. Co-hosts James Mathison and Natarsha Belling remain.
Attard confirmed to Mumbrella she is doing two crosses per week for the show, adding: “It’s quite low key. It’s a good opportunity to bring these foreign issues, which they otherwise would not be overly exposed to, to this audience.”
In nearly 30 years with the public broadcaster Attard held a variety of roles including host of Media Watch and five years as Russia correspondent, and currently blogs for The Hoopla on a range of issues including foreign affairs, as well as contributing to US broadcaster CNN.
She added: “I’ll continue to do bits and pieces for CNN, I’m at the stage of my career now where I can do little bits and pieces and dabble, and commercial breakfast TV is certainly not an area I know. It’s a great opportunity.”
Attard was the founding editor of The Global Mail, but left the online publication after ten months last May after reportedly falling out with management including entrepreneur Graeme Wood who founded the publication.
Confirming the new role
Sounds like a good move
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Nice score Ten!
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Indeed. Some long awaited credibility to what is effective a lightweight station. Interesting to see how this lasts given Murdoch and Reinhart hanging around when they are not wanted.
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Not impressed. I want news which is live and local. I don’t want to hear about suicide bombers and the situation in Turkmenistan. There is a great opportunity for someone to provide Australia-only news and magazine programming.
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Very good move for the show.
But overall I find Wake Up really old fashioned and almost tacky in its production quality. After watching it just twice I felt that ‘yeah, been there watched that about ten years ago’ kind of feeling.
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LJW, I agree totally with you.
Give me the ABC Breakfast show with Virginia and Michael anytime professional and well presented – and not tacky and old fashioned like ten’s breakfast show. I only watched it for the Ten show for ten minutes to give it a go and then switched off.
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Nuala Hafner what a heavyweight news anchor!
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Yes definitely Carole Goldsmith – I really enjoy Michael and Virginia. They have a good balance of professional and serious with just the right amount of laughter and personality.
I think Beverley is doing a great job of standing in for Virginia at the moment, the sports presenter makes me laugh – he was so animated when talking about sport but give the ‘news’ and he goes all quiet again.
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