News Corp launches internet radio offering with first show fronted by columnist Miranda Devine
News Corp has created a new internet radio offering which which will be live streamed on The Daily Telegraph’s website.
Zac Skulander, head of print innovation, told Mumbrella the new offering is about creating another platform for News Corp to tell its stories on.
Skulander: New platform to tell stories
“It really was just for us to own another platform to tell our story on from a newspaper and digital point of view.
“When you talk about the newspaper driving the agenda for the day and owning the agenda for the day, you don’t really realise what that means until you see other media take stories that you see your journos working on and that was one of those things where it was a light bulb moment for me, looking across the floor of our journalists and seeing how much talent we had and just knowing that any radio station would literally be tripping over themselves to have the talent that we have.”
The first program will be three-time-a-week broadcast from columnist Miranda Devine. The first episode of Miranda Live will air at 5.30pm eastern tonight and run for an hour.
Chris Bowen, a former studio producer at talk station 2GB, will be the producer for the program which will bebroadcast from The Daily Telegraph’s Sydney newsroom.
Bowen will be producer for the new live offering
Skulander said the new platform was about owning News Corp’s talent and stories right from the beginning and then “own[ing] it on every platform, running through every single channel”.
Devine’s show will feature a range of guests, with Malcolm Turnbull the first to take the microphone.
Skulander said: “It is not always going to be hard hitting political current affairs stuff, we’ve got some great lifestyle guests and editors that we have access to whether that’s motoring or travel.”
Devine: “Miranda Live is a natural extension of my column”
“The live slant came into it because I needed to give our audience a channel to contact her in real time, whether that was via Twitter or Facebook or even being able to call into the studio and have a conversation with her and have a rebuttal or have their say,” said Skulander.
“The other reason to go live was because we’re breaking news all the time so I needed to have that flexibility as well, I couldn’t do a podcast that was a day behind or a few hours behind because the news cycle changes all the time.
“The studio’s located on the editorial floor so I can have the editor of the DT (Daily Telegraph) coming up any time saying we are working on this massive story which has just broken out of here, there, anywhere around the world, and we can report that straight to our listeners immediately.”
The new show will include editor Chris Dore sharing the next day’s front page story.
This allows News Corp and The Daily Telegraph to “own” the front page and push the print edition by saying “buy the Telegraph to find out more”, Skulander added.
Abigail Dawson was Mumbrella's senior content journalist covering event content. She left Mumbrella to move into an agency role in 2020.
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Good luck to them. Personally I’d rather have a helper monkey stick burning matches into my ears 3 times a week from 5.29pm to 6.31pm than listen to the ideological nonsense sprouted by Miranda Devine.
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“head of print innovation” is a hilariously oxymoronic job title
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