Nine continues shift to Washington bureau despite shooting
An idea to create a Nine Washington DC bureau that began with Peter Harvey will come to fruition this week despite Nine’s correspondent having been shot with a sponge bullet by riot police in Los Angeles.
Reporter Lauren Tomasi, who will staff the bureau along with a camera operator, is flying out of LA on Thursday to set up shop a few hundred metres from the White House.
When Mumbrella spoke to Tomasi after the shooting, she said she had continued to work until 2am the next day, doing live crosses to Australia about her experience.
Lauren Tomasi before the shooting
“It’s a crazy way to end my time here in LA – the removalists are coming on Wednesday and I’m flying out on Thursday. I haven’t had a chance to pack up the house.”
In earlier conversations, both Tomasi and Nine news boss Fiona Dear had emphasised the significance of the Washington bureau. The shooting, which is now being investigated by LA police, has not changed the timetable.
It’s a move that Dear has been planning for some time.
“I remember standing in the Sydney newsroom on the night that Trump was elected, and I was watching him speak,” she told Mumbrella.
“I actually said it out loud to the newsroom: ‘We need to open up a Washington bureau’. Hearing the way he addressed the world that night made me realise that we needed to be on the front doorstep for all major announcements coming out of that White House for the next four years.”
The original bureau idea goes even further back: Dear said legendary Nine correspondent Peter Harvey, who died in 2013, had “dreamt of this”.
“Every move we make in the industry at the moment has to be a strategic move,” Dear said. “It’s a hard media world out there at the moment. So when you are investing in a new project, it needs to be the right project for the right reasons. So I obviously needed to do a bunch of homework first, to make sure that investing in a Washington bureau was the right step for Nine.
“I’m entrusted with this role at Nine, I take all major moves seriously.”
Fiona Dear
Dear has been at Nine for 20 years, and the network’s director of news and current affairs for just over 12 months. She took over a newsroom in disarray, with her predecessor Darren Wick leaving after over a dozen claims of inappropriate behaviour were levelled at him from staff past and present.
This led to an external investigation by third-party Intersection that “found concerning levels of inappropriate workplace behaviours at Nine”, and to the eventual stepping down of CEO Mike Sneesby.
Since taking over Nine’s broadcast news operation, Dear has installed a number of female executive producers across the network’s news slate, and focused on growing the audiences for the station’s flagship 6pm bulletin – while also expanding its digital news offering. In regards to hiring a female-heavy executive suite, Dear said simply: “I think the best person should get the job.”
“I’m very mindful of that,” she said. “We’ve entered an era where we try to be transparent about roles that come up. We have processes in place, internally and externally. We advertise roles. We go through due process to make sure we get the right person for the role – and I’ll continue to do that, going forward.”
It’s undoubtedly a positive change for Nine, and the industry as a whole. However, Dear says the ratings boost that has seen Nine’s 6pm free-to-air news audience grow across all five capital city areas in the past year comes from maintaining the quality of its product, rather than from making any big moves.
“We don’t take those audience numbers for granted,” Dear said. “We are very appreciative of the trust that our audience puts in Nine news and current affairs. We work really, really hard on maintaining and keeping true to what the Nine brand is. It’s trust and experience. I don’t think we have done anything radically different. What we’ve done, we’ve done well – and we’ve made sure that we listen to our audience.
“We have taken risks where they have been strategic risks, but it’s all about our storytelling. We make sure that the news is at the forefront, not us. It’s not about our hosts or our reporters or our cameramen, it’s about the stories we tell and the people in those stories. We take that really seriously.”
Where Nine has held steady, its major competitor at Seven has thrown a number of curve-balls at its 6pm audience over the past year.
Driven by Seven’s recently departed news boss Anthony De Ceglie, who was brought across from Seven West Media’s western newspaper monopoly last April with hopes of achieving the same dominance on the east coast, Seven’s 6pm news experimented with a confusingly misplaced satirical news segment, introduced a decidedly unscientific horoscopes segment, and axed TV news presenter Sharyn Ghidella who had banked 17 years with the network, with De Ceglie citing “a strategy to recruit young leaders to Seven”.
The experimental features were quickly discontinued, De Ceglie left Seven to head up an NRL team not due to play for 20 months, and Seven’s nightly news lost its footing as the country’s top-rating daily show. Dear watched all this with the required distance.
“I learned a lesson in this industry about 20 years ago that you focus on yourself and don’t spend too much time looking over your shoulder,” she said.
“So of course we watch what our competitors do, but we run our own race. With all due respect to some of the moves that my competitors have made, was I going to follow them? No, I wasn’t,” she said.
“I remind myself and our team every day that we run our own race. We just deliver the news of the day to the best quality that we can.”
This means no horoscopes.
“I’m trying to be respectful here of my competitors,” she said. “Was I tempted to make some radical moves? No, I wasn’t. But, I respect people who try new things. We should all try new things, but they have to be calculated, strategic moves.”
Like launching a Washington bureau during the biggest upheaval of American democracy in quite some time.
New Washington correspodent Tomasi agrees with Dear on the moment the bureau became a no-brainer.
“Having Donald Trump be reelected to the White House really made the decision clear,” Tomasi says. “I sat in the courtroom as Donald Trump became the first U.S. president to be facing a criminal trial. He was then convicted.
Lauren Tomasi
“I went to so many rallies in so many different battleground states through the election campaign. It was really interesting to speak to Americans on the ground. I think the fascinating thing that we continue to look on, was Donald Trump won the popular vote.
“He was, by a majority of Americans, chosen as the president, not just by their electoral college system. And when you’re going through these Midwest states, or when I went to the state of Georgia and went to one of the rallies, you talk to these people on the ground, and he just had the momentum behind him.
“He had such a big fan base and that was momentum that carried through. And in the end, it took him to a second term.”
A second term that Nine will be covering from the ground, as it happens. Dear said she is “super proud” of her team, and the work they are doing to advance Nine’s news offering. And now they will have a bureau situated just 300 metres from the Oval Office, there’s no excuse for not having the best US political coverage in Australia.
“It was Peter Harvey, a long time ago, who dreamt of this, and he was a good mate of mine,” Dear said.
“I think Peter would be looking down – and he’d be a bit proud too.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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