Paul Whittaker named as new editor-in-chief of The Australian as Chris Mitchell retires
New boss: Paul Whittaker
Daily Telegraph editor Paul Whittaker has been named as the new editor-in-chief of News Corp’s national broadsheet The Australian with longstanding boss Chris Mitchell confirming his retirement.
The move sees Courier-Mail editor Chris Dore move to Sydney to replace Whittaker, nicknamed ‘Boris’, with the moves set to come into effect on December 11 when Mitchell officially retires.
Mitchell has been in the top job at the last remaining national broadsheet newspaper since 2002, while Whittaker had a stint as editor of the paper between 2007-2011.
Chairman *Michael* Miller
Hi CM,
You’re not wrong – despite speaking as one they’re not morphing into one just yet.
Cheers,
Alex – editor, Mumbrella
ABC Terrorism front pages on the cover of a national paper.
The newspaper game is not going to end with a whimper but rather a spectacular enfilade. It will be…..interesting, probably not edifying.
The Tele under Paul Whittaker: Embarrasingly sycophantic adulation of Tony Abbott; a 1950’s vision for Sydney that involved motorways, a mega casino, and tax cuts for horse racing at the expense of decent infrastructure, schools and hospitals; attacks on the disabled; a demented 4-year obsession with Clover Moore; totally missing the Obeid/ICAC stuff until it was too late, then getting revenge by campaigning unsuccessfully against ICAC, an institution vital to NSW. Oh, and falling circulation and an unpopular website.
i went to look enfilade up but got shot down
Droll Mr. O’Really 🙂
They say that you can do anything with numbers. News Corpse announcements on staff appointments prove yet again that you can do anything with words … everyone is brilliant, everything is going gangbusters … what about those 50 hacks pushed out the backdoor on the redundancy conveyor belt week? Umh, move on please – nothing to see here.
Mitchell clearly didn’t want to go. So the push is intriguing. Maybe Whittaker is besties with Lachlan? Or has Thomson finally acted on his dislike of Mitchell? We can only wonder what sort of obsessions will come next.
Whittaker isn’t known to be a caring and sharing kind of guy. Word is there was a power struggle between him and long time Foreign Editor, Greg Sheridan – both of them of Rupert’s far right perspective, of course – over who would get the job. Paul Kelly, the ex-editor who has been there since Adam was a boy – he gets rolled out on every anniversary of the Dismissal to regurgitate even more words on it – backed Sheridan in the ensuing rumble but his man lost. Will Whittaker now be gunning for Kelly? Self-important late middle-aged men in suits doing what self-important late middle-aged men in suits do best.
Sheridan has spent years in journalism, but not one day involved in the production of a newspaper, so it is hard to understand how anybody could think of him as a possible editor of any newspaper. Whittaker is a clever journalist who is without understanding of how the world operates. Unless he is moved on quickly he will be the last editor of The Australian.