{"id":5912,"date":"2013-07-05T14:50:57","date_gmt":"2013-07-05T04:50:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nofibs.com.au\/?p=5912"},"modified":"2022-05-02T00:29:39","modified_gmt":"2022-05-01T14:29:39","slug":"mediaactive-interview-with-abc-news-director-katetorney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/mediaactive-interview-with-abc-news-director-katetorney\/","title":{"rendered":"@MediaActive interviews ABC news director @katetorney"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Director

Director of News at the ABC, Kate Torney Courtesy ABC via Globalmail.org<\/p><\/div>\n

Kate Torney, director of news at the ABC, says she welcomes new news media players into the local scene, celebrates constant change in the news industry and affirms the bedrock principles of a publicly funded news organisation as the digital revolution gathers pace<\/p>\n

Torney has been director of news at the ABC since 2009. She is hardly a household name. Yet she is leading the news division during an era of unprecedented change in news gathering and distribution at the national broadcaster. Her daily influence is not overt but it is culturally significant.<\/p>\n

\u201cBuilding the future of the ABC is about building agility into our thinking,\u201d she says. \u201cWe will constantly be changing. The changes we are introducing now are the tip of the iceberg\u201d.<\/p>\n

Those shifts include providing a publicly funded 24\/7 television news service in competition with Sky News and the recent fundamental re-structuring of the ABC\u2019s Sydney convergent newsroom to meet the cross-breeding demands of the emerging digital news media epoque.<\/p>\n

The ABC has just made another digital move with its new mobile news app<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a wide-ranging interview<\/a> with the Australian current affairs site Inside Story<\/em><\/a>, Torney takes a \u201cnews media ecology\u201d approach, welcoming more players into the local digital space including The Guardian Australia<\/em> and potentially The Huffington Post<\/em> and New York Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s good for democracy! It\u2019s good for the audience. … you want to be able to log on at any time to a range of sources and a variety of views and opinions and news platforms. I think the more the better in any news ecology.\u201d<\/p>\n

The start-up phase of the re-structured ABC convergent newsroom coincided with the 2013 Boston Bombing. Torney sees that incident and the subsequent global coverage as another of those turning points in the digital transformation of the media and journalism. And a learning moment for all news players: \u201cI think it was a moment when a range of media outlets and social media made mistakes around coverage … for the ABC, ultimately, we returned to first principles – verification.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms Torney strongly rejects an \u201cus and them\u201d division between \u201cmainstream media\u201d and social media preferring to view the complex and often \u201cunreliable\u201d process more broadly as \u201cinformation flow\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the much discussed tensions between \u201cspeed and accuracy\u201d, she acknowledges the immediacy of social media platforms such as Twitter, \u201cWe understand that ultimately Twitter and social media platforms are going to be breaking stories quicker than we can. And we are often, hopefully, going to be right there with them … and constantly with those breaking news stories we see audiences coming back for verification and coming back to a trusted brand to help understand the mountain of information you\u2019re sifting through.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked to make a prediction about how the evolution of news will unfold over the next five years, Torney agrees that what we are familiar with now in news gathering and presentation will alter fundamentally: \u201c … there\u2019s just this wave to ride if you can get on it … certainly not in the next two or three years, but I see a time when the distribution of information will be completely different, there will be just so much more opportunity to tailor content …\u201d<\/p>\n

This fundamental difference may, in Torney\u2019s view, eventually mean the phasing out of \u201clinear\u201d mass media news bulletins as evolving digital media technologies, newsroom cultures and more informed and self-assured audiences adapt to the new era.<\/p>\n

With the looming federal election, Ms Torney rejected the suggestion that ABC journalists should \u201cget off the bus\u201d to avoid those \u201cmagical mystery tours\u201d organised by political parties for staged announcements and photo opportunities: \u201cFor us the challenge will be to find compelling ways to engage audiences … it\u2019s not necessarily all about the \u2018horse-race\u2019 but it\u2019s about how do those policies affect individuals … we will have people on the bus, because I think there is a responsibility to tell our viewers what has happened on a daily basis, where the leaders have been on a daily basis. That\u2019s not to say that we won\u2019t be taking a holistic look at what the day has meant and how the day has shaped up – it\u2019s very much why our senior people will not be on buses.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently, the ABC decided to not replace Norman Hermant as the corporation\u2019s foreign correspondent in Moscow after the ABC\u2019s twenty-three year presence in the Russian and former Soviet capital. The news director maintains the decision was made after extensive internal analysis of reports from that bureau compared to others\u2019 and in response to the apparently increasing demands for reporting and coverage from the Middle East. This is despite Russia\u2019s key role in the Syrian civil war, one of the Middle East\u2019s biggest stories. She says, however, \u201cNow in twelve months time, we may decide to move correspondents around … but we are always accountable for how we spend the money, where we have people …\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms Torney also admitted the ABC news division, as it moves beyond its original broadcaster model into presenting much more written text, now needs to improve its website writing to transcend primarily reproducing online the text of radio news scripts with quotation marks around recorded audio content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kate Torney, director of news at the ABC, says she welcomes new news media players into the local scene, celebrates constant change in the news industry and affirms the bedrock principles of a publicly funded news organisation as the digital revolution gathers pace Torney has been director of news at the ABC since 2009. She […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":117,"featured_media":6001,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3434,57,3546,585,21,38],"tags":[814,815,817,818,813,816],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/d2dd936696f6279d79780e5542ee9f4e.jpg?fit=960%2C526&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3t0mw-1xm","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5912"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/117"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5912"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56649,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5912\/revisions\/56649"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}