One of the Sunday Telegraph’s biggest names for the past two decades, the gossip queen Ros Reines, has been retrenched as part of News Corp’s latest quiet but brutal cull of senior journalists.
Once trumpeted as “the columnist they can’t silence” and given a double-page tabloid spread in which to gossip about Sydney celebrities, Reines was dumped by telephone last week. She told Weekly Beast she had been unceremoniously made redundant by a News Corp manager and not the paper’s editor, Mick Carroll.
“Hi darl, yes, it’s true,” Reines said when Beast called her on Wednesday. “It took them 18 years to get rid of me and they finally have. We were trying to get into a restaurant after it happened and my son said, ‘Just tell them who you are.’ And I said, ‘I’m not me any more.’”
Reines was legendary for her “Guess who don’t sue” column and wrote extensively about her own personal life including a facelift, a boob job and dieting. She also had some infamous run-ins with the big names of Sydney. One of the most notable was with James Packer, who tore strips off her at a Nine network season launch at Garden Island in 2001. (The Weekly Beast can attest to this as she was a witness.) “People will be jumping for joy all over Sydney which means I’ve done my job well,” Reines said.
This year she detailed some of the highlights of life as a gossip columnist. Of Packer’s spray she said: “It was so humiliating, I wanted to jump in the harbour to get away.”
Numbers up
The ABC’s Radio National is set to announce its 2016 program lineup soon, but we can reveal one of the new shows is an economics report hosted by Richard Aedy. A former Life Matters, Sunday Profile and Media Report host, Aedy has been hand-picked to launch the new economics show, a first for RN. We’re still unhappy management decided to dump the Media Report, mind you.
Small change
It’s been a big week for one of the smaller publishers in town, New Matilda run by Chris Graham. First Graham was appointed to the Australian Press Council as the first representative for smaller constituent bodies, including his publication plus Crikey, HuffPost Australia, Mumbrella, New Daily and others.
The next day Graham reached his $30,000 fundraising target to hire an Aboriginal cadet for the tiny online outfit, which struggles to survive financially.
“New Matilda’s Aboriginal affairs reporting is well known in the Aboriginal community, but with the departure of Amy McQuire, a Darumbal woman, earlier this year, our newsroom didn’t have an Aboriginal face,” Graham told Weekly Beast.
“An Aboriginal cadet brings a perspective to reporting that other cadets simply don’t have. You can’t beat an Aboriginal person telling Aboriginal stories. So we’re very excited about it. The cadetship will be based in Canberra and it starts in March 2016.”
Snap unhappy
Aaron Patrick, the print editor of the Australian Financial Review, was one of half a dozen journalists to go on a junket to Israel courtesy of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council last month. Patrick wrote an engaging insider piece on how well their hosts treated them: they flew business class, had an armed driver and a full-time guide. “Experts were paid to brief us. We joked with the deputy prime minister. We had dinner at the Australian ambassador’s house.”
But the revelation which has caused the most grief among the cohort was that the “trimmer of us swam in the Dead Sea”. The AFR published a photograph of journalists Bevan Shields from Fairfax, David Lipson from Sky News, Ben English of the Daily Telegraph and Sharri Markson from the Australian literally rolling in mud. The Australian’s Media Diary chastised Patrick for publishing the photo and breaching “a journalist’s privacy”. Patrick was quoted: “We did not receive a request from the owner of the photo to take it down. As you may be aware the photo was provided to us by an employee of the Australian.”
The Israel junket by @apatrickafr includes this A+ photo of @BevanShields and @SharriMarkson https://t.co/JA25Dallqh pic.twitter.com/gnHdGoUv7b
— Mark Di Stefano (@MarkDiStef) November 26, 2015
Weekly Beast has investigated the mud fight and can reveal the photo belonged to Markson, and the two journos who did not want it published were Shields and English. English is deputy editor of the Tele and in line to be the next editor of the Courier-Mail.
Next Tuesday, four of the group – Shields, Lipson, English and Alex Hart from Seven News – will be speaking at a special event for the Jewish community held at the Sydney Jewish Museum, called “Journalists Report Back”.
