Ray Martin, who famously hosted Midday and A Current Affair and was an original reporter on Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes, was dubbed Mr Television in the past for obvious reasons. He hosted Carols by Candlelight for 20 years, won five Gold Logies, and hosted the federal election debates. Now in semi-retirement, nothing has changed. Still filing reports for Channel Nine, Martin is back in the spotlight after being appointed by the ABC board to head up an audit into Q&A.
But he’s going to have to work hard to fit it in around all his other gigs. Earlier this week he was guest-hosting Sunrise on Seven with Samantha Armytage when he declared Tony Abbott’s ban on frontbenchers appearing on the ABC show was “silly”.
Last week SBS announced it had signed him up for the new series of Who Do You Think You Are? which will further explore his Aboriginal roots. And Martin has also narrated Yesterday is History, a program about war stories for pay TV’s History Channel. Is there any channel Martin is not involved with?
How to tweet your way to oblivion
One journalist who is going to find it hard to get work is Pebbles Hooper, an editor who has just been fired by the New Zealand Herald for a stupid tweet she posted on Twitter.
“I’ll get major slack for this, but leaving a car running inside a closed garage while you’re [sic] kids are in the house is natural selection,” Hooper said after news broke that a young mother and her three children had perished in a terrible accident in Ashburton in New Zealand.
An apology wasn’t enough and the newspaper’s editor Miriyana Alexander said a few days later Hooper had resigned. “She will no longer co-edit the Spy pages in the Herald on Sunday, or appear in the Weekend Herald’s Canvas magazine,” Alexander said in the paper. “As I said on Sunday, the views she expressed in her tweet were distressing and are obviously not shared by me, or the Herald on Sunday. I have also apologised to a family spokesman for the contents of the tweet and the distress it caused them.”
Marion Ives settles unfair dismissal case with SBS
We are happy to report that Marion Ives, the second SBS reporter who was sacked after management objected to a post on social media, has settled her unfair dismissal case against the broadcaster. The Ives incident came shortly after sports reporter Scott McIntyre was sacked by SBS managing director Michael Ebeid hours after posting a series of provocative tweets about Anzac Day. Ives, who shared an article on Facebook which lamented the diminishing number of non-Anglo faces in the SBS newsroom, took the broadcaster to the Fair Work Commission with the assistance of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance. McIntyre is still attempting to settle his legal action against SBS.
Geoff Brown, a TV industry champion, farewelled
The film and television industry has lost one of its greatest advocates. The former executive director of the Screen Producers Association of Australia (SPAA), Geoff Brown, has died. Brown led SPAA from 2002 until 2012 and was a tireless operator in promoting Australian screen talent and negotiating with governments, funding bodies and networks. Before SPAA, Brown spent 11 years with the ABC in senior management roles. In his later advocacy role he helped the ABC win an extra $100m in funding for drama, after the broadcaster’s slate fell to just eight hours of new drama in 2008. Brown lost his wife and his 34-year-old son in recent years and credited his friends in the industry for getting him through.
Labor Herald crowdfunds its way towards launch
The Australian Labor party’s big plans for an online newspaper, the Labor Herald, have not quite been realised. It is hoped the site will go live in time for the party’s national conference in Melbourne on 24 July.
While Alex Brooks was hired as the editor, she is still trying to crowdfund $30,000 to pay writers and photographers. Brooks told Weekly Beast $24,000 had been raised by Tuesday evening.
“The Labor Herald has had more than 7,000 people sign up for our email newsletter and has nearly 3,000 Facebook fans, which isn’t bad considering we haven’t yet published any content. We know we can’t please everyone and there are still politicians – and commentariat – who don’t want us to launch at all. The Labor Herald has a very long way to go, but once the site is live we want people to continue to support and participate in this project. I am confident the Labor Herald will find its niche as long as we empower supporters and give them a voice.”
From shocks to locks
Karl Stefanovic and Lisa Wilkinson are widely recognised as good interviewers with a sharp news sense, but their interview with Dawn Fraser on Today this week showed none of their usual professionalism. After the swimming legend made her extraordinary attack on tennis star Nick Kyrgios, Stefanovic’s next question was: “Your hair looks amazing. What are you doing with it?”
