Breakfast with Breen

The new executive producer of Nine’s Today show Neil Breen made the jump to TV after 23 years in print. He spoke to Brooke Hemphill about his surprise appointment as editor of The Sunday Telegraph, being in Kevin Rudd’s bad books and his plans for Today.

Neil Breen sits behind The Sunday Telegraph editor’s desk at News Limited’s Sydney headquarters on Holt Street. He’s into his last few days on the job and outside his office are rows of empty desks as many of the staff have moved across the floor to join their colleagues from The Daily Telegraph in the newly consolidated seven-day newsroom. Breen is about to leave the building to start his new role as executive producer of Nine’s breakfast program, Today, and he’s talking down expectations about making the leap to a different medium in which he has little more experience than being a regular guest on the program. “Maybe I’ll come a cropper. I’ve come a cropper before,” he says.

Breen started out as a cadet at Brisbane newspaper The Daily Sun before working his way up through the ranks at The Courier Mail. Chris Mitchell, now editor-in-chief of The Australian, was overseeing the publisher’s Queensland papers in 1995 when Breen was working as a police reporter. Mitchell tells Encore: “I made him the deputy sports editor and sports editor. When I came back to The Australian in 2002, I hired Neil down here as sports editor. I plucked him out because I thought he was bright and somebody who wouldn’t fail given bigger tasks.”

Breen made the move to Sydney to test himself. He says: “The Courier Mail’s in a one-paper town so I decided to go to Sydney to compete.”