News Corp Australia winds back national news desk
News Corp Australia is set to wind back its national news desk and return key reporters in areas such as politics to their former mastheads, Mumbrella can reveal.
The publisher will move a number of high profile reporters away from the centralised news hub, run by executive editor John McGourty, and return them to their original newspapers from Monday.
News Corp Australia declined to comment on the moves, but Mumbrella understands among those leaving the desk are political reporters Gemma Jones and Patrick Lion, who will return to the Daily Telegraph, and Jessica Marsalek, who will go back to Melbourne’s Herald Sun.
Centralisation was a key initiative of former News CEO Kim Williams and the national news hub cut costs by having a central group of reporters reporting national stories for News Corp’s mastheads across the country rather than several journalists at various newspapers covering the same news story.
“One feature common to most of these developments was the extensive use of campaigns of civil resistance demonstrating popular opposition to the continuation of one-party rule and contributing to the pressure for change.”
Sorry, that’s the revolutions in 1989 that led to the fall of the USSR, completely unrelated to what we’re seeing here. Clearly.