Saturday AM presenter Elizabeth Jackson has been made redundant from the ABC, joining Emma Alberici who has settled legal action with the national broadcaster and taken a redundancy.
Also walking out the door from the News and Current Affairs division are:
Zoe Daniel
Michaela Boland
Dominique Schwartz
Karen Percy
Sandi Aloisi
Sophie McNeill resigned before the redundancies began, to join Human Rights Watch.
The ABC Rural Department’s Country Hour EP Helen Taylor has left the building, as have long serving regional journalists Michael Cavanagh and Moyra Shields.
Caberra’s Andrea Ho and ABC Audio Studios’ Kellie Riordan are also on the redundancy list, as is Marianne Leitch, Sheryle Bagwell and Sascha Rundle.
As redundant staff walk out the door, various divisions in the ABC are restructuring to cope with the leaner working environment. In the News Division, Gaven Morris told radioinfo:
There are expected to be around 200 redundancies in total.
UPDATE. Elenor Hall says she was not made redundant. She has tweeted to her social media followers:
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So many familiar faces and voices disappearing at once. I hope that they can transfer their skills into other aspects of their career.
Some of the familiar voices have had the courage to report from the Middle East be embedded with and report from "the other side". I hope that skill can be transferred to the corporate world.
There is one thing that I feel uncomfortable, based on the names in this news item, is that women are over-represented. This is especially so when women are encouraged to contribute to the workforce.
To those in the commercial media typically saying "....we're getting cut....why aren't there cuts to the ABC....." that may be a valid statement. At the same time, with cuts to newspaper and the closure of commercial TV bureaus in rural towns, there is no news from these rural areas. Such a macabre request for solidarity by the commercial media commentators has the consequence of no news being reported at all.
Thank you,
Anthony of sad Belfield
Dear editor,
Notwithstanding the corrections for the reasons for the departure of Eleanor Hall and Sophie McNeill, I still hold that (i) there was an over-representation of women leaving the news department, and still hope those that were made redundant are able to transfer their skills elsewhere.
A skills transfer may not necessarily mean that the next job is necessarily journalistic.
Thank you,
Anthony of hopeful Belfield