Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee, , 5:24:44 to 5:26:41
Senators request a detailed breakdown of the 2,000 staff members in the news division, focusing on their specific roles, qualifications, and geographic distribution across regional offices.
Topics: Public service staffing, Government spending
Speakers: Senator The Hon Sarah Henderson, Hugh Marks, Ms Deena Amorelli
Uh look, I I would be just on a related matter, I would be keen, um Mr. Marks, how many journalists and others do you employ in the news and current affairs divisions of the ABC?
Ms. Samarelli might have those data. Yeah.
There's about two thousand staff in the division of news.
On notice, could you please give me a breakdown of the each of those persons at the ABC, unidentified, of course, and where they're located in the country and the role, so looking for the role they perform their title to the extent that it's describing the nature of their work and uh and their qualifications, please?
Yeah, I think Senator, what we could do is look at some broad groupings of roles across the organisation, how many are journalists, how many are researchers, um, other I guess professionals, um obviously you're seeing the rise of video journalists at the moment as a as an important category, and we can look at where those are broken down across the country. I'm sure that's uh level of information will be.
How many are in Sydney? What what what's the breakdown of the roles? How many are in Perth, Renmark, Geelong, wherever it might be? So if we could just get a very detailed breakdown of where ABC journalists producers, editors and other staff in news and current affairs of the of that 2,000, because it's a lot of people I realise, but uh where they are located, how they are qualified and the work that they are doing.
Yeah, just to give you idea, Senator, I think somewhere around seven to eight hundred of those people are located in regional and rural offices. Um but I don't know whether that's of the journalistic number. Um so let us come back with some information and see what we can provide to you.