While News Corp is famous for having men in key editorial roles, staffers at The Age have for some time been openly canvassing the lack of senior women in key decision-making roles at the paper. While the Age has a long history of female weekend editors, as well as female editors of specific topics (it appointed its first female sports editor Chloe Saltau last year), the Monday-to-Friday team making the decisions at news conferences is starkly male.
The situation is highlighted by a recent management reshuffle, which has had a swag of blokes promoted or maintained in senior editorial ranks at The Age, with only four women (and seven men) given new roles. For comparison, The Sydney Morning Herald is onto its second female editor with Judith Whelan. One consolation for Age staffers is the appointment of two women as join PM editors (Robyn Grace and Marissa Calligeros). Meanwhile men deciding what’s news at The Age include the Monday-to-Friday editor (Michael Coulter), the weekend editor (Dan Silkstone), the digital editor (Michael Schlechta) and the AM digital editor (Mark Fuller). Along with editor-in-chief Mark Forbes, of course, also recently promoted.
Crikey is committed to hosting lively discussions. Help us keep the conversation useful, interesting and welcoming. We aim to publish comments quickly in the interest of promoting robust conversation, but we’re a small team and we deploy filters to protect against legal risk. Occasionally your comment may be held up while we review, but we’re working as fast as we can to keep the conversation rolling.
The Crikey comment section is members-only content. Please subscribe to leave a comment.
The Crikey comment section is members-only content. Please login to leave a comment.