{"id":491945,"date":"2026-02-20T07:53:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T07:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/491945\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T07:53:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T07:53:07","slug":"sky-goes-dark-but-a-new-dawn-awaits-at-news-corps-holt-street-studios-amanda-meade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/491945\/","title":{"rendered":"Sky goes dark but a new dawn awaits at News Corp\u2019s Holt Street studios | Amanda Meade"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anthony Albanese managed to straddle the media divide on one busy Friday, dropping into Guardian Australia\u2019s newsroom to record a podcast <\/a>in the morning, before he was due to visit Sydney\u2019s News Corp headquarters to join chair Lachlan Murdoch for the unveiling of Sky News Australia\u2019s new name in the afternoon. Just imagine the whiplash.<\/p>\n

The prime minister planned to join the New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, and a cavalcade of Sky presenters to mingle over drinks and speeches inside the new home of Sky. The News Corp platform has been forced to rebrand as it loses the rights to the name Sky News in December when a 10-year deal with UK Sky News expires.<\/p>\n

Despite Sky offering an almost exclusive roster of on-air guests from the other side of politics, Labor leaders continue to<\/a> accept News Corp invites. (In 2024 the PM attended Lachlan\u2019s Christmas party, The Australian\u2019s 60th birthday party and the opening of Qtopia Sydney, funded by the Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch Foundation<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

On Thursday, just to take one night as an example, the following were guests on Sky: the Liberal leader, Angus Taylor, the shadow ministers Tim Wilson, Michaelia Cash, Anne Ruston and Jonathon Duniam, the Nationals backbenchers Matt Canavan and Ross Cadell, and the One Nation recruit Barnaby Joyce.<\/p>\n

The newly renovated studios are inside the Holt Street headquarters in Surry Hills alongside the newspapers, but that\u2019s where the camaraderie ends. Journalists at the Daily Telegraph and The Australian have been kept at arm\u2019s length from the new digs for fear of the name and logo being revealed ahead of time.<\/p>\n

It appears to have worked \u2013 the new name has not leaked.<\/p>\n

We reported last month that the company had lodged six brand names<\/a> with IP Australia and was awaiting the regulator\u2019s approval to register them as trademarks.<\/p>\n

Bone dry story<\/p>\n

The former News Corp journalist turned true crime podcaster Bryan Littlely believed he had \u201cmost likely\u201d found the bones of the Beaumont children<\/a> \u2013 three siblings who disappeared from a beach in South Australia in 1966.<\/p>\n

The missing Beaumont children: Jane, Arnna and Grant<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are closer in the past decade than we were in the first 50 years,\u201d Littlely told the Nightly in an almost 2,000-word \u201cexclusive\u201d on the so-called discovery<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Melenie Ambrose reported that \u201ccitizen investigators\u201d had helped Littlely find \u201cnew witnesses, evidence of a hidden network around the Beaumont family and even a possible child\u2019s bone now in police hands\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cLittlely insists the Beaumont children remain \u2018very much in play\u2019, citing overlapping suspects and similar age ranges of victims,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

Littlely, a former Adelaide Advertiser journalist, is \u201cfrustrated\u201d he had to wait so long for the police to test the bone, a process police say took much longer because Littlely decided to cut the bone into smaller pieces before handing it over.<\/p>\n

A little over a week after the Nightly piece was published, South Australia police put out an unusually frank statement<\/a> criticising the citizen sleuths, and announcing that a forensic examination had determined the bone fragments were not human remains.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the bone fragment had been human, the way it was handled, cut, and packaged could have significantly hindered the extraction of DNA and may have prevented the identification of a deceased person,\u201d police said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuch actions have the potential to cause serious detriment to investigations and undue distress to families of missing persons.\u201d<\/p>\n

The police referred to the social media speculation stirred up by Littlely without naming him.<\/p>\n

\u201cSA Police is urging the community and media outlets to exercise caution and responsibility when sharing, reporting, or promoting information relating to missing person cases.\u201d<\/p>\n

Littlely said he was \u201cdisappointed but not distracted\u201d by the police response and would now have the bone \u201cindependently tested. To be sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

How goes the war?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a little awkward for the Nine newspapers<\/a> \u2013 but a relief for all of us \u2013 that an alarming 2023 front page warning about the threat of \u201cwar with China within three years\u201d appears not to have eventuated.<\/p>\n

On 7 March it will be three years since the Red Alert series<\/a> was published by the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, featuring a panel of five national security experts who warned that Australia faced a potential war with China within three years.<\/p>\n

The multimedia series was widely criticised as hysterical and hyperbolic, most colourfully<\/a> by the former prime minister Paul Keating and comprehensively by Paul Barry on Media Watch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Margaret Simons, writing in Guardian Australia, spoke to a range of foreign affairs specialists who described the series variously as \u201cpretentious\u201d, \u201cirresponsible\u201d and implicitly racist<\/a> in its depictions of China.<\/p>\n

We await an update from the SMH and the Age in some 15 days on how the series is holding up.<\/p>\n

Silence barely broken<\/p>\n

The media got overexcited this week when there was a development in the case against the accused Bondi beach terrorist<\/a> Naveed Akram.<\/p>\n

He made his first court appearance in Sydney and the headlines were somewhat overblown. They claimed he had broken his silence, uttered his first words and he had been seen for the first time.<\/p>\n

double quotation markBondi shooter utters first words in first court showing \u2013 MSN<\/p>\n

double quotation markBondi Beach massacre accused breaks silence in court \u2013 Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n

double quotation markAlleged Bondi shooter seen after arrest \u2013news.com.au<\/p>\n

The reality was far more prosaic.<\/p>\n

The 24-year-old appeared via video link<\/a> in the Downing Centre local court and said two words: \u201cyeah\u201d and \u201cyep\u201d. The much-promised first sighting was a court sketch by the artist Rocco Fazzari, and of course we had already seen multiple photographs and videos of the alleged terrorist.<\/p>\n

Back to Bondi<\/p>\n

On Sunday the first Australian interview with one of the Bondi heroes, Ahmed al-Ahmed, will air on Nine\u2019s 60 Minutes.<\/p>\n

The Syrian-born father of two helped disarm one of two gunmen<\/a> during the terror attack and was badly injured by five bullets.<\/p>\n

For the premiere of the 48th season of 60 Minutes, the reporter Dimity Clancey takes Ahmed back to Bondi beach, his arm still in a sling.<\/p>\n

Ahmed was interviewed by the US broadcaster CBS at the end of December and about the same time he was photographed with the Sky News Australia<\/a> host Sharri Markson, who said on social media she had secured an interview.<\/p>\n

But the interview did not proceed, leading to an extraordinary 1,500 word lament<\/a> by the Sky News director of programs, Mark Calvert, who was more than a little uncharitable about the man widely hailed as a hero.<\/p>\n

Sharri Markson with Ahmed Al-Ahmed in a photo posted to her Instagram before he withdrew from their interview<\/p>\n

Sources close to Ahmed told Weekly Beast he was very unwell at the time and felt pressured and misled by Sky News. He wrote on Instagram: \u201cThey didn\u2019t even care about my health condition!\u201d The post was later deleted.<\/p>\n

Markson\u2019s Sky documentary on the terrorist attack, Bondi: A Timeline of Terror, will air on Tuesday. She has also teamed up with Alex Ryvchin from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry to write a book, Bondi Terror, to be published by HarperCollins in September.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve such a strong sense that the other media will not do this properly,\u201d Markson told Sky viewers. \u201cYou know, just like after the Holocaust, as you say, all of those stories need to be recorded, and we have to do that now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bio engineering<\/p>\n

In December the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age stopped disclosing that the conservative columnist Parnell Palme McGuinness is a senior fellow at the rightwing thinktank the Centre for Independent Studies. Her byline referred to her simply as \u201can independent insights and advocacy strategist\u201d.<\/p>\n

After we approached Nine, the publisher said it was a \u201cproduction error\u201d and the CIS disclosure would be added in future in print, and online articles would be amended.<\/p>\n

McGuinness\u2019s online bio is now pretty comprehensive: \u201cParnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She is also an advisory board member of Australians For Prosperity, which is part-funded by the coal industry.<\/p>\n

McGuinness said: \u201cI\u2019ve always told my editors that they were very welcome to just link to my LinkedIn profile instead of using up column inches publishing my CV each week.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anthony Albanese managed to straddle the media divide on one busy Friday, dropping into Guardian Australia\u2019s newsroom to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-491945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}