Former news director of Australian Broadcasting Corporation joins Constructive Institute Asia Pacific as CEO
We are thrilled to announce that Constructive Institute Asia Pacific will be up and running early next year.
This will be under the leadership of Kate Torney OAM, who is the former news director of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and former CEO of Peter MacCallum Cancer Foundation Limited.
August 6, 2024
Constructive Institute Asia Pacific gets a CEO in former news director of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Kate Torney OAM.
In a partnership between Monash University in Melbourne and Constructive Institute at Danish Aarhus University the new center for constructive journalism will open early next year. The CI Asia Pacific is the result of a joint strategy at both Monash and Constructive Insitute to find new ways to help journalism help democracy in the Asia Pacific region.
“This is a rare moment in time for the media sector – a chance to deliberately be part of the solution to the polarisation and mistrust that we are seeing in so many of our institutions and democracies around the world,” Kate Torney says.
She is a highly respected leader Down Under and comes from a position as head of Peter MacCallum Cancer Foundation Limited.
Kate Torney, who will be professor at the Monash School of Media, Film and Journalism, will begin in November with training in Denmark.
She replaces the Australian media icon Stan Grant, who stepped down from the position in the Spring for personal reasons.
“We are excited for the significant impact the Constructive Institute Asia Pacific will have on developing the next generation of journalists with a renewed commitment to news integrity,” the Dean of Arts Katie Stevenson says.
Constructive Institue was founded in Denmark in 2017 as an independent NGO with a mission to change the global news culture with more focus on nuance, dialouge and inspiration. The constructive center in Melbourne will be the second after the German Bonn Institute. Plans are with local partners to launch more centers at other continents in upcomming years.
As the Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021 Maria Ressa puts it:
“Constructive news is the way journalism should always have been.”