Former News Corp editor Luke McIlveen, who went on to be the founding editor of Daily Mail Australia, has been appointed executive editor of Nine newspapers.
McIlveen will oversee the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald mastheads and the Brisbane Times and WAToday digital news sites, Nine announced on Monday.
McIlveen takes over from Tory Maguire who has become managing director of Nine’s publishing branch.
Maguire said on Monday that McIlveen would “help drive the continued transformation, innovation and high-quality journalism Nine’s metro mastheads have achieved in recent years”.
McIlveen in the same statement said he was “thrilled and honoured” to be leading “Australian journalism at its very best”.
McIlveen was a cadet at the Australian newspaper before working in the Canberra press gallery. He held senior roles at the Daily Telegraph and edited the Manly Daily before becoming editor-in-chief of news.com.au.
McIlveen then left News to become the founding editor of Daily Mail Australia and was later executive editor at Fox Sports.
The Daily Mail was criticised for using competitors’ content when McIlveen was in charge with News Corp Australia in 2014 labelling the publication’s journalists “copy snatchers and parasites”. The parties later reached a confidential legal settlement.
McIlveen found himself in hot water as a Daily Telegraph reporter in 2006 over a story about an ANZ bank technology centre in Bengaluru.
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McIlveen’s report incorrectly claimed the building was a call centre that employed 1,300 workers who handled Australian customer accounts. ANZ pulled $4-5m worth of advertising from News and threatened legal action. The Telegraph’s then editor David Penberthy later said the error was his.
When asked by the Australian newspaper in 2010 what his biggest mistake was, McIlveen told James Chessell – who went on to become managing director of Nine’s mastheads before resigning late last year – that he knew “full well what it is”.
“Look, sitting in Bengaluru pooing through the eye of a needle while a major bank launches a full-scale PR assault against your front page on Aussie jobs being shifted to India was not the ideal way to take in the subcontinent,” he said at the time.