Members' biographies:
Journalist and Editor Members

Bruce Baskett

Bruce Baskett is currently a freelance business writer for overseas publications, as well as acting as a business communications adviser state governments and large companies. He was appointed a Journalist Member Alternate of the Council in July 2003.

Formerly, he worked as a journalist and editor, largely for the Herald and Weekly Times, being chief of staff for the Herald (1982-3), New York editor for HWT (1985-7), day editor of the Sun News-Pictorial (1987-9, editor of the Herald and then Herald-Sun (1989-91). He also worked as European editor (1991-2) and Australian Group Editorial Development Manager for New Technology (1992-4) for News Limited. Subsequently he worked as General Manager of the Bendigo Advertiser and editor of The Press, Christchurch.

In the late 1980s he briefly served as the alternate member of the Press Council for HWT.

Bruce Baskett has judged the PANPA Newspaper of the Year, Melbourne Press Club Quill and Victorian Cricket Association Media awards.

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Warren Beeby formerly represented News Limited on the Council. He was in August 2007 appointed as an editor member.

In his time in the newspaper industry, since 1957, Warren Bebey worked in almost every facet of the editorial side of newspapers, from copy boy to foreign correspondent to political correspondent to business editor to editor of the national daily, The Australian.

He moved into newspaper management in 1982 and was group editorial manager of News Limited from the early 1990s until his retirement.

He served as a director of Nationwide News Pty Ltd, the operating company for the Sydney-based newspapers of News Limited, a director of Australian Associated Press and Vice President of the the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Asscoiation (PANPA), as well as of Newspoll.

Mr Beeby was appointed Australian section Chairman of the Commonwealth Press Union in 1995. He was a News Limited representative (or alternate) on the Australian Press Council from 1988 until his retirement on 30 June 2007. He was subsequently appointed to the pnel of editor members of the Council.

see also - articles by Warren Beeby
Judges Must Protect Free Speech
Threats to press freedom - 2001 CPU speech

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Gary Evans began his career in journalism in 1957 as a cadet on The Courier-Mail, Brisbane. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Queensland. During his career with The Courier-Mail has been chief of staff, a columnist, feature writer and foreign correspondent with assignments throughout the Pacific, Vietnam as a war correspondent. Japan, South Africa and Europe. In the 1960s he worked on The Sunday Mirror, London and in the London bureau of Australian Associated Press. He has been vice chair of the Communications and Media Law Association of Australia and chair of the Combined Newspaper and Magazine Copyright Committee which lobbied successfully for a change in the Copyright Act to allow the print media to enter electronic publishing. From 1985 until his retirement in 2000 he was editorial manager of Queensland Newspapers with duties which included industrial relations, legal matters and responses to complaints to the Australia Press Council.

He is a former president and remains a director of the Queensland Arts Council and a former director of Regional Arts Australia.

From 2000 to 2004 he was chief executive officer of the Princess Alexandra Hospital Foundation which raised money for medical research. He plays very bad golf but does catch fish.

Gary Evans was appointed a member of the Panel of Editor members in November 2002.

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Prue Innes was a journalist for about 24 years. She did her cadetship at the Herald and Weekly Times, with most of it on The Sun, and stints at the Listener-In, and in the 3DB and HSV7 newsrooms. She then went to The Age where she became a specialist court reporter and then law reporter, but her time at The Age included two years in the Canberra press gallery and a year on the subs' desk.

She was a member of the review panel of the MEAA which produced the revised Code of Ethics in the late 1990s, and was the inaugural chair of the national ethics panel, until resigning earlier this year. She was active in the Victorian ethics committee for a number of years.

Prue was the first media officer in the Victorian court system, until July 2007. One of her areas of interest was contempt of court (and how to avoid it), and she regularly ran workshops for journalists on the essentials of court reporting. She was a member of the Courts Media Liaison Group which brought together key players to work out issues of concern for media coverage of the courts and improve media access. In 1998 she took a Churchill Fellowship looking at the relationship between the courts and the media, and was a member of the advisory board of Melbourne University's Centre for Media and Communications Law from its inception until resigning last December.

She holds a BA from Melbourne University, and a graduate diploma in commercial law from Monash University.

Prue Innes was appointed an independent journalist member of the Council in August 2007.

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Alan Kennedy

Alan Kennedy has been a journalist for the past 40 years. He began his career with a cadetship on The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, and has worked throughout Australia and in London.

After working on the development of Australian Business magazine in the early 1980s, he pursued a successful career as a freelance journalist, concentrating on the car industry. As motoring editor of both Australian Business and The Bulletin, he wrote extensively on industry policy.

The past 19 years were spent at The Sydney Morning Herald - firstly, as motoring editor. He edited the Stay In Touch column for three years, before becoming deputy editor and then editor of the sports section.

He returned to reporting for his last few years with the Herald, covering the America's Cup and Olympic sailing, the AFL, Formula One and tennis.

As a specialist sailing writer, he covered the 1998 Sydney to Hobart race in which six sailors died. He followed the events as they unfolded, the inquest and the fallout from the race, which continued for more than five years.

Alan has been a member of the Australian Journalists' Association (AJA), now part of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), for 40 years and has been active in the union for most of that time. He chaired the Australian Consolidated Press House Committee, then, after joining the Herald, became chair of the Fairfax House Committee. For the past eight years, he has been president of the journalists' section of the MEAA.

He was active during the Fairfax takeover in 1992. Through the Friends of Fairfax, he and his colleagues developed grassroots opposition to further concentration of media ownership. This campaign culminated in a rally in Sydney, where Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser came together for the first time since 1975 to support the opponents of media concentration. He appeared before the House of Representatives committee of inquiry into the media in 1991.

Alan has worked with fledgling unions in Asia, including AJI, the journalists' union in Indonesia.

He went to East Timor in the weeks after the United Nations intervention to investigate the needs of the media and to support if International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Safety Office.

As a reserve councillor with the IFJ, he has travelled to Indonesia several times - initially, to report on the state of the media as it emerged from the Suharto years.

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Adrian McGregor is an award-winning writer with long experience on Australian newspapers. He was a senior feature writer on The Australian newspaper for some 20 years and, earlier in his career, for a decade was a columnist for The Bulletin magazine. He is now a freelance writer and a regular commentator on news and politics with ABC radio in Brisbane. He is a five times Walkley award finalist, was named Most Outstanding Contributor of Journalism in Queensland, and has won a National Press Club award for best sporting feature. He has a BA from the University of Queensland where he tutored in journalism. He is also the author of best-selling sports biographies including that of Wally Lewis which created a new readership for rugby league books, of Greg Chappell, acclaimed as one of the finest contemporary contributions to the history of cricket, and of Cathy Freeman, praised for its insights into Australia's most popular sportswoman. He was appointed an Alternate Member of the Council in 2004 and a full member in October 2005.

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