About Us
As its name implies, The World Today reports Australia's place in the world and the way that international issues affect us.
Broadcast around the nation at 12:10pm on local ABC and Radio National, The World Today is essential listening, midway between its stable-mate programs AM and PM, by which time significant stories have developed here and overseas, particularly in Asia, the Pacific and North America.
The World Today uses an absorbing mix of highly produced packages and presenter-based interviews and debates on a range of issues important to its metropolitan, suburban, rural, international and online audiences.
ABC reporters around Australia and overseas correspondents file up to the minute reports, presented by of the nation's most distinguished journalists. Eleanor Hall, a former foreign correspondent, anchors a program characterised by immediacy and depth of analysis.
The World Today gives the listener a unique entrée in serious current affairs, presented in a friendly, easily accessible manner, which sits comfortably at lunchtime.
The World Today covers breaking stories and gives you all the background and analysis you'll need. With its broader format, The World Today takes you to places other daily current affairs programs rarely reach.
Eleanor Hall
Contact
Eleanor Hall is the voice of ABC Radio at lunchtime. She hosts the ABC's daily newshour, The World Today, which delivers national and international news and analysis to radio and online audiences nationally and throughout the region.
With two decades of reporting experience and with degrees from the US, Australia and a term studying at Oxford University, Eleanor is a truly international journalist who has reported with intelligence and compassion from all corners of the globe.
She has hosted The World Today since 2001. Prior to that she worked in television for ABC TV News, the 7.30 Report, Lateline and the Foreign Correspondent program. She was the ABC's Washington correspondent and covered the Clinton impeachment in the late 1990s and she worked for five years in the Canberra parliamentary press gallery. Eleanor made her professional home at the ABC after working and studying in the United States as a recipient of the Harkness Fellowship and earned her masters in journalism from Columbia University in New York.
In 2009 she won a scholarship to the UK where she completed a term at Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and submitted a paper on politics in the YouTube age, focusing on the Obama e-campaign.
Eleanor's career has taken her around Australia and the globe including to the US, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Guatemala, Britain, Hungary, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and India. Prior to joining the ABC, Eleanor was a scriptwriter on the documentary, Chile Hasta Cuando, which won Brazilian and Cuban film festival awards. She also freelanced from Central America for National Public Radio in the United States.
Eleanor was born in the UK but brought up in Australia. She has two wonderful children.
About Program Production
Behind the informative airwaves that make up Radio Current Affairs, works an essential mix of editorial and technical talent that together makes sure you hear what you need to hear to stay informed and in touch.
The production process stretches across the country and the production team deals with every stage of that process. A press conference in Melbourne will be patched to Perth to become part of the story there; audio of an event in country Queensland will be sent to Adelaide; staff at archives will provide audio from decades past; a policy announcement in Tasmania will be sent to political correspondents in Canberra; newspaper clippings and press releases will be faxed to correspondents abroad; listeners comments, suggestions and irritations will be received and logged; transcripts and streaming audio will be put out on to the world wide web; and of course the broadcast of the programs themselves from the current affairs studios in Sydney.
As air-time looms, the hub of activity is the current affairs lines room where stories and scripts are filed from around the world and around the country via satellites, internet connections, ISDN and phone lines. The pieces are edited, mixed and checked, often re-edited, re-mixed, and edited again; scripts are then subedited, printed, copied, and finally distributed to the presenter and on-air team.
Focus then shifts to the control room and studio as the on-air team - made up of the Executive Producer, Studio Producer, and Technical Operator - prepare to broadcast the final program. As a medium, radio's greatest asset is its immediacy and nowhere is this more evident than in the studios during broadcast. As stories break and develop the current affairs studio is able to keep pace, letting you stay up to date.
It's the production team that's charged with ensuring that the stories of the day get to your ears quickly and cleanly - and while the technology at our end might constantly change, it's hoped the appreciation at your end won't.
