ABC began international search to replace Justin Stevens as news director without his knowledge

ABC managing director Hugh Marks has confirmed he secretly engaged a recruitment company to look for a replacement for news director Justin Stevens after the two disagreed over the direction of ABC News.

Marks said Stevens “did not know” he had begun an international search for a new head of news but it was a necessary move because they “couldn’t get agreement on the way forward”.

A 19-year veteran of ABC News, Stevens was forced to resign last month after Marks told him he had hired a top news executive from Reuters, Simon Robinson, to replace him.

Marks also signalled sweeping change across the organisation, saying all the ABC’s leadership roles were under review and it was not unusual to “undertake extensive succession planning for all of our key executive roles, all the time”.

“We’ve got to go through some changes, and I guess we can have different views on what those changes should be, and how we go about implementing them” he said in an interview with Sally Sara on Radio National Breakfast on Tuesday.

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He said there were “key problems” the ABC had to fix and resources were too stretched across live news. He again indicated some legacy programming or services may have to go.

Now well into his second year in the ABC’s top job, Marks appears ready to start making big changes as he signalled last month on Alan Kohler’s That’s Business podcast: “I’ll give you an example: a legacy television show that has been around for 40 years,” he told the ABC business editor about his plans to axe some longstanding programs.

During the interview, Sara played him those comments , which he said were “hypothetical”. Earlier, he ruled out that 7.30, a 40-year-old program, was facing the axe.

“A better term would have been: what got us to where we are today is not necessarily the things [that] are going to be successful in the future,” Marks said.

Marks also addressed the controversy that arose last week when the ABC’s hiring of former Australian of the Year Grace Tame to host a podcast about autism prompted Melbourne radio host Charlie Pickering to call the move “problematic”.