The new RTÉ chair and her board don’t have the luxury of a decision-making vacuum, however, as they will soon have to begin the process of finding a replacement for RTÉ director-general Dee Forbes, whose term is due to finish next summer.
You wait ages for one of the most senior jobs in Irish journalism to come along and then two arrive at once: RTÉ's recruitment advertisement for a permanent successor to Williams – the role has been filled in the interim by Deirdre McCarthy – was published on the same day as The Irish Times advertised for a new editor.
The year also brought changes at Enda O’Coineen’s Business Post Group, which marked September’s new-term feeling by rearranging the management hierarchy. Newsbrands Ireland chairman Colm O’Reilly, then the chief executive of the Business Post, is now chief operations officer of the wider Business Post Group, overseeing its acquisitions and funding strategy as well as its overall financial performance, while Sarah Murphy is his replacement as CEO of the Business Post itself.
In the US, Discovery’s takeover of Warner Media to create Warner Bros Discovery brought regime change to CNN, where new boss Chris Licht pulled the plug on subscription service CNN Plus after less than a month.