Joanna Spiteri appointed new CEO of Broadcasting Authority

The Broadcasting Authority has appointed Joanna Spiteri as its new chief executive, following the decision of the present CEO, Pierre Cassar, to resign in order to pursue greener pastures.

Cassar had handed in his resignation, bringing to an end almost eight years in the position in order to take up a new job as director of communications at the University of Malta.

Having graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in communication studies in 1998 from the University of Malta, with her main dissertation focusing on the changes in Maltese print journalism since the eighties, Spiteri worked as a journalist at Public Broadcasting Services Ltd. newsroom, producing local and foreign features for television and radio, as well as covering parliamentary sittings.

During the two years at PBS Ltd, Spiteri presented and produced current affairs programmes on TVM and Radju Malta, two of which had won the Broadcasting Authority’s Programme Awards. She also produced and presented a series of programmes on Channel 12 focusing on the work done by voluntary organisations and adult learning.

In 1999, she joined the Broadcasting Authority as a supervisor in the programme monitoring department. During the tenure of this post, she read for a Master’s degree in arts at the University of Malta focusing her research on the portrayal of gender issues in news bulletins.

As a result of her interest in gender issues, the Authority appointed her as a chairperson of the Broadcasting Authority’s equality committee in order to liaise gender issues at her workplace with the National Commission for the Promotion of Equality. In 2004, she drafted the Broadcasting Authority Guidelines on Gender Equality and Gender Portrayal in the Media.

She was involved in a number of projects with regard to gender and the media including the co-ordination of an EU project known as “Portraying Politics: a Toolkit on Gender and Television” and co-coordinating the staff at the Broadcasting Authority to assist the National Coordinator, Brenda Murphy, in the Global Media Monitoring Project. 

She followed her studies by reading for a Ph.D. with the University of Sterling in Scotland, where she studied news impartiality in the Maltese TV broadcasting scenario, the role of the public service broadcaster and the role of the Broadcasting Authority in achieving impartiality on the television broadcasting media.