Ian Walker took over the running of the ABC’s fledgling podcast unit, First Run, in 2015. Since then, he has helped launch more than a dozen new podcasts, including the hit kids show Short & Curly, Tall Tales & True, The Real Thing, Burn Your Passport, Little Tiny, and more recently Unravel True Crime, currently the ABC’s most downloaded digital-first podcast.
Allan Clarke, Yale MacGillivray and the Unravel True Crime team won a 2018 Walkley Award for Best Indigenous Reporting for Unravel’s season one story, ‘Blood On The Tracks’. The project also pioneered unique production and distribution models – partnering with TV production companies and the ABC’s Australian Story to produce and publish the same story across different platforms.
Before podcasting, Ian worked as a TV documentary director, making award-winning documentaries (I, Psychopath, 2007), then producing and executive producing others (Naked On The Inside; Feral Peril). As a radio documentary maker, he has produced and reported over a dozen stories for RN’s Background Briefing. Ian has a Master of Arts (Directing Documentary) from AFTRS and is a former Triple J newsreader and published author.