Evarist Bartolo to run One News in drastic effort to reinforce Labour media
Shadow education minister and former editor to coordinate One News and maltastar.com
Labour MP Evarist Bartolo is to be deployed to coordinate the Labour broadcast media machine in a bid to shore up its waning effect on audiences, and intensify its political effort.
Bartolo, formerly an education minister and also a university lecturer at the Centre for Communication Technology, had been the first to coordinate the Super One newsroom when the TV station was launched in 1992.
Adding to his current role as shadow education minister, he will return to manage One News and maltastar.com, Labour’s English-language news website.
One TV is headed by journalist Glenn Bedingfield, but the PL will tonight announce Bartolo’s return to the newsroom in the role of coordinator. Bedingfield, who had recently left One News to pursue a career as a restaurateur, will be editor at maltastar.com.
MaltaToday was told that mounting internal criticism on the quality of One News, and the worsening quality of maltastar.com’s reporting, led to this decision. “Bartolo’s media-savviness is expected to bring back some of the ‘oomph’ we lost in recent months,” a party source told this newspaper.
Bartolo is the former editor for the party’s defunct organ ll-Helsien. As an MP he was close to former party leader Alfred Sant, and has been returned on two electoral districts – the predominantly Nationalist tenth and twelfth (Sliema and Mellieha) districts – since 1992.
Bartolo was education minister in 1996, and today lectures at the University of Malta in journalism and communications. Following the resignation of Alfred Sant in 2008, Evarist Bartolo ran for the post of party leader but was eliminated in the first round of voting.











