Channel 4 CEO Alex Mahon is stepping down and will leave the broadcaster in the summer.
Jonathan Allan, Channel 4’s chief operating officer, will become interim CEO while the broadcaster’s board undertakes a recruitment process for a successor over the next few months.
Mahon joined Channel 4 in 2017 as its first female CEO. Under her leadership, Channel 4 navigated and ultimately trounced multiple attempts by the government to privatise the public-service broadcaster.
As leader, she was also tasked with catalysing Channel 4’s transition to digital via its Fast Forward strategy — a five-year effort to become a “digital-first public-service streamer” by 2030. The broadcaster is currently set to relaunch its streaming proposition for consumers and advertisers later this year, with an eye towards simplifying its ad buying platform.
Mahon embraced a forward-thinking distribution strategy that leaned in to social media platforms for audience acquisition and retention. Channel 4 was notably the first public-service broadcaster to upload full episodes of its programming to YouTube — a move that was later followed by ITV.
“If you’re in a television business, you should be trying to move into digital as fast as possible,” Mahon said at The Future of TV Advertising Global in December 2024. “That’s where there’s growth. What’s growing is digital and what’s shrinking is linear, unless it’s a big live event.”
But Channel 4’s restructuring led to substantial redundancies and a downsizing of Channel 4’s London headquarters. Under Mahon, Channel 4 moved its new national headquarters to Leeds in 2020.
Despite the broadcaster’s embrace of social platforms, Mahon has more recently become a major industry advocate against social media’s negative externalities, including the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
In a January speech announcing a research study on Gen Z’s media consumption, she declared: “The way in which Gen Z learn to judge fact, fiction and fairness as they grow older may become the defining issue of our age.”
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In a statement, Mahon said that, over her nearly eight years at the helm, she worked to protect Channel 4’s brand, “even as we reinvented it”.
“I hope that we have evolved what Channel 4 means and what it stands for,” she said. “We’ve stayed risky, relevant and relentlessly new.”
Mahon continued: “Working at Channel 4 has been a lifetime privilege because Channel 4 is the most extraordinary organisation. What we get to do here is much more than television, because we reflect our country with humour, creativity, grit and care.
“We try our best to challenge convention and to change conversations. And we do it with a kind of irreverent brilliance that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else.
“I feel lucky beyond belief to have had the chance to lead Channel 4 for nearly eight years — through calm seas (very few) and stormy waters (more than our fair share). From navigating the threat of privatisation (twice) to shifting out of London, to digital transformation, lockdowns, political upheaval, advertising chaos — there has never been a dull moment.
“But through every twist and turn, there’s been one constant: the astonishing calibre, resilience and creativity of all my colleagues at Channel 4.”
Interim chair Dawn Airey called Mahon a “great figure in British television” and “one of the most impactful CEOs since Jeremy Isaacs’ founding of Channel 4 more than 42 years ago”.
Airey added: “Under her leadership, Channel 4 has moved with the times and driven the times.”
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