Author: Who Is Marc Fennell’s Wife, Madeleine Genner? Explore His Married Life

Marc Fennell is an Australian film critic known for being a technology journalist, radio personality, author, and television presenter.

He is perhaps best known for being a co-anchor for The Feed, current Australian affairs, news, and satire television series airing on SBS Viceland. The Feed has been airing since May 20, 2013, with a total of nine series and 600 episodes as of the writing of this article.

He is also known for being a host on Mastermind, an Australian television quiz show on SBS, or the Special Broadcasting Service. Mastermind has been airing since April 15, 2019, and is based on the original British game show of the same name.

The show, created by Bill Wright, features an intimidating setting with difficult questions based around specialized subjects that the contestants can choose from, alongside a general knowledge question.

Jennifer Byrne hosted the show’s first two seasons, but Fennell took over after Byrne left temporarily due to an injury during the second season.

He took over from the third season onwards.

Quick Facts About Marc Fennell

Who Is Marc Fennell’s Wife, Madeleine Genner?

Marc Fennell is married to his wife, Madeleine Genner, a reporter with ABC’s Radio Current Affairs Department.

She is also a former Radio National Breakfast reporter and producer.

According to her LinkedIn, the woman has only had the two positions spoken about briefly before.  Her profile states that she was a Producer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from 1998 to 2008, and then a second position as a Producer in the same company.

This repetition was probably a mistake as she might not use LinkedIn as regularly as might be recommended.

How Many Children Does Marc Fennell Have?

Marc Fennell and his wife, Madeleine Genner, have two children named Max and Sophie.

Fennell and Genner love posting about their children on their social media, although Fennell’s Instagram is more professional, he doesn’t have as many pictures.

Genner, on the other hand, has lots of pictures of her children, from playing around to doing household chores.

The two children, Max and Sophie, are quite young and have beautiful tufts of ginger hair. By all accounts, their parents love them very much, and that love is on display in both Fennell and Genner’s social media.

As Genner posts about them almost daily, it’s easy to get a glimpse into their lives through her social media.

Who Is Marc Fennell?

Besides being born on June 2, 1985, in Sydney, New South Wales, not much is known about Marc Fennell.

The furthest back any information about his career goes is up till 2002, when he won the first Young Film Critics Competition hosted by AFI, the Australian Film Institute.

Soon after, he became a film critic and reporter for FBi Radio, a Sydney radio station from 2003 to 2006.

Around this time, Fennell is also selected as one of four presenters of The Movie Show, an SBS presentation, in mid-2004.

Due to his wonderful presentation in it, the film critic remained with the show until June 2006.

The show then went on Hiatus and when it eventually returned in 2007, it did so in a different format and with a different team.

More About Marc Fennell’s Early Career

After leaving The Movie Show, Marc Fennell started covering cinema across the ABC Radio Network.

Some places he did so were ABC Local Radio and the national youth broadcaster triple j. He eventually gained a more significant role in the latter, where he started presenting a weekly film segment for its run on ABC1 and ABC2.

He also presented the weekly movie segment on The Circle, a Network Ten morning program, from 2010 until its end in August 2012. After this axing, Fennell carried on the weekly segment on Network Ten’s Breakfast program.

The film critic expanded his oeuvre by regularly producing digital video projects exploring other cinema cultures. The most prominent of these was a series for SBS Television on the history of Bollywood called Bollywood For Beginners.

He also co-produced a web series concerning movie trailers with Nick Hayden and Nicholas McDougall called Coming Sooner.

Lastly, Fennell published his first book, That Movie Book with HarperCollins in December 2011.

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How Did Marc Fennell Become Famous?

Marc Fennell had made a name for himself through the previously mentioned outings, but his time with Hungry Beast helped catapult his name.

The Hungry Beast was a shortlived television comedy and current affairs program broadcast on ABC Television. The way the show worked was a half-hour program structured as a hybrid between a current affairs program and a comedy/satire show.

Initially, the presenters were given a single instruction by the editor to tell them and the audience something they didn’t know.

Due to this instruction, rather than conforming to a strict format, the final shape of the show evolved alongside the assembled presentation team. Due to all this chaos, even before the show had debuted, Andrew Denton, the show’s debut executive producer, described it as unclassifiable and compared the show’s format to the internet.

The show initially had nineteen presenters, but by the second season, the hosts were pared down to just four:

• Dan Ilic
• Kristen Drysdale
• Nicholas Hayden, and
• Monique Schafter

The show’s second season was quite popular and saw many accolades thrown the show’s way.

For example, two reporters, Ali Russell and Kirk Docker, received nominations for a Walkley Award for their coverage of Indigenous Affairs. They had done a story on the Gang of 49. The show received nominations for an ATOM Award in the Best Multimedia category and a Best Light Entertainment AFI Award.

Marc Fennell was one of these reporters and made a name for himself alongside his peers.

Due to the erratic and chaotic nature of Hungry Beast, the creatives in the show could let their creative juices fly and do what they wanted to expand their vision. As such, Fennell could gain recognition and flex his creative juices.

However, this freedom weighed the showdown rather than lifting it to great heights as the show lasted three seasons and thirty-two episodes between September 30, 2009, to 2011. Due to his training with the show, Fennell would eventually become the force of nature in Australian media that he has evolved in the 2010s and onward.

What Is Technology Journalism?

As Marc Fennell’s career grew, he became known as one of Australia’s foremost technology journalists.

Technology journalism is a segment of journalism that focuses on technological subjects.

Journalists in this field present material focused on tech-related subjects in written, visual, audio, or multi-media form.

Due to their difficult nature, they are often the frontrunners for the public media’s dissemination of these topics.

This field covers various genres like news, analysis, and reports. Each covers an array of topics like the internet, social media, scientific research, robotics, and the IT industry, to name a few.

However, technology journalism doesn’t have to be so grand and can be as micro-focused as product reviews, like journalists expressing opinions about specific devices or applications. He began his dalliance, which became a total commitment, with technology journalism once he started hosting Download This Show, an ABC technology radio program.

The show examines the latest developments in consumer electronics, digital politics, social media, hacktivism, and online privacy.

The program airs on Radio National and ABC Local Radio Digital. It is also quite successful outside Australia and airs throughout the Asia Pacific on Radio Australia.

Perhaps due to the success of Download This Show, Fennel has become a guest tech journalist on other shows.

He has regularly produced technical reports for ABC News 24 programs like News Exchange, Weekend Breakfast, Technology Quarter, and The Drum. Of these four, The Drum is the most successful and has had Marc Fennell over the most.

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How Much Is Marc Fennell’s Net Worth?

Australian film critic Marc Fennell has an estimated net worth of $6 million as of 2022.

By now, it should be clear that Fennell has had a long and storied career that has only become more prominent.

Through this multi-decade career, Fennell has amassed respect, fame, and wealth, which though not quite at the level of, say, Nicole Kidman, is still respectable for someone who did it on his terms and in roles he liked.

He has become a well-known, trusted, and respected figure in Australian media and continues to do so as the years go by.

However, his major roles are yet to be talked about as the previously mentioned roles may have put him on the map, but his association with The Feed and Mastermind was what made him so indelibly popular with the press, the public, and Australian media at large.

As stated above, The Feed is a news, current affairs, and satirical television series.

It was created by the former Director of News and Current Affairs of SBS, Paul Cutler.

Cutler enlisted Patrick Abboud, a pop culture journalist, for help to assemble a crew to produce what he thought would be a 15-minute daily show. Cutler also enlisted Nick Hayden to executive produce the first season, which started airing in 2013 with Marc Fennell, Patrick Abboud, Jan Fran, and Andy Park to present.

Due to the show’s initial success, subsequent seasons saw the show be extended to a full daily half-hour segment.

This expansion afforded the show in-depth features, news headlines, and more comedy skits.

As the show went on and became more successful, they saw an increase in guest presenters but also lost Andy Park as a regular presenter in 2015.

Park left the show to become a reporter on ABC’s 7.30 current affairs show, and since then, the show has had Marc Fennell, Jan Fran, and Laura Murphy-Oates as co-hosts.

2020 saw The Feed go to a weekly format from daily, which worried some fans, but it was also switched to the SBS main channel, which allayed most of their worries as they were fearing cancellation.

On the main channel, The Feed airs at 10 PM, right after Insight and Dateline at 8.30 PM and 9.30 PM. Sadly, SBS announced on May 2022 that the show would be ending due to declining audience figures.

The last episode aired on June 28. Still, content under the brand of The Feed continues to be made for SBS’s social media.

How Rich Is Marc Fennell?

As successful as The Feed was, Marc Fennell was only a co-host, and it would take Mastermind to push him to the fame he currently enjoys.

As stated above, Jennifer Bryne was the show’s first host, but during the second season, Fennell had to temporarily step in as Byrne had had a fall.

This fall had left the host with injuries to her wrist and face, and Fennell stepped in to host for two weeks. This second season was mired with a lot of difficulties as the COVID-19 pandemic caused the finals of the second season to be delayed nearly a year, returning only in February 2021.

Within a month of the second season’s finals, Mastermind announced that Fennel would take over as the show host from the third season onward, which began that same month.

Fennell has seen a lot of success in Mastermind and gained a lot of fans and recognition from Australian media as a whole. Mastermind itself is hugely popular as it has an enviable concept.

The standard episodes of the show consist of two rounds, with the first having the contenders with two minutes to answer as many questions as possible from a subject they’ve chosen. The second round consists of the contestants facing 90 seconds of general knowledge questions.

The show has four contestants in each episode from Monday to Thursday, and the winner from each question then comes on Friday to compete in the weekly final on Friday, winning which would advance them to the semi-final. The show has been airing for four seasons from April 15, 2021, with the most recent episode airing on June 17, 2022.

Each season has exactly 85 episodes. Because of how successful the show is, there is bound to be the fifth season, and because of how famous Fennell is, he is bound to return.

Some FAQs

Is Marc Fennell Married?

Yes, he is married to producer Madeleine Genner

How Many Children Does Marc Fennell Have?

He has two children, a boy named Max and a girl named Sophie

How Much Is Marc Fennell’s Net Worth?

He has a net worth of $6 million