TABLOID PRODIGY
on projects for his BIG group of companies, including helping to open Home House nightclub.
“He has done extremely well with a brilliant work ethic,” Lyons said.
“He has a wonderful and successful family around him who have obviously been very supportive and, of course, very, very proud of his achievements.”
Former Addy editor Peter Judd said Howard had been a “very conscientious” journalist who was popular with staff because of his upbeat personality.
“(He was) a really good bloke to work with,” Judd said.
“He’s never been a guy with a big head ... he’s got good manners, he always makes time for other people.”
Howard’s first foray into the world of celebrity came at Seven, where he worked as a sports journalist and producer between 2004 and 2008.
He was sent on junkets to Beijing to cover Olympic preparations and to Thailand to cover the tsunami clean up, his LinkedIn profile says, and was highly commended at the prestigious 2007 Quill awards.
But he was dumped by the network in November 2008 after he was caught up in a chequebook journalism scandal, when the network bought stolen AFL medical records and broadcast details of two anonymous players’ drug use and counselling.
Neither the network nor Howard faced charges over the scandal.
Howard moved to New York in 2009 to report for the US branch of Craig Hutchison’s company Crocmedia.
Hutchison has expressed approval of Howard’s talent in a podcast, but said he quickly parted ways with the journalist.
“His methods make me uncomfortable, that’s probably the best way to put it,” Hutchison said.
Soon, Howard was working for magazine giant American Media Inc in Los Angeles, in a senior editorial position.
It was during his time in the LA office that Howard allegedly harassed colleagues.
Last year, allegations that he described his sexual partners in the newsroom, made women watch, or listen, to porn and discussed female workers’ sex lives, surfaced.
Previous employees told the Associated Press of the alleged sexual misconduct, but Howard described the allegations as “baseless”.
His conduct resulted in an internal inquiry in 2012 by an external consultant, and Howard resigned after the report was finished.
But about a year later, he was rehired by the company.
His current New York- based role, chief content officer, involves overseeing American publications with huge reach, including tabloid the National Enquirer and celebrity gossip magazine US Weekly.
During his time in the US, Howard has been at the epicentre of some of the largest celebrity stories of recent times.
He was close to Charlie Sheen when the sitcom star was constantly in the headlines for his wild antics.
Howard wrote in an essay for the Hollywood Reporter that he and Sheen “enjoyed a working relationship for more than three years, since before his dismissal from Two and a Half Men — and subsequent meltdown — had made him the hottest source of copy in my career”.
That was, until Howard caught wind that Sheen could be HIV-positive and began relentlessly pursuing the story.
Things turned even more sour after the National Enquirer published a story claiming Sheen sexually assaulted Corey Haim, a former child star who died in 2010.
Sheen denied the allegations, and launched legal action against the tabloid.
The case reportedly recently settled.
But Howard himself became part of one of the most explosive Hollywood stories last year, when he was named as one of Weinstein’s ‘army of spies’.
It was revealed Howard had exchanged information about Rose McGowan, a TV star who alleged Weinstein raped her, with Weinstein, The New Yorker reported.
Howard last year said he “had an obligation to protect AMI’s interests by seeking out — but not publishing — truthful information about people who Mr Weinstein insisted were making false claims against him”.
“To the extent I provided ‘off the record’ information to Mr Weinstein about one of his accusers — at a time when Mr Weinstein was denying any harassment of any woman — it was information which I would never have allowed AMI to publish on the internet or in its magazines.”
He also claimed that he never let his relationship with Weinstein affect his editorial choices.
“I always separated those two roles carefully and completely — and resisted Mr Weinstein’s repeated efforts to have AMI titles publish favourable stories about him or negative articles about his accusers,” Howard said in the statement.
The National Enquirer has also been subject to reports of being pro-Trump — a New Yorker piece said “throughout the 2016 Presidential race, the Enquirer embraced Trump with sycophantic fervour”.
But despite often hitting the headlines himself, Howard’s venture abroad has brought career success — he remains vice president of AMI and was referred to in The New Yorker as “something of a tabloid prodigy”.