APN CEO Brett Chenoweth, chairman Peter Hunt and three directors resign
Resigned: Chenoweth
Resigned: Peter Hunt
The crisis at the heart of APN News & Media has deepened with the company this evening announcing the resignation of CEO Brett Chenoweth, chairman Peter Hunt and directors John Harvey, Melinda Conrad and John Maasland.
APN is Australasia’s third largest newspaper publisher after News Limited and Fairfax.
wow what a mess..
Plenty of work ahead for APN.
They need to rationalise their newspaper business & find some money to invest in a strong digital strategy to capture the attention of Australians online.
Otherwise, they dont have much time left as a company.
APN is completely captive to its old school culture, from the bottom up. It is a print business that acts as a holding company for a bunch of other media assets (radio, outdoor). It is not, and never has been, an integrated media business. That is its biggest problem. Their culture is derived from regional Qld publishing operations, where print rules and deals are done to maintain local monopolies. All they’ve done in recent years is slap a superficial digital layer on top of existing business verticals and pretend that is a strategy. Chenoweth was dealt a tough hand, but he’s a grown up and he went into it with his eyes open. Turns out he’s been “grinf***ked” like all the other (non-Irish) big city management types who went before him.
APN represents a shameful wasted opportunity, and INM are culpable. The Irish ripped so much money out of APN over the recent years that even if there had been a local will to turn it around it was never going to possible doing it on a shoestring.
Rupert is on the money in so many ways. Until recently I worked there for ten years. All the shareholders did was squeeze us year after year to work harder with fewer materials and rapidly aging hardware and software. When people left, they were not replaced and the suckers left behind were expected to just work harder to make up the shortfall. There are a lot of good people there who mean well but the bean counters are squeezing them to the point of breakdown. I’m so glad I no longer work there but I worry for my workmates still stuck with the growing frustrations and theo going shortmindedness of upper management.
I worked at APN Online for almost two years. When I came in their Search4 brand of websites was just beginning to take off. Online had a staff of just seven really motivated people. Within a matter of months it blew up to almost 40–not to mention it became upper management heavy. Then upper management and the Board of Directors decided that Search4 should go and everything get rebranded to Finda. In just 30 DAYS. I have over 15 years in the creative industry and knew it would flop. You just can’t do things like this. And of course, it failed. The wasting of time, money and effort to make this silliness happen was staggering and mind numbing. In the end, it all fell apart like a house of cards–and the upper management types ran out of there like rats, while people like me were handed pink slips and dumped into the street to look for work elsewhere.
@MI5 interesting points. It is worth mentioning that those Search4 brands had been supported by nearly $1 million in SEM over the previous year. Buying traffic like that is never a good idea. And APN thought they could make Search4 a national classies brand. That was never going to work.
You’re partly right about Finda, though. It was a dumb name and the execution was crap. The group CEO at the time chose the name and insisted it be launched in Toowoomba and “proved” before going into other markets. So the online staff were fighting that battle with one hand tied behind their back.
And then there is the print-online divide. The newspaper guys just want the interweb to go away and leave them to keep printing papers.
As I said earlier, APN’s problem is that it was (and still is) completely captive to its old school culture.