BotW: The week the wheels fell off
Welcome to Best of the Week. And what a week.
Yesterday’s incoming texts had a similar tone:
“Fucking crazy week or two”
“What a week for traditional media hey?!”
“Huge week in media.”
“Another busy week for Australian media. Looking forward to your analysis.”
No pressure.
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In return you get access to our full archive which goes behind the paywall after two months. You also get discounts on tickets to our events, including our AI conference humAIn and our retail media conference, REmade, and a free ticket to our annual Compass series.
Fucking crazy week
Journalists operate to deadlines. Most of the story gets written in the last ten per cent of time remaining.
Their bosses are much the same. Their deadline is the end of financial year. Having had months of falling audiences, declining ad markets, structural shifts in where marketers place advertising, and the end of Facebook funding, they finally acted.
We just experienced the most brutal week since the end of the 2012 financial year when Fairfax Media cut 1900 newspaper jobs and News Corp took out 1600. Twelve years and one week later, the TV industry has experienced its own print moment, with the biggest cuts ever seen at Seven and Nine.
On Tuesday, Seven West Media defenestrated its top tier, split itself into three and prepared to axe a reported 150 staff.
A breakup of Seven West Media – with Kerry Stokes getting the WA arm and a US platform picking up the TV business – now seems even more likely.
Meanwhile, News Corp has restructured into three publishing divisions and a unified sales team. Reportedly 80 jobs have gone, mostly in sales.
Southern Cross Austereo has been quietly making redundancies all year, mainly around back end production roles. Yesterday saw the unexpected departure of chief marketing officer Nikki Clarkson after nearly 17 years with the company.
After the exit of Mel Hopkins from Seven, Clarkson is the second media CMO to go in three days. The question of what that says about how media companies really prioritise their own marketing will have to wait for a quieter day.
Nine leaves it latest
Just as things seemed to be calming down, Nine yesterday told its staff that it would be cutting 200 jobs.
Like the people say, fucking crazy week.
It happens like that because if there are jobs to be cut and redundancies to pay out, then it’s best to get them done before the new financial year begins. That way when it’s time to share results with the ASX, the pain comes all at once, and the following year’s comparisons look better.
Facebook has been a convenient scapegoat. When the threat of designation under the News Media Bargaining Code strong armed Google and Facebook into signing deals with publishers in 2021, managements used the money to boost profits; they didn’t necessarily invest it in making their products better. They did very little to prepare their publishing businesses for when the free money stopped.
Almost a year ago, it became clear in Nine’s FY23 financial results update that CEO Mike Sneesby hadn’t put in any work on a new plan.
It reminds me of the old days of Fairfax Media (before it was taken over by Nine): round after round of job cuts without fundamental changes to the business model while the board hoped for better times that never came. Then, in the nick of time, CEO Greg Hywood brought in Chris Janz who put together a team to rebuild the newspaper business. That launched in 2017 and was the final round of newspaper redundancies – until now.
Janz later missed out to Mike Sneesby for the top job at Nine and departed to do his own thing at Scire. That may prove to be a sliding doors moment for future of Nine’s newspapers.
In yesterday’s email to staff, Nine’s managing director of publishing Tory Maguire reminded them there had been no cuts since 2017. This line was discouraging: “It is clear that we need to evolve our operating model and reset the Publishing business to create a sustainable future for the mastheads.”
In other words, they’re planning to make a plan. That doesn’t build confidence that the cuts will be a one-off.
That’s not on Maguire, by the way. She only been in that role for six months after the departure of James Chessell. It means that somebody who was a journalist, not a publisher, until six months ago is now expected to reinvent the company’s publishing business model without the domain expertise to do so.
It might be on Sneesby though. He’s the one who failed to retain Janz and Chessell.
Nine’s union members yesterday passed a vote of no confidence in Sneesby and the board: “We demand an explanation from the company about why the publishing division appears to have been disproportionately targeted for job losses, given the recent strong financial performance by the mastheads in a particularly difficult time for all print outlets, and given the fact that the Meta money was spent across the company, rather than just on the mastheads.”
Maybe it’s time for Nine’s board to make an acqi-hire and buy Capital Brief owner Scire to get Janz back into the business.
The timing of Nine’s announcement is also an eyebrow raiser. For no good reason, these cuts will wait until the next financial year. They missed the EOFY deadline. Was that because of the distractions of Sneesby fighting for his job over the Darren Wick newsroom scandal, and the exit of chairman Peter Costello?
And things may yet get worse for everyone. Ad spend follows the economy. Today’s front page of the Australian Financial Review is calling a “50-50 chance” of a recession.
Crazy week.
The best they’ve got?
Yesterday may have seen the end of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. At lunchtime, Australian time, CNN hosted the live debate between Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump.
It will become as famous a TV moment as the very first televised presidential debate back in 1960 when a youthful John F Kennedy bested a sweaty Richard Nixon.
In a format that prevented Trump’s usual technique of talking over his opponents – microphones were turned off when time for a reply was up – Biden was vague and meandering. Trump kept it together, by his own standards anyway. The CNN moderators stayed away from live fact checking Trump’s lies, and Biden wasn’t up to doing so.
With the US public presented with the choice between a 78-year-old felon and an 81-year old career politician who should be enjoying an overdue retirement, it looks an ugly choice. Suddenly the idea of Biden dropping out at the last minute looks realistic – all thanks to two hours of a bad TV performance.
The debate had its own echo in the UK, where there’s also an election under way. Earlier in the week, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak took on his likely successor Keir Starmer in a debate hosted by the BBC. The format was even more exacting – questions from the public, who can be as rude as they want. The most viral moment came when a member of the public asked – to the loudest applause of the night – “Are you two really the best we’ve got?”
It may well be the defining question of an extraordinary campaign in which, much as the British public have turned against the ruling Conservative party, they’ve shown lukewarm enthusiasm for play-it-safe Starmer.
For all the talk of the diminishing power of television, on both sides of the Atlantic, we witnessed its power to influence elections.
Unmade Index finishes week (and financial year) with an upwards blip
ASX investors like job cuts because they can mean improved profits. That may help explain why shares in Nine and Seven West Media rose on Friday.
The Unmade Index closed up 0.7% to 478.3 points.
IVE Group and Pureprofile had the best day yesterday, rising by 4.77% and 5%. On Thursday, Pureprofile said it had agreed to buy data company i-Link, owner of the LiveTribe panel.
COTW: Love that lingers
In each edition of BotW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their Campaign of the Week
LBB’s APAC reporter Casey Martin writes:
VML has brought to light the comfort and warmth of familiarity. The story of a young family, a caring father and a cheeky little girl leaving a note of appreciation is enough to make you reminisce about your own childhood.
It captures Cuddly Fabric Softener’s tagline, ‘A Love That Lingers’ perfectly.
In case you missed it:
On Monday we previewed SCA’s decision on whether to acquire ACM’s mastheads:
On Tuesday we put the spotlight on domain expertise among Australia’s media board chairs:
On Wednesday we analysed the dramatic news of the Seven West Media shakeup:
On Thursday we talked to former Austereo boss Michael Anderson about the state of the media industry and his plans for Pureprofile:
On Friday we explained the decision of SCA to turn down Antony Catalano despite the numbers adding up:
Time to leave you to your weekend.
With all of this talk of end of financial year, don’t forget Unmade’s own 40% off membership offer which ends tomorrow.
When you find out what we’re planning for our members, you may just be glad you locked in the discount while you could.
If you’ve not had enough of me already, then the latest edition of the Game Changers Radio: Melbourne Radio Wars podcast went live this morning. I joined them to talk about this week’s media ructions and campaign group MFW’s low impact (so far) campaign against The Kyle & Jackie O Show’s Melbourne arrival.
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
