Sydney breakfast radio is there for the taking
Beau Ryan is one third of the longest-running Sydney radio team - despite being on air less than a year
“Good morning Sydney, and welcome to Sydney’s longest serving breakfast team.” That was how Beau Ryan greeted Triple M listeners on Thursday, March 5, around 36 hours after the news broke that the Kyle and Jackie O show was no more.
Jonesy and Amanda’s twenty-year run as Gold/WS-FM’s breakfast team had ended with the new year, as they shifted to a national drive to make way for Christian O’Connell’s launch into the Sydney market. Fitzy, Wippa, and Kate Ritchie had done likewise at Nova, moving to drive as Ricki-Lee Coulter and Tim Blackwell took the reins of the Sydney breakfast show.
With Jimmy Smith leaving 2DayFM’s breakfast show in late 2025, and the program retooled as “2Day Breakfast with Nath and Emma” for 2026 — and Smooth’s Bogart Torelli decidedly not a “team” — that leaves Triple M’s Beau Ryan, Cat Lynch, and Aaron Woods as Sydney’s longest-running FM breakfast team, despite only being on-air together for nine months.
Triple M had more fun with the concept, launching a digital out-of-home campaign that same morning with the tagline: “Sydney’s longest running breakfast team (since Tuesday)”.
While it was all lighthearted fun — Woods joked they’d “Stephen Bradbury’ed it” — the truth remains that Sydney’s once established breakfast radio market is currently in flux, with its most established team having the gestation time of a newborn.
It’s fun — and true
Thursday’s radio ratings, the first of 2026, were kind to Southern Cross Austereo’s two Sydney breakfast shows, with Triple M climbing one percentage point and 2Day gaining 0.7. Both shows still have some work to do — sitting on 5.0 and 3.6 respectively; Kyle and Jackie O ended their 57-book reign with a 12.7 — but SCA’s head of broadcast audio Matthew O’Reilly sees the opportunity that has opened up.
“We hope to see more growth over the course of the year,” he tells Mumbrella, noting we won’t see the full impact of the lineup changes until the third ratings book drops in June.
“We believe there’s a gap there for 2Day to win the pop culture, and we’re really leaning into that. We want to be doing more pop culture than everyone else. From a Triple M point of view, we see an opportunity to get males from all of those stations. Kyle was very male appeal, as were Fitzy and Wippa. Jonesy and Amanda are ex-Triple M staffers back in the day.
“Beau [Ryan] was fill-in on the Kyle and Jackie O show for a number of years, so we definitely see an opportunity there to gather some males from everywhere.
“We’re very clear that our biggest opportunity to grow ratings, share, audience, is in the Sydney market over the next couple of months.”
The biggest new entry into the Sydney market is Christian O’Connell, whose Melbourne show is now simulcast into Gold’s breakfast slot each weekday morning. O’Connell launched into Sydney a week before the official ratings year started on January 18; his planned week of lighthearted silliness was undone by the tragic Bondi massacre.
Suddenly, O’Connell was an on-air salve for his new listeners, who were turning to a trusted albeit new voice to help them make sense of the senseless. Despite endearing himself immediately, O’Connell couldn’t keep the audience built by Jonesy and Amanda over two decades, dropping 3.6 points to land at 6.1 for his first Sydney ratings book.
History suggests ARN shouldn’t be worried about O’Connell’s prospects in Sydney. His Melbourne breakfast show took 18 months from its June 2018 launch to climb to the top spot in the ratings, where it has frequently remained since — it ended 2025 as the city’s top-rating FM breakfast show.
Christian O’Connell started slowly, but he will be a major force in Sydney breakfast radio before too long
For Nova and its sister station Smooth, consistency is key — even when the lineups shift. Nova Entertainment’s chief growth officer, Adam Johnson, tells Mumbrella that the overall feel of both networks helped when making personnel changes, like the breakfast/drive shift that saw Ricki-Lee and Tim take over Sydney breakfast from Fitzy, Wippa, and Kate.
“The thing that both shows have in common is that they are Nova,” he told Mumbrella. “We do a lot of work to make sure that Nova is front-of-mind for people when they want to have a really entertaining listen in the morning.”
Johnson says he isn’t nervous about the lineup flip, but is curious to see how the audience reacts. The switch came in the middle of the first ratings period for the year, and he expects to have a clearer read on it by the middle of the year.
“We would never have done it if we didn’t feel like it wasn’t, A) what the audience wanted, and B) what our advertisers wanted. The brand is strong enough to carry product changes, because every Nova presenting team, everyone from the people on air to the newsreaders to the producers, they fit that shape of that Nova show, and therefore, even if you listen to Fitzy, Wippa, and Kate in the morning on the Friday, and then it’s Ricki-Lee and Tim on the Monday, it should feel like a Nova show.”
Likewise, he credits Smooth’s continued success — it’s currently the top-rating station in Sydney, across both AM and FM — to its consistent, comfortable output. Bogart Torelli’s show is second in FM breakfast ratings only to the defunct Kyle and Jackie O.
“Bogart is a consummate professional in terms of finding that balance between more music and less talk,” Johnson said of her success. “You still want a bit of talk, but we play a lot of great music, and the brand is a shortcut for a lot of people to, ‘I’m just going to put the radio on and have a moment where I’m not thinking about the rest of the world.'”
Johnson feels the counter-programming strategy of less talk, more music — compared to the traditional personality-driven breakfast shows — is a big reason people tune in.
“There is a group of people out there who, for their morning routine, don’t want a huge amount of talk,” he reasons.
“They want to feel like they’re having a human connection, and that’s what Bogart brings. But ultimately, you know, they’re there to be informed and entertained … it’s always about finding that particular balance.”
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How can you write such an excellent story and not mention the #1 Ben Fordham 2GB Breakfast Show? Not just #1 overall (geez it’s on AM) but #1 DAB, & #1 for streaming. That’s people mostly streaming on their phones.
Shouldn’t you mention the show somewhere when analysing the Sydney market?
Yeah, very good point, although I was covering FM radio, and they don’t seem to see AM stations as competition. Fordham definitely has Sydney on lock though.