Wake Up, news shows axed by troubled Ten as network seeks to cut costs

Just another nail in the coffin for one of the longest and most painful demises of a once solid network that was also a very profitable business. The way the business has been allowed to be run into the ground through a complete lack of TV knowledge and business acumen is something that should be closely looked at and shareholders should be demanding answers. Management do not appear to be in any way accountable for their actions and one must feel sorry for the loyal staff that have stuck by through all the broken promises. Sad thing is its not over yet!! Blackdog must chuckle into his SMH every morning.

150 jobs go to loyal committed everyday people, and the impact that has on their families, yet the CEO and now Executive Chairman only months ago got a lazy 5m for presiding over the greatest stuff up in modern media.

Too sad for words – TEN 10 in Sydney has always been my fav Network. To see its demise is very sad indeed.

I said it before and i will say it again. Ten should not have let Bert go. I arrived in Australia in 1991 and as a housewife watched GMA for the first time and fell in love with Bert and the rapport he had with his duests and co hosts like Elizabeth Chong, Ken James, Chiyka, Dorinda etc. who became household names due to the show. Where are they now?
Ten never recoverd from that.

Why do I see Ten Eyewitness News still surviving? This is because it is the only news bulletin that screens at 5pm whereas the news bulletins ran by Seven and Nine screen concurrently at 6pm.

It even becomes easier for one who is observing or comparing how different channels are treating a news story of interest to them to switch on the TV to Ten Eyewitness News at 5pm, switch to 7 or 9 at 6pm, then tune to SBS 1 at 6:30pm and ABC at 7pm. In some cases, the competing channel’s newscast or current-affairs show may be recorded so that one can assess the treatment of that story by that channel.

As well, Ten, ABC or SBS may have a non-news program that runs at 6pm and it makes it easier to head for those shows but capture a run of “popular” news from them at 5 or “quality” news at 7 from the ABC. It also appeals to those of us who would rather dinner at 6 and rather have the TV off at that time.

How much money has Ten wasted on breakfast shows over the past few years? It was obvious from day one that Wake Up would not work: a bad name with dull presenters on a bad set. That’s the price you pay for a lacking the courage to try something new. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rumours of a Good Morning Australia resurrection were true. You can’t fall any further Ten, trying taking a punt on a new idea for a change.

Can someone call Brian mcalpine and ask him to come out of retirement…seriously

And in other news the board and senior management who presided over the decline and problems largely remain unscathed and even handsomely rewarded. It’s sad the people who had no input into the direction, business or creative side and worked tirelessly to carry out their duties cop the brunt of the cuts.

How many board members, senior execs and managers are going to be forced to walk the plank? Anyone? Anyone?

It’s like the yellow boat pulling half a length ahead of the blue, within three lengths of the finish line, and suddenly, sensing the competition is too much, the blue team ships its oars.

What’s in a name? well, a large chunk of success can be attributed to a name.

Sunrise is a first class name. A massive range, from worshipers to bread bakers, from the Incas to the nation of Japan has known about the secret powers of Sunrise.
A quick glance at the ephemera of advertising will show you that it has been widely applied and hugely successful for over two hundred years. It is even the origin of the halo above the heads of religious icons.

Everyone loves Sunrise. Nobody likes to Wake up.
The entire truth isn’t that easy, but this is a big start. Mission statements and touchy feely meetings where slogans are chanted and back slapping is encouraged, are all bluster and fear balm.

Like the Blue team, you need to pull the oars just a little better and a little harder, you might scrape in second, or first equal, or you might just win.

I’ve never got the fascination with Hamish McLennan, has he ever gone in and meaningfully grown a business?

I don’t know the answer, just asking.

Seems like at Patts, Y&R and now 10 he just gets out his calculator, makes cuts and runs them into the ground. Am I missing something?

What a shame that a once great tv station run by great tv people has been turned into a basket case by non tv people who thought they knew better.

When will hey learn that those who are good at creating spin aren’t necessarily good at running a real business?

Bring back Mc Alpine, Blackley and co I say, at least they had a clue and were passionate about the product and weren’t just hatchet men who dont care about the place or the people in it as they know they are guaranteed a nice handshake win lose or draw.

What a joke

I’d like to know how they intend to change their “business model”. The free tv industry buys programmes and sells advertising. Many years ago the free tv industry started to outsource the making of content, only keeping news as in house production. The business model of the entire free tv industry is seriously outdated. Revenue is down across all networks, and unlikely to rise. The audience of free tv is aging, and they struggle to attract younger viewers. Tens current decision is purely a cost cutting exercise with no policy there on how to lift revenue. It will be hard to relaunch any of those bulitens once they have lost them.

Well if they’re going to cost cut and axe, maybe they can bring back the morning cartoon shows. In fact I would sooner watch Thundercats, Battle for the Planets, etc than that awful Wake Up show.

What a cop out! “it is proposed that Wake Up and the Early, Morning and Late News will cease production”. It’s more than just proposed, it is happening, and you are making it happen!

A decent management would have the courage to admit this is being driven by them and isn’t just mysteriously being proposed by some unnamed third party.

What a sad commentary on company mismanagement – going back for years and getting worse as the amateurs with power and money interfered.

That said, Wake Up was dreadful – dull hosts, wacky selection of material, pointless (and expensive) location. Result: few viewers (ask anyone you know if they watch)

Early newses and Late newses are two-a-penny these days thanks to cable TV, so no wonder they got few viewers either.

But the Ten news brand was destroyed before our very eyes with the great early evening extravaganza – Negus and so on – all poorly thought through, all out of kilter with Ten’s image in the public mind and strategically weak against the competition.

And then came the millionaires “..we’re here to save you!”) Which was even worse.

Ten’s bosses and board deserve redundancy too – for inept judgement.

This from the Fairfax report on the Channel 10 redundancies: “The situation was not helped by his [Channel 10 head of News, Peter Meakin] boss, Hamish McLennan, telling media he expected “immediate” results from him…”

Somewhat ironic given McLennan himself has failed to achieve anything remotely resembling “immediate results” since taking the top job at 10 almost a year and a half ago. In fact, 10 is floundering even more now than it was when he took over. So far it is channel 10 staff who have borne the brunt. When will Channel 10 management — most notably HMc — accept some accountability/responsibility. When and where will the buck stop?

The silver lining is Studio 10 – GREAT SHOW! Ten just need to hit the jackpot again. They will – bring back Bert? Someone from Studio 10 could do an early morning show? There is someone out there who would/could be awesome.

Well channel 10 went broke in the early 1990s, without competition from cable TV, the world wide web, or digital channels. This is an object lesson in what happens when you pay too much for a business and then cripple it with the debt used to pay for it.

Very sad for the people losing their jobs. There was nothing wrong with the Circle. If anyone needs to go it’s the management who have consistent commissioned shows the nobody has any desire to watch.

Ten has not had credible news for about 20 years. Go back to the late ’80s and early ’90s, when the network had real reporters, not film flam pretty people, and a sense of direction. It was also pre-Foxtel and Ten had the rights to use CNN…. remember the first Gulf War and it was Ten that excelled in coverage then through the use of CNN. That was the one and only glory period for Ten’s news, with presenters like Katrina Lee, Eric Walters, John Gatfield, Tim Webster, Juanita Phillips and John Mangos. Since then it has been downhill all the way. The funny thing is that Ten was in receivership way back then, but it’s product was good.
For Adam Boland to tweet that the Wake Up people have been let down by his early departure as producer is a self-serving piece of nonsense. The concept was terrible, the product was even worse, with poor hosts, poor content. Why would anyone want to watch morning TV simply because it was produced from a beach? It was never going to steal viewers from the competing breakfast program’s, and there is a finite number of people even remotely interested in watching lightweight breakfast TV, so it was never going to recruit a fresh audience. A disaster in both concept and execution.

If I was Ten, I’d take a look at the lesson of Vega, Classic Rock to the success of Smooth FM. More content, fewer ads, lower costs, more viewers, better return on capital.

The billionaires club bought in and set to their ideological stripping, like getting rid of Nick Falloon who knew what he was doing. Lachlan and his replacement CEOs never seem to get/got the primary idea of running a network – viewers matter. Yes Ten, viewers matter. People kept watching the news at 5, and at least that was a chance to promote programming. But if they now give up on you, I’d say all your hopes of rebuilding are now dashed. I had hope the brand could slowly rebuild. But with this gutting on news today and disregard for viewers, I sold my shares.

For lease: Television studio in Manly with extensive views of the beach. Would be suitable for early morning television show, fish and chip shop or hatted restaurant. Available immediately.

Agree with you Jack. Wake Up was ill concieved and very lightweight.

I think Ten needs a major revamp of its entire strategy from the ground up and to do this it literally needs to go off the air except for it’s news offering at 5.00pm and come back with a completely new look and focus.

I had heard that the Sydney newsroom had been going great guns under Meakin, with great staff morale. Ratings this Monday for 5 o’clock were great. I was happy for some of the staff I knew there that the place had recovered from the 2012 bloodbath under Warburton. What a shame that Meakin has been sold a pup (he doesn’t deserve it and neither do the long-suffering staff) and now has to oversee McLennan’s 2014 bloodbath.

Attention all 10 executives – do yourself a favour and look in the mirror tonight, put your hand on your heart, say sorry to the 150 people and their families whose lives you have wrecked, and then sleep tight in the knowledge your half a million $ salary plus is assured of being banked on pay day? Read these comments from people, and the common denominator is MIS MANAGEMENT not someone on 45k who works on a show being cancelled. When will the board step in and do something about having ad agency people, with no broadcast executive experience, destroy a once competitive number 3 BUT making the best EBIT of the 3 commercial networks. Please fall on your swords or a skewer if they means many!!!

@Thirsty,it all started when that Blackdog bloke took over,go back and check the share price drop during his stay at the top!Percentage wise he was the worst of the lot.

It’s hard to believe their revenue is down so much when you watch a program: the number of ads has long since passed the pain threshold. Has anyone at Ten ever wondered whether the length of the ad breaks puts viewers off?? It certainly does in our house. In The Good Wife for instance you seem to get through one short dramatic sequence and there they are again…. Too much. We now record and watch later, and whizz through the commercials at high speed, and even that takes a while…

I guess the rationale behind getting McLennan and his ad agency cronies in to run the joint was that they could help pull in much-needed ad revenue from other ad agency types. ONly problem with that is that advertising spend is driven by audience size, which is driven by excellent programming and scheduling — something the ad agency types running 10 have absolutely no experience in, or understanding of. Channel 10 needs a management team who understand the broadcastTV business, and in particular programming and audience. Channel 10 management have axed non-performing shows. When will the board axe their non-performing management?

Hamish. The problem starts , and should end, there.

Shareholder – I think Thirsty is right. McAlpine, Falloon and Blackley delivered. They presided over profits around $200m plus. They fired Falloon and Blackley delivering $210m in profits in 2010 because Murdoch could do better….and the share price was $1.50 when they fired them.

Fast forward – Murdoch presided over a drop of 80% in the share price and a even more dramatic drop in profit (actually three Capital Raisings and zero profit).

Who are you Shareholder ?

i meant john mcalpine – brian was his brother lol

Mclennan was brought in to sell the network, not bring in revenue and definitely not to turn it around strategically.

Look at his remuneration package for evidence of this.

– no term, rolling agreement
– 12 month exit terms
– most notably all incentives vest in full immediately upon a 50% change of ownership

Point 3 is the difference between him and Warburton. Warburton was brought in to fix the boat, then steer the boat in the right direction (change of ownership had no influence on his remuneration).

Mcl has been bought in to sell a leaky boat and give investors an honourable exit. No other exec has this change of ownership element in their rem. which says a lot.

TEN is a Farkin joke & McLennan has no Farkin idea!
His is the last nail in the coffin. Down the slippery slope they go.
Pathetic!

Just put reruns of Jerry Springer on at 11.

I’d be buying Ten shares right about now.

When do the people at the top have to start to take responsibility and pay cuts for not turning the network around? What’s the point of hiring people like Howcroft if they are not kicking any goals? Why keep hiring CEOs with no background in tv production? The people at the bottom of the chain have been hit again because of the dire mistakes from the top.

As the resident ten-year old in the room, I’d like to send my generation’s condolences to ten. The message reads ‘Get Rekt’.

Dear CEO, you could have pulled a coupla news old timers in for a chat before yesterday’s bloodbath. We could have saved a coupla bulletins for you, told you how it was done in the old days, when like the news would make a profit of about $7m a year. See you can do things on the cheap and with clever rostering get a bulletin around 11:30, your 5 and your late on minimal staff and studio crews. It goes like this, Sydney does 5 and Late, two producers work from 3pm to 11pm (so they can help out on the 5 for a coupla hours) and with a good presenter like Sully pull together a good looking bulletin each night and you just have a young pup in CPH to pull together late breaking political stories and do a cross for you during sitting weeks, don’t need anyone else really. If you are really smart, you can run a little sports program that runs at 11pm and can promote the hell out of the sport you own, oh, and pull in about $20m a year in sponsorship (sorry, your mate LM thought it was a good idea to axe it, would be helping the bottom line now). Your crew works just the one shift and local updates only start about 3:30pm once they come in. Then a newsroom like Brisbane runs the morning news, they can have a producer start at 8am to pull the rundown together, your crew working an 8 hour shift air your morning bulletin, film network updates and then do the local 5, so you getting 2 bulletins a day from that team. You don’t go overseas to big stories, just get a good writer back here to pull it together from the overseas feeds. You pay your staff as little as you can, if they ask for a pay rise, you don’t cough up. This is how it went for a coupla decades before your mates moved in late 2010, and people still watched, your newsreaders were stars, and it was a happy place to work. Sometimes it’s worth mixing with your old timers.

Trashed and very affordable.

Good job, Murdoch Jr.

Sad news indeed – especially for the real workers and their families.
When will TV realise that breakfast is the domain of radio? Yes Sunrise goes ok numbers wise, but that’s in a large part due to the aging audience that Seven has – they don’t have to go to work or get kids to school.
Why pull the late news? That’s a point of difference for the network! Not all of us are home at 5, 6 or even 7pm to watch the news – and if we are home then its family time.
In the UK, for many many years the BBC had the 9pm news (and then repositioned to 10pm) and ITV has had News At 10 for more than 30 years!
In my experience advertisers prefer news content programmming because it commands attention from the viewer and is far more engaging.
Please Network 10, now is your chance to make things right. Don’t lose your good hard working people to the dole – think about what your viewers NEEDS are and how you can provide a solution for them – not just what tyou think they want to or should watch!

First the passing of Harry Potter. Now this. What a terrible week for the good folk of Ten.

Waking up will not be the same at all without wake Up. A drivel show , with drivel content ,amateur TV at it’s best…..what people were paid to produce this…well I never.

Hamish McLennan is known both in the states and here as Hamish Mc Murdoch. Follow his career he is joined at the hip. An ad agency guy has no possible idea what the people with the people meters want to watch?? Fall on your sword and get someone who knows broadcast in the 2000’s, 26c you have to be kidding. So readers know Grant Blackley was placed on I believe either a 3 or 4 year deal as CEO by Murdoch with an L and 3 months into the deal he flicked him and GB is a millionaire many times over and good on him. The burning question is how does someone’s performance go that bad in 3 months out of a possible 48 months. He was good enough to earn that deal and in 90 days was useless??? Work it out

@ comment 44. that isn’t true. Blackley’s deal expired Sept 2011 (4 years from Sept 2007 … he was appointed group CEO with no change to his deal. Ten paid out the remainder of his contract.

Question is still why Blackley was appointed in Dec of 2010 then stood down 2 months later … but that right at the start of the woes when they had to report reduced earnings guidance. Surely they knew in December that their forward situation wasn’t good. TV market couldn’t have been THAT short.

Remember also that Blackley was replaced by LM at a pro-rata base salary around $3m a year.

I’ve just been told Ten Network intend replacing their axed programs with reruns of the Bold and the Beautiful, Entertainment Tonight, and the Bolt Report. This just seems to go from bad to worse.

Poor Ten they can’t see what to do and how to do it, its like the whole of upper management have just been asleep at the wheel while the world changed…there are so many ways they could be playing this with a narrow bandwith of risk and its like they are just having this evolving conversation with themselves while the ship sinks. They’ve lost it…and there’s no coming back because the people making the decisions simply aren’t that bright or have their finger on the pulse and the people they have employed to do so haven’t either…toxic mess that they alone have created. Get the basics right start with Niche driven programming and build from there.

@Jones.

I agree with the essence of what you are saying, but they have not been asleep at the wheel. The way I see it , they have been wide awake at the wheel, but constantly looking in the wrong direction. Without an accurate chart, they have steered the ship onto every reef and rock before them. In order to win a perceived race, they went full throttle at the same time, which has exacerbated the problems.

The theatrical way to fix problems is to sift through the components, find the problems and regroup. The corporate way to fix problems is to sack the Puppet Master throw out the puppets, bring in a more expensive Puppet Master and allow him/her to order new puppets.

Like buying lottery tickets, this may one day strike the winning number, but it more likely will deplete the profits and leave you with a hand full of paper. This is all part of the naive idea that more money will fix problems. The lunatic notion that talent somehow equates to money somehow equates to talent.

I know, and have known people who I believe could have done the job better than this on less than $15,000 per annum.