Media Roundup: Mike Sneesby heading to US, WIN revenue flat but profit halves, ABC says sorry, Kyle and Jackie O find Canberra audience

nine

Lachlan Murdoch reports record political ad spend at Fox News, Return of the legal procedural, Forgetting to change channels on Cup Day.

Business of Media

Mike Sneesby racing off to US after leaving Nine Entertainment

Former Nine boss Mike Sneesby flies out of Australia on Wednesday on an overseas trip as he considers his next career move after quitting the media giant after a scandal-filled year, report News Corp’s Peter Jenkins and Jonathon Moran.

Breaking his silence for the first time since a #MeToo-style scandal engulfed Nine, including the departure of former news boss Darren Wick following allegations of inappropriate behaviour, Sneesby told The Daily Telegraph he would head to the US for a series of meetings after enjoying a much-needed break with his son on the NSW north coast.

Sneesby departed as chief executive of Nine Entertainment at the end of September, ahead of the release of a report into workplace culture at the network.

At Royal Randwick on Tuesday, a relaxed Sneesby, alongside wife Ursula, enjoyed the hospitality in the VIP Ballroom at The Big Dance.

“I finished up at Nine on the first day of school holidays and we did a road trip up to Byron. We fished and camped, stayed in tents, stayed in hotels.

“Tomorrow I’m off to the US, spending a few weeks over there just talking to people in my network.”

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Bruce Gordon’s WIN profits halve even as advertising revenue holds up

Profits at the regional media group owned by billionaire businessman Bruce Gordon have halved in the last year as the broadcaster weathers a downturn in television advertising but suffers from rising costs, reports The AFR’s Sam Buckingham-Jones.

WIN Corporation owns the WIN network, two radio stations in NSW and a substantial property portfolio. New accounts filed with the corporate regulator show profits fell from $8.3 million to $4.7 million in the 12 months to June 30. Revenues dropped from $200.8 million to $195.1 million.

Gordon, 95, is the largest shareholder in Nine Entertainment, the media giant that owns the Nine Network, streaming platform Stan, radio stations including 3AW and 2GB, and publications including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review.

Earlier this year, he quietly retired from the boards of WIN, his private investment firm Birketu and 41 other private companies.

Gordon’s son, Andrew, is WIN’s chairman.

There are 370 people employed by WIN, the documents filed with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission show. Expenses in the TV division rose from $136.9 million to $144.8 million, while costs at its radio stations, i98FM in Wollongong and C91.3FM in Campbelltown, fell slightly.

WIN made $182.3 million from advertising revenue alone this past financial year, a small decline from $185.6 million the year before.

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Political ads in US campaign and sports drive Q1 Fox Corp profit

A surge in ad revenue tied to the coming 2024 presidential election and to a summer filled with soccer broadcasts boosted results in Fox Corp’s first fiscal quarter, reports Variety.

The owner of the Fox broadcast network, Fox Sports and Fox News Media said net income attributable to Fox Corporation stockholders came to US$827 million, or $1.78 per share in the period, compared to $407 million, or 82 cents a share in the year-earlier quarter. Revenue rose 11%, or $357 million, to $3.56 billion, compared with nearly $3.21 billion a year earlier.

Lachlan Murdoch, CEO of Fox Corp., in a statement cited factors including “strong audience growth at Fox News, record political advertising across the company, accelerating revenue growth at Tubi and a compelling start to our fall sports calendar.”

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News Brands

ABC ‘sorry’ for fake gunshot scandal

The ABC has apologised for “inadvertently” including additional audio of gunshots in a series of stories about an Australian military operation in Afghanistan in 2012, report Sophie Elsworth and James Madden.

ABC news director Justin Stevens told Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday that the issues with the audio “shouldn’t have occurred” but he refused to name any employees involved in the stories that ran on the 7.30 program and on the public broadcaster’s website.

ABC managing director David Anderson subsequently launched a review into the matter, to be conducted by the organisation’s former editorial chief Alan Sunderland.

In commissioning the review, Anderson said he was, to that point, unaware the ABC’s legal department had received a letter raising concerns about the audio editing but hadn’t passed it on to the organisation’s news division.

Sunderland’s interim report, tabled on Tuesday afternoon, found there was “no evidence of any intention to mislead by any ABC employee”, and cleared the broadcaster and the journalists involved in the stories of having “deliberately doctored, falsified, manipulated or distorted information, material or evidence in order to mislead audiences”.

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ABC news boss Justin Stevens’ explanation for ‘inadvertent’ errors falls short

Justin Stevens says responsibility for the news content that goes to air on the ABC ultimately rests with him, writes The Australian’s James Madden.

If that is indeed the case, Stevens – who was appointed ABC news director almost two years ago – needs to properly explain how the taxpayer-funded organisation’s 2022 Line of Fire series, that scrutinised an Australian military operation in Afghanistan, was so botched.

Fronting a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Stevens was happy to quote freely from an “independent” review (conducted by former long-serving ABC staffer Alan Sunderland) that found fake gunshot audio was somehow inserted into stories that alleged elite Australian soldiers fired repeatedly at unarmed Afghan civilians from a helicopter.

Raw footage from a soldier’s helmet cam revealed one shot was fired, but when the ABC’s story went to air, six gunshots were audible.

Sunderland’s interim report raises more questions than answers about how these errors made it to air on the national broadcaster.

As the most senior newsroom figure in the ABC, Stevens needs to fill in the gaps.

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Television

Edgier and updated, the case of the procedural show is back

What’s old is new again, writes Nine Publishing’s Craig Mathieson.

The procedural is the format television was built on. Since the earliest days of the medium, professionals have been solving mysteries week in, week out: detectives play sleuth and uncover a killer, doctors diagnose a patient’s inexplicable ailment, lawyers clear a case. Across an hour – 42 minutes of story, 18 minutes of advertisements – the procedural told a self-contained story. Every week was a variation on the same structure. You could miss an instalment and it didn’t matter because the protagonists always followed the same path.

The canniest newcomer is Ten and Paramount+’s Matlock, which was promoted as a reboot of the legal procedural about a crusty but clever lawyer, Ben Matlock (Andy Griffith), that ran from 1986 and 1995 and lived on as a running gag on The Simpsons. Gender-flipped and updated, it introduces the equally folksy but astute Madeline Matlock (Kathy Bates), a grandmother who jokes about her TV namesake even as she secures an associate’s position at a high-powered New York law firm. Her new 20-something colleagues are gobsmacked.

Without spoiling it, the first episode of Matlock has a fantastic twist that subverts your expectations for the show and reinvents it as two connected strands: a client of the week procedural where Madeline’s experience and empathy win through, and a darker thriller that paints her in a new light.

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Radio

Media regulator can’t bring herself to read out ‘revolting’ Kyle & Jackie O transcripts

Australia’s communications regulator has come under fire for failing to investigate “revolting” material aired on The Kyle & Jackie O Show, including “sexist, racist, [and] misogynistic” content, reports Guardian Australia’s Sarah Martin.

In a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday night, the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young challenged the chair of Australia’s communications and media regulator, Nerida O’Loughlin, to read out a sample of comments made on KIIS FM’s flagship breakfast show in recent weeks.

Hanson-Young said that the material, which she circulated to the committee, included “jokes about people being gay, jokes about one of the producer’s Asian housemates, jokes about people not being white … violent language about women and sex and … vulgar detail about sex acts.”

The transcript also included a segment in which Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O Henderson held a competition where female staff recorded themselves urinating for the “boys … to figure out whose flaps made that wee”.

O’Loughlin, the head of Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), refused to read out the transcripts, saying: “I would prefer not to read it out.”

O’Loughlin said the regulator had received 59 complaints about the show since July, but under the co-regulatory system, complaints were dealt with by the licence holder in the first instance.

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Sports Media

Thousands of Australians miss the Melbourne Cup after making same mistake

Channel 7 is under fire after thousands of Aussies tuned in to watch the Melbourne Cup only to realise that the traditional racing network didn’t have the broadcast rights, reports news.com.au.

The network on Tuesday screened shots of other race events around the nation and it appears plenty of Australians missed “The Race That Stops the Nation” assuming the great 3200m race was back on the traditional broadcaster of the Cup.

Thousands of Aussies made the same stuff up last year with one fan saying he had “never felt so stupid” in his life for failing to realise the Cup was being covered by Channel 10.

But from 2024 until 2029, Channel 9 has the rights to the big race, with the best option to catch the action being the free livestream on 9Now.

By the time the traditional 3pm start time for the Melbourne Cup passed, plenty of fans couldn’t work out why it wasn’t on their television screens.

[Read more]

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