Business of Media
Live pigs and word clouds: How the British media is covering the downfall of Boris Johnson
The United Kingdom is waking up to a new wave of MP resignations and news that Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to resign, reports Nine Publishing’s Anthony Segaert.
While Australians have become accustomed to leadership spills and parliamentary chaos, it’s a slightly less common affair in the UK. But, thankfully, the British media has demonstrated it’s up to the task of covering the drama moment by moment.
From rolling lists of resignations to interviewing cats and holding live pigs on TV, British news outlets are going all out to cover the final days of the Johnson prime ministership.
Call for China to free Aussie journo Cheng Lei crosses party lines
Former prime minister John Howard, former Liberal foreign minister Alexander Downer and former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans have joined members of the Albanese government and federal opposition in calling for Beijing to release Australian journalist Cheng Lei, reports News Corp’s Will Glasgow.
Influential business figures also signed the open letter published in The Australian on Friday, joining senior members from across Australian media and some of the country’s most influential security and foreign policy experts, revealing the wide support for Cheng.
“We write out of deep concern for the rights, health, and wellbeing of Australian journalist Ms Cheng Lei to urge the Government of the People’s Republic of China to authorise the relevant legal authority to release her from detention and allow her to return to her home and family in Australia,” the distinguished Australians write.
They note the “chilling effect” the imprisonment of the mother-of-two has had on relations between Australia and China.
Twitter says it suspends 1m spam users a day as Elon Musk row deepens
Twitter has revealed that it is suspending more than 1m spam accounts a day, as Elon Musk threatens to walk away from buying the business in a dispute over fake users, reports The Guardian’s Dan Milmo.
The new figure, confirmed by the social media platform on Thursday, represents a doubling of its previous update. Its chief executive, Parag Agrawal, said in May that spam account suspensions were running at 500,000 a day.
Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and the world’s richest man, has agreed to buy Twitter for $44bn, but his lawyers have written to the company accusing it of refusing to provide sufficient information about the number of spam users on the service. It has since started to supply him with public tweet data.
UK journalism has received almost £80m in philanthropy since 2019 but US dominates donations for news
UK journalism has been supported by at least £77m of philanthropic funding since 2019, Press Gazette research has found – although funding for news remains a fraction of what’s available in the US, reports Press Gazette’s Aisha Majid.
Last year, Press Gazette tallied up the amount of funding provided to newsrooms large and small to find that at least £55m of money had been given to fund journalism as of mid-2021. Our current total for funding we know is confirmed until the end of 2022 stands at £77m.
Our research is based on figures supplied by some funders and recipients as well as publicly available records from the Charity Commission and 360Giving. We have also included grant support to journalism from tech giants Google and Facebook, which is separate to the content syndication fees they pay to publishers.
While our figure most likely misses some of the funding given, it suggests that the amounts given to UK newsrooms are going up and philanthropy is a growing source of revenue.
Ex-Channel Seven journalist pleads guilty to culpable driving charge that killed friend
The tragic decline of a once high-flying Channel Seven reporter from one of the country’s biggest newsrooms to poverty and jail in a few years has been revealed in all of its sombre detail in a Melbourne court, reports News Corp’s Hugo Timms.
Richmond man Trent Evans, 45, pleaded guilty to culpable driving causing death in the Victorian County Court on Thursday following a car crash in February last year that killed his friend Rex Willox.
Evans’ guilty plea has marked the final chapter in what his lawyer described as a “descent into absolute chaos” for a man who in two years went from managing newsrooms for Channel Seven and 10 to homelessness, drug use and, now, imprisonment.
Agencies
Oporto appoints Poem to lead communications strategy
Australian fast food chain, Oporto, has appointed creative communications agency, Poem, to lead its creative communications strategy.
Poem will work alongside media agency Mindshare in Oporto’s creative roster and will be responsible for creative earned media for the brand including communications strategy, PR, social media strategy and management, influencer and content.
Poem managing director and co-founder, Rob Lowe, said: “We are delighted to be working with Oporto; an iconic Australian brand with strong values, great tasting food and a Bondi heritage associated with fun lifestyles in the sun.
“The Oporto marketing team is highly energised and has some strong growth plans, so we’re looking forward to working with them to refresh the brand and bring Oporto to new audiences and old fans.”
Wunderman Thompson announces two new creative director promotions
Wunderman Thompson has announced the promotions of Steven Hey and Simon Koay to creative directors.
With more than two decades of industry experience between them, the duo began at Wunderman Thompson as senior creatives in 2018, progressing to associate creative directors in 2021.
The pair have produced notable campaigns for Parkinson’s NSW, Rural Fire Service NSW and Kellogg’s, and headed up pitch wins for RFS, Victorian Department of Justice, Sunbeam and Nikon.
As creative leads on KitKat, Hey and Koay have helped the brand reclaim its position as Australia’s number one chocolate bar, had multiple campaigns adopted globally and had their recent ‘Have a Bite’ campaign pick up multiple trophies at both AWARD and Spikes.
News Brands
Afghanistan’s independent media is fading away, but a few hold out
Waheeda Hasan, a reporter for the Afghan broadcaster Tolo News, on a recent morning got out of the car, hid her phone in the folds of her head scarf and walked to the protest site, a busy intersection here, reports The Wall Street Journal’s Margherita Stancati.
There, a dozen women waved colorful posters and chanted slogans calling on the Taliban to reopen secondary schools for girls and to allow women to return to work in all professions. Hasan started filming the protest on her phone. Within minutes, Taliban security forces swarmed the area. Hasan quickly uploaded her footage and slipped away safely. A radio journalist, the only other local reporter there, was briefly detained.
Afghanistan’s flourishing media industry was one of the flagship achievements of the 20 years of U.S.-led intervention in the country. Now, less than a year since the Taliban replaced the Western-backed government, there is little of it left, and even reporting on small, peaceful gatherings of women has become a risky endeavor.
Women’s rights protests aren’t allowed, and neither is covering them.
Television
One last, emotional lap for Julia Zemiro
“We had always said, jokingly, ‘When the last one comes it should probably be me!’ But I couldn’t tell if they were serious or not. Well, fair enough. They were serious,” Julia Zemiro admits to TV Tonight.
“I won’t lie to you, I was nervous about doing it. It did feel weird.
“I’ve watched it back and I’m fine with it.”
Zemiro’s hesitation, of course, is in shifting from host to the subject for the very last episode of her famed Home Delivery series on ABC.
This time around the hosting duties are shared between Mark Humphries, Justine Clarke and former Delivery passengers, Costa Georgiadis and Judith Lucy.