Business of Media
Embattled Nine boss Darren Wick’s $1m golden handshake
Nine news boss Darren Wick left the media company in March with a near million-dollar golden handshake, despite senior management and the board being aware of allegations the veteran newsman had behaved inappropriately towards female staff, report The Australian’s Sophie Elsworth and James Madden.
The Australian understands that Wick, 60, agreed to a financial settlement of close to $1m upon his departure from Nine – which equates to more than his annual salary – even though he left under a cloud after discussions at board level about his alleged workplace improprieties.
Nine’s seven-person board is chaired by former federal treasurer Peter Costello; the media company’s chief executive, Mike Sneesby, also sits on the board.
Nine boss Mike Sneesby cancels holiday as crisis engulfs media company
Nine boss Mike Sneesby will make an early return home from the US to handle the crisis engulfing his media company, reports News Corp’s Jonathon Moran.
After addressing staff in a company-wide email on Wednesday, chief executive officer Sneesby has cancelled a planned holiday in the wake of the disaster.
“Mike has been in the US on business and is returning this weekend,” Nine director of communications Victoria Buchan told The Daily Telegraph. “Mike was planning a holiday but he is now returning.”
Michael Schumacher’s family win case against publisher over fake AI interview
The family of Michael Schumacher have won their legal action against the publisher of a magazine that printed an artificial intelligence-generated interview with the multiple Formula One champion, reports the Associated Press.
The German celebrity magazine Die Aktuelle promoted on its cover in April 2023 the words: “Michael Schumacher, the first interview!” It also wrote “it sounds deceptively real”, with the supposed quotes attributed to Schumacher generated by AI.
Brutal economics behind Brisbane’s Tay Tay snub
If a politician loves anything more than being photographed in high-vis construction gear, it’s probably the opportunity to bask in the glow of superstardom, reports Nine Publishing’s Liam Walsh.
But as with any high, there are the dizzying lows. Text messages we’ve uncovered between an entertainment mogul and a premier show the fretting that occurs should leading artists decide not to tour locally.
Audio
How to listen to Bronwyn, The Australian’s new podcast
A new Hedley Thomas podcast has launched, reports The Australian.
The podcast, titled Bronwyn, examines the disappearance of a young mother who vanished from her home in idyllic Lennox Head, near Byron Bay on the NSW far north coast, in May 1993.
While a coroner recommended that a “known person” be charged with her murder, the office of the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions refused to proceed with a prosecution.
Television
Is Netflix killing off the binge model it created? The signs say yes
At its best, TV is a social experience. It’s turning up to work on a Monday and immediately discussing last night’s episode of Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad or Succession. The weekly format of those water-cooler classics meant we had more time to digest each episode, discuss plot developments, and speculate about future storylines, reports Nine Publishing’s Aine Ryan.
The advent of streaming – and Netflix’s model in particular – did its best to kill that, with the shift to the binge model that saw all episodes of a show released at once.
Unless it’s a breakout hit, like Baby Reindeer, a new show on a streaming platform has a huge challenge in finding – and holding on to – an audience. In large part, that’s because a show’s entire life cycle from premiere to post-mortem happens within a week. They get a fortnight if they’re lucky.
Such Brave Girls is comedy fiction, but most of it actually happened to writer and star Kat Sadler
Most people who write and then star in a TV show or film are at pains to make it clear that it is not, actually, autobiographical, reports the ABC’s Katherine Smyrk.
Think, Phoebe Waller-Bridge having to publicly state that the awful characters in Fleabag are not based on her life or family. Or Noah Baumbach insisting his divorce film Marriage Story is “not autobiographical; it’s personal”.
But for Kat Sadler, the creator and lead of Such Brave Girls, the opposite is true.