Business of Media
Elon Musk lashes the ABC over its decision to abandon his social media platform X
Billionaire businessman Elon Musk has lashed out at the ABC over its decision to abandon his platform and accused the public broadcaster of favouring “censorship-friendly social media”, reports The Australian’s Sophie Elsworth.
Musk purchased X (formerly Twitter) in 2022 and has made many changes to the platform, including rebranding it, sacking thousands of staff and introducing charges for verification, but its overhaul has not been welcomed by the public broadcaster.
The reasons behind the ABC’s decision to stop using the platform included blaming toxic interactions, costs and lack of trust but it was met with annoyance by Musk who took to social media to scold the taxpayer-funded organisation.
Hours after the decision was announced by the ABC, Musk responded on X to a post about the ABC’s move by writing, “Well of course they prefer censorship-friendly social media. The Australian public does not”.
Linda Yaccarino says Twitter will reinstate ‘client council’ for ad execs
The chief executive of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has moved to repair the company’s relationship with advertisers by reinstating a “client council” for marketing and ad agency executives, reports The Guardian’s Dan Milmo.
Linda Yaccarino wrote on the platform on Thursday that it was “officially bringing back the client council in the fall”, as the business seeks to reverse an advertiser boycott that has hit revenues since it was bought by Elon Musk for $44bn last year. Musk admitted last month that cashflow was still negative amid a 50% slump in advertising revenues.
Yaccarino, who was a highly rated TV advertising executive before joining Twitter this year, told the news channel CNBC she had been focused on talking to brands such as Coca-Cola and Visa.
“I’ve lived on a lot of planes lately, direct conversations with CMOs and CEOs [chief marketing officers and chief executive officers], and we cover a lot of ground and I focus on those that have either maybe paused or reduced spending to remind them about the power of the platform and the power of the user base and the economic potential of them partnering with us again,” she said.
Hollywood is striking with no end in sight. It’s leaving Australia’s film industry in a tough spot
Hollywood’s been hit with the biggest strikes in decades and the impact is being felt in Australia, with hundreds of cast and crew working on offshore productions affected, reports The ABC’s Rhiana Whitson.
The 160,000-member strong Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG_AFTRA) last month joined the Writers Guild of America in walking off the job after pay negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers broke down.
There are no signs of the stalemate ending anytime soon.
US film and TV veteran actor James Huang might be a world away in Melbourne, but he backs his union’s decision to shut down Hollywood and productions across the world.
“I’ve been a SAG-AFTRA member since the 90s and this strike is entirely about fighting for working-class people,” Huang told 7.30.
“And it’s entirely to do with studios taking advantage of actors’ likeness with the AI, artificial intelligence, technology, and streaming and accountability for what actors live and breathe on, which is residual income.”
Television
Emmys postponed until January over Hollywood strikes
The Emmy Awards have been postponed by almost four months, organizers said Thursday, as crippling strikes by Hollywood’s actors and writers drag on with no resolution in sight, reports AFP.
Television’s equivalent of the Oscars had been due to take place this September, but will now be held in mid-January next year, broadcaster Fox and the Television Academy wrote in a statement.
“We are pleased to announce that the 75th Emmy Awards will now air on Monday, January 15, 2024,” said a Fox spokesman.
The Emmys are the most significant entertainment event so far to be delayed by Hollywood’s first industry-wide walkout by both actors and writers in more than 60 years.
The last time the Emmys were delayed was in 2001, when the ceremony was postponed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Did Bluey really average 11 million viewers?
Just how big is Bluey? Without a shadow of a doubt, very bloody big. Last month ABC staggeringly claimed Season 3 had attracted “a whopping series average Total Audience of 11 million viewers,” subsequently reported in a wave of press coverage, reports TV Tonight.
ABC claimed the audience outranked “any series to air in Australia, including MAFS (2.58m), Lego Masters (2.2m) and State of Origin (2.6m in 2022) on Nine, and even higher than the Tokyo Olympics Opening Ceremony (3.7m) in 2021 on Seven!”
ABC added together every screening, including repeats, regional viewers and VPM.
ABC said, “We have reported that it has a Total Audience of 12.7m (28 day broadcast + cume VPM). This includes 952k for the 8am premiere on 9 April. It also includes over 8 million iview VPM (from premiere to date) and 3.7 million average audience from cumulative encores of which there were 2 on ABC Kids and ABC TV.”
An OzTAM spokesperson told TV Tonight, adding first run and encore audiences is permissable, but cannot be called an Average and should be clearly sourced.
TV Tonight has provided an update to the story stating: OzTAM spokesperson: “OzTAM and the ABC agree that the sole reference to the ’series average’ could have been better expressed as a series average based on the total audience (not the average audience), for each episode.”
Denise Scott reveals how she juggled cancer treatment with the reboot of Mother and Son
Looking back now, Denise Scott thinks she might have been a little crazy to shoot the reimagining of beloved Aussie sitcom Mother and Son earlier this year – but she has zero regrets, reports News Corp’s James Wigney.
First there was the fact that the veteran comedian was stepping into the shoes of Ruth Cracknell – the stage and screen actor so revered that she has a room at the Sydney Theatre Company named in her honour – to play role of the scheming, dementia-suffering Maggie.
As if the pressure and expectation of that wasn’t enough, by the time cameras rolled, Scott was also undergoing a gruelling treatment for breast cancer. Although she knew the long days of shooting would be tough, she elected to press on and in the end found that the project was a welcome – and joyous – distraction as she fought the illness.
“In hindsight, it was probably insane because it was a full-on, walloping sort of chemo,” Scott says. “However, whenever I was actually filming and getting to play Maggie, I felt this inexplicable joy. I felt really happy. Everything else was a bit tricky and I’d worry about whether I was going to get through it and then when I was Maggie … I thought it was thrilling and I love the character and I really enjoyed making her mine.”
Sports Media
Agreement reached: NRL and players set to end long-running CBA war
The NRL’s long-running pay dispute is all but over, with the parties striking an in-principle agreement on Thursday evening pending documentation and ratification from the playing group, report Nine Publishing’s Adrian Proszenko and Adam Pengilly.
Earlier this week, ARLC chairman Peter V’landys boldly declared that he could broker a deal within “two hours” if both parties returned to the negotiating table in good faith. In the end, an agreement took two days.
After refusing to speak to each other for months, the NRL and the players’ union met on Wednesday and again late on Thursday afternoon. The latter meeting resolved the final outstanding issues, giving the Rugby League Players’ Association the chance to take the offer back to its members for approval. An elusive collective bargaining agreement, one that has been 21 months in the making, appears imminent.
The players have ended their ban on speaking to the media on game days, and were set to resume pre- and post-match interviews from Thursday night’s match.