Statement from Vinyl Group on Mumbrella Reporting and Press Council Process

Vinyl Group welcomes scrutiny. We are a publicly listed company operating across media, music and technology, and we accept that our strategy, performance and leadership will be questioned.

What we do not accept is a sustained pattern of inaccurate reporting, unsupported speculation, personal abuse and commercial denigration presented to the market as informed industry analysis.

Between February 2025 and July 2026, we reviewed more than 30 Mumbrella articles and podcast episodes substantially dedicated to Vinyl Group. The review was not exhaustive. It identified recurring factual inaccuracies, opinion presented within news reporting as though it were established fact, unrelated historical material repeatedly inserted into new stories, undisclosed conflicts of interest and increasingly hostile commentary about our strategy, people and journalism.

The volume and hostility of the coverage increased following Vinyl Group’s acquisition of Mediaweek, a publication operating in the same trade-media market as Mumbrella.

For many months, the attacks were directed primarily at me. I largely chose not to respond. Being criticised personally is an occupational hazard of leading a public company.

That changed when Mumbrella began targeting the work of our writers and other hard-working team members.

In the week beginning 20 July alone, Mumbrella published five articles, two newsletters and a podcast substantially focused on Vinyl Group. Across that concentrated burst of coverage, Mumbrella and its proprietor, Tim Burrowes, described Vinyl’s strategy, communications and journalism as “semi-delusional”, “verging-on-delusional”, “bombastic”, a “publishing circus”, a possible “face-saving move”, the work of an “enthusiastic collector of brands”, a “piece of crap” and “editorial slop”. Since then, Burrowes has also described what we are building as “fantasy”.

Burrowes also suggested that advertisers may become embarrassed to associate with our brands, groundlessly speculated that a newly appointed executive would replace me as CEO, and falsely assumed that a human-written article produced by one of our journalists was AI-generated.

Burrowes’ succession speculation misunderstands the nature of Vinyl Group as a founder-led business. I developed the strategy, have led the company through its transformation and remain fully committed to executing its next phase. Building and attracting a stronger executive team is evidence of my effectiveness as a founder CEO, not evidence of an undisclosed succession plan.

More importantly, the article Burrowes denigrated was not AI-generated, as he claimed. It was written by a journalist, and Concrete Playground was not the publication on which the AI workflows described in our strategy were being trialled. Those trials were being conducted on Blunt, as disclosed.

Burrowes and Mumbrella therefore selected an unrelated article, falsely treated it as evidence of our AI strategy and described the journalist’s work as a “piece of crap” and “editorial slop” without making any inquiry into how it had been produced. That is not scrutiny of corporate strategy. It is abuse directed at a writer who had nothing to do with the broader business proposition being criticised.

Burrowes and Mumbrella have also repeatedly inserted personal allegations concerning Richard White into reporting about Vinyl Group, despite Richard not being a direct shareholder and having no operational role in the company. RealWise, of which Richard is the beneficial owner and sole director, is a shareholder, but Richard does not control Vinyl’s operations, management or editorial decision-making. 

The pattern has also extended to the casual distribution of my non-work phone number to Mumbrella staff and external contractors, and the manipulation of my image to create an unflattering depiction despite the availability of approved photographs.

In just the last week, our investor relations team was required to seek corrections to Mumbrella reporting that:

• confused cash receipts with revenue;
• misrepresented our 15x workflow efficiency metric as a commitment to produce 15 times more articles;
• misrepresented our 95%+ quality metric as AI content being “95% as good as human output”;
• initially presented the statutory 0.4-quarter funding calculation without the normalised 3.81-quarter runway disclosed in the same Appendix 4C; and
• incorrectly interpreted our audience reporting.

Burrowes was expressly told that Vinyl’s editorial model is human-first and technology-enabled. He was told that the 15x metric relates to specific story-sourcing and curation workflows, not automated article output. He was told that the 95%+ metric means existing editorial and SEO standards were maintained while those workflow efficiencies were achieved.

Despite those clarifications, the same false characterisation continued.

It was also suggested that Vinyl deliberately released its strategy presentation four minutes after its Appendix 4C to obscure or distract from the quarterly results, when both documents had been uploaded simultaneously before market open, and the timing and sequencing of their release were controlled by the ASX.

Vinyl’s strategy is not hidden. We have published a strategy update at the beginning of every financial year since I became CEO and provide further strategic updates several times each year, in addition to our minimum reporting obligations.

Our model is straightforward. We acquire trusted brands and cultural assets with established audiences at attractive prices, integrate shared commercial and technology infrastructure, and create scale effects across the portfolio.

We have completed approximately 10 transactions in three years and, on average, acquired businesses at discounts of approximately 90% to the values previously attributed to them through earlier sales or capital raisings.

Some of those businesses were distressed, neglected or mismanaged. That was the opportunity.

The work of rescuing and integrating them has been difficult and, at times, messy. Aggregation is difficult. Turnarounds are difficult. But Vinyl has preserved brands and journalism assets that may otherwise have disappeared, while building audience reach far faster and cheaper than could have been achieved organically.

With the support of our investors, Vinyl, under my leadership, has made one of the most significant commitments to independent media in Australia in the past decade, preserving mastheads, audiences and journalism jobs that may otherwise have been lost.

Mumbrella has also left unmoderated reader comments accusing the company of “smoke and mirrors” and deception in how it characterises its audience growth and financial performance. So let me be clear: as previously disclosed, the company delivered 28% year-on-year organic growth in cash receipts and increased its Australian web audience reach from 26% in FY25 to 55% in FY26, based on January 2026 Ipsos data.

 That 55% figure relates to native web audience alone and excludes social and platform reach. Including social and platform performance, monthly content views across Vinyl’s properties have increased more than 100-fold since our first publishing acquisition in 2024, as disclosed in last year’s annual report, generating many billions of impressions and consistently exceeding 100 million impressions each month.

Reasonable people may disagree with our thesis that trusted mastheads will become more valuable as signal beacons in an AI-saturated world. What is not reasonable is for Burrowes and Mumbrella to repeatedly misstate the thesis, attack the company on the basis of that misstatement, and then present the resulting confusion as evidence that the strategy cannot be understood.

Ironically, Mumbrella itself may not entirely disagree. On 27 July, it published an opinion piece by Dan Monheit titled The Infinite Half-Life of Earned Media: LLMs Just Rewrote the Rules of ROI.

Thus far we have chosen not to litigate.

Instead, Vinyl prepared and submitted a complaint to the Australian Press Council on 6 July, before the most recent escalation in rhetoric. We did so because we believed the appropriate first response was independent consideration through journalism’s own accountability framework.

The Press Council subsequently advised that it would not exercise its discretion to consider the complaint because Mumbrella was no longer a constituent body. That was a jurisdictional outcome. It was not a determination on the merits.

This matters because Burrowes and Mumbrella report to a concentrated commercial audience that includes investors, advertisers, executives, prospective employees, acquisition targets and strategic partners. Mumbrella’s reporting is also indexed by search engines and incorporated into AI-generated summaries.

Vinyl is now aware of investors, including members of our top-five shareholder group, encountering AI summaries asserting that the company has lost forecast credibility.

Mumbrella has repeatedly asserted that Vinyl has lost forecast credibility and is itself the principal source of that repeated assertion. The cash-flow milestone on which that assertion has focused was for Vinyl to become cash positive in the December 2025 quarter. We achieved it.

Repetition does not make a false proposition true. It does, however, make it more likely to be absorbed by search engines, AI systems and stakeholders who may never read our ASX disclosures.

That is no longer merely offensive. It is commercially harmful.

We understand that risk particularly well because our Adaptive Media strategy recognises that, in an AI-enabled information environment, repeated online signals increasingly shape search results, AI-generated summaries, brand perception and commercial decision-making. That is precisely why trusted brands and credible journalism matter more, not less.

Vinyl Group is seeking an executive-level discussion with Simon Grover, Managing Director of The Intermedia Group, Mumbrella’s parent company. As part of that discussion, we will ask The Intermedia Group to review the conduct and coverage of Burrowes and Mumbrella across its website, newsletters and podcasts against Intermedia’s own published Editorial Code of Practice, including its requirements concerning accuracy, fairness, rights of reply, emotive language, corrections and offensive language.

Separately, we will publish our Press Council complaint and supporting materials so that shareholders, advertisers, journalists and other stakeholders can review the evidence for themselves.

We remain open to a constructive resolution. However, the repeated publication of false statements concerning Vinyl’s business is now causing identifiable commercial harm, and we are preserving all legal rights available to the company.

Shareholders should also understand that the company does not expect to incur material legal fees in reviewing this matter or, should it choose to pursue it, taking further action. The company’s longstanding media counsel considers the issue important on a broader industry level and has agreed to cap his fees. Any decision to commence proceedings would remain subject to appropriate Board oversight.

Our strategy may be debated. Our performance may be scrutinised. I may be criticised personally.

But our journalists should not be abused, their work should not be falsely described as AI-generated, and inaccurate narratives should not be repeated so frequently that investors and other stakeholders reasonably mistake them for established fact. Nor should our writers have to work under the threat that their ordinary reporting will be mislabelled and publicly ridiculed to serve a predetermined narrative.

Mediaweek is owned by Vinyl Group