Mike Sneesby heads to Greece, as Nine’s newsrooms crumble

Nine CEO Mike Sneesby flew to Greece on Friday night for a week-long family holiday, just hours after slashing hundreds of jobs at the embattled media company.

Nine chief executive Mike Sneesby. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Nine’s chief executive officer Mike Sneesby flew to Greece on Friday night for a week-long family holiday, just hours after slashing the embattled media company’s headcount by four per cent in a move that prompted “white-hot anger” among staff.

Mr Sneesby, who has come under enormous pressure over the past six weeks due to his perceived mishandling of the serious harassment allegations levelled against former Nine news boss Darren Wick, was spotted in the first-class lounge at Sydney Airport on Friday evening.

It’s understood that Mr Sneesby has taken a week of annual leave to attend the wedding of a family member in Greece.

The timing of Mr Sneesby’s leave – though planned for some time – is likely to further upset staff, many of whom claim to have been “blindsided” on Friday morning by his company-wide email that outlined the loss of 200 jobs, most of them in the company’s publishing division, which is home to The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review, the Brisbane Times and WAtoday.

As many as 90 roles across Nine’s publishing division will be made redundant. A further 38 jobs will be shed in the company’s TV arm, with the remainder of the cuts spread across the rest of the media organisation.

One senior Nine insider compared Mr Sneesby’s decision to go on an overseas holiday during the company’s current crisis as his “I don’t hold a hose moment” – a reference to then prime minister Scott Morrison’s decision to go on a holiday to Hawaii during the Black Summer bushfires of 2019.

“The timing is bad. He doesn’t seem to understand how angry the staff are,” the source said.

“He certainly doesn’t seem to understand how badly these cuts will affect Nine’s journalism.”

Another insider questioned why Mr Sneesby hadn’t been more upfront in recent months about the precarious financial state of the company’s publishing division.

“It seems as though he’s been trying so hard to put a positive spin on things that the business has lost all transparency,” the senior insider told The Australian.

As recently as May, Mr Sneesby told the Macquarie Conference in Sydney that Nine was “Australia’s most-read publisher in our targeted markets”, and told a panel discussion at that event that the publishing division was performing well.

Tory Maguire, the managing director of Nine Publishing, is expected to address staff from the division’s five mastheads on Monday morning to provide more details of the cutbacks.

On Friday, following Mr Sneesby’s all-staff email, Maguire messaged employees in the publishing division, informing them of the need to make “significant savings in FY25”.

“It is clear that we need to evolve our operating model and reset the publishing business to create a sustainable future for the mastheads,” Maguire said.

“The publishing division is not alone in having to make these tough calls.

“If we make the right decisions now our mastheads have a thriving and sustainable future ahead of them and the important journalism we do every day will continue to make a difference for the better.”

Maguire will address staff on Monday morning.

Is it also understood mastheads editors, including The Age’s Patrick Elligett, addressed staff on Friday after Mr Sneesby made his announcement about the hundreds of job losses.

One insider at The Age told The Australian: “The mood seems largely unfavourable to management.

“Some of the bolshie people are arguing the publication side is profitable and the cuts are too disproportionate.”

The media union, the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, moved a vote of no confidence in Mr Sneesby and the board on Friday afternoon, but are yet to receive a response.

In announcing the job cuts last Friday, Mr Sneesby cited the prolonged slump in advertising revenue, along with Meta’s decision to walk away from the renegotiation of its payment-for-content deals with news media companies, as the main reasons for the savage cost cutting.

“It is not something we want to do but it is something we need to do to continue to build on a successful platform of high-quality journalism and digital subscription growth,” Mr Sneesby said in his staff note.

Another issue facing Nine in the short-term is the apparent shortfall in its projected revenue from its Olympic Games ad packages.

Two weeks ago, The Australian reported that while Nine had locked in its advertising contracts with its major Games partners, it was struggling to sell ad slots to clients for its smaller Olympics advertising packages, which, cumulatively, are worth many millions of dollars.

Further complicating matters at Nine are the ongoing negotiations surrounding a new enterprise bargaining agreement; the current deal expired on Sunday.

The new deal, whenever it is resolved, will see Nine’s wage bill blow out significantly.

Nine is also on the hunt for at least one, if not two, new board members, following the resignation last month of chair Peter Costello.

At present, there are just six members on Nine’s board, including chair Catherine West and Mr Sneesby.

Nine’s share price closed at $1.40 on Friday, down more than 30 per cent over the past six months.

Mr Sneesby declined to answer questions from The Australian on Sunday.

Originally published as Mike Sneesby heads to Greece, as Nine’s newsrooms crumble