Sharp Divide: Who had a good week and who just wants to hide?

SHARP DIVIDE: Annette Sharp reveals whose stocks are rising and whose are falling during the week.

KIM WILSON

WHEN your columnist broke the news this week former OK! Magazine and New Idea editor Kim Wilson had risen to the top of an impressive list of contenders to nab the coveted job as editor-in-chief of The Australian Women’s Weekly, queries came thick and fast

“But who is she and what is she like?” was the oft-repeated query.

This writer has had a few encounters with Wilson over the years and has always found her to be professional and dedicated. Beyond that, she’s a bit of an enigma.

Unlike some former AWW editors, she doesn’t seem to relish the limelight.

She’s also a mum, albeit a new one, so is fast developing a sense of just how thanklessly challenging and exhausting a doormat’s life can be.

Former AWW editor Robyn Foyster told Confidential Wilson is a hard worker who understands the magazine’s “heartland”.

Her new bosses will be praying it’s so. As new circulation figures have revealed, Wilson has her work cut out in a declining magazine market.

AWW shed another 31,000 buyers in the year that was, and without a yet-to-be-appointed CEO at the helm, the culture at publishing company Bauer Media is fast deteriorating.

AMBER McDONALD

THE Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy comparisons have been made before but when willowy part-time model Amber McDonald captured the heart of former PM Paul Keating’s son Patrick, who she married in 2002 in a glittering society wedding, many people became instantly captivated by the quietly spoken beauty.

Amber Keating.

The wedding was at the suitably grand St Mary’s Cathedral Sydney, an opera singer sang, and the bride was dressed in the height of Australian bridal couture in a beaded Collette Dinnigan gown.

From my position on the grassy knoll outside the cathedral’s crypt, it appeared like a union that might last, but 10 years later it was over.

The private McDonald then lost herself in raising the couple’s two children, Avalon and Slade, until a few years later businessman Aussie John Symond started courting her.

A romantic St Valentine’s Day proposal came last year, with a wedding imminent.

Since meeting Symond, McDonald has become one of Sydney’s most generous charity hosts, regularly throwing open the doors of his multi-millionaire’s waterfront Point Piper mansion to raise money for children’s charities, hospitals and the arts.

SARAH STINSON

Nova 10th birthday at Table For Twenty Restaurant in Surry Hills. Sarah Stinson.

SHE’S marked for bigger things at the Seven Network — rumours this week (denied by Seven) claim she has been thrust in over the top of the Sunrise EP Michael Pell to help manage some of the issues that Pell is facing both on screen and off.

Chief among those is that Sunrise — for a decade the nation’s most popular breakfast show — has lost its ratings edge to rival Today.

The talent she represents adore her, the newly appointed Head of News at Nine Craig McPherson respects her, and she’s on the rise at Seven in a news environment traditionally dominated by men.

CAROLINE OVERINGTON

Caroline Overington.

CONTROVERSY follows this well-regarded writer wherever she goes and once again caught up with her at The Australian Women’s Weekly during her tenure there as associate editor.

Last week came word Caroline Overington had applied for the job of editor-in-chief of the title, along, I hear, with some 20 others, including experienced editors from Fairfax, Pacific Publications, News Corp, Bauer and television, plus one eastern suburbs socialite.

Bauer publisher Matt Dominello spent the first week of February telling internal applicants they had been unsuccessful.

Whether it was this that set Overington off we can’t say, but insiders witnessed a huge blow-up with Dominello in the Weekly offices some 10 days ago, prompting Overington to storm out. Sources say she has resigned. The AWW’s new PR man could not be reached yesterday to confirm.

CAMERON WILLIAMS

Cameron Williams.

THERE are two types of people in this town. The first can reinvent themselves with each job or new boss.

The second type, due to past indiscretions, don’t ever get there.

That’s why this writer is watching with interest who picks up sports newsreader Cameron Williams, who faced indecent assault charges brought against him by a Fox Sports make-up artist Samantha Clifford in 2001.

While the charges were dropped, Williams admitted to the court he had sometimes asked Clifford to expose her bra, describing the routine as being “like a secret handshake” between them.

Then, after being picked up by Channel 9 in 2008, he was ejected from a Sydney pub for allegedly abusing female staff. His TV reps claimed pub security guards did not grab and eject him, but merely asked him to leave over a reserved table mix up.

Last week Williams announced he was leaving Nine after contract negotiations collapsed.

JURY’S OUT

BRUCE GORDON

The Nine Network’s largest shareholder, WIN TV owner Bruce Gordon, is going to extreme lengths to preserve what was once a virtual commercial monopoly of some parts of regional Australia.

Bruce Gordon.

Having been denied a seat on Nine’s board — something to which a 15 per cent stakeholder might be entitled — he is taking Nine to court, alleging it has breached the terms of a program supply deal with WIN, which broadcasts Nine’s signal to regional Australia.

The Australian last week revealed Gordon intends to claim Nine violated its broadcasting agreement by live-streaming its channels Go, GEM and 9Life into areas in which WIN holds commercial TV broadcast licences.

He is testing the Broadcasting Services Act 1992, sources claim, in an action which promises to expose the outdated broadcasting laws still impacting modern media in a country where the internet has changed media businesses forever.