How Nine played its part in ending Alan Jones’ radio career
Sweeping cultural change at merged media company Nine - and an urgent need to save the business upwards of $5 million a year in salaries - has brought to an abrupt end the 35-year career of veteran radio broadcaster Alan Jones.
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Sweeping cultural change at merged media company Nine - and an urgent need to save the business upwards of $5 million a year in salaries - has brought to an abrupt end the 35-year career of veteran radio broadcaster Alan Jones.
One year into a hard-fought-for $8 million two-year contract, Jones is stepping down from radio station 2GB citing ill health to make way for a younger head to replace him, a man almost four decades his junior, 2GB drive show host Ben Fordham.
Overlooked in the plan to give critical life support to 2GB’s ailing revenue is Jones’s long-time understudy, Ray Hadley, the man picked out and groomed to replace Jones by 2GB’s former owner John Singleton.
At 65, Hadley remains a dominant force in talk radio. His morning program delivered to 2GB a 17.5 per cent audience share in the March radio ratings survey - up 3.2 percent on the previous survey despite the broadcaster going to court to see off bullying allegations from a former staffer - yet he is no longer central to Nine’s radio plans, a shock to those inside the 2GB bunker.
Earlier this year Hadley also came off Nine’s rugby league commentary team - a hint of what was to come with Nine now openly rolling back its commitment to the NRL.
The push to try and save money comes after Nine lost millions of dollars in revenue following an advertiser boycott last year, one triggered by Jones’s comments on 2GB about New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
He told Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on his breakfast show last August to “shove a sock down her throat”.
With Nine’s identity changing following its merger with Fairfax Media in 2018 from a news-heavy sports-saturated free-to-air television broadcaster with conservative leanings to a Married At First Sight-led entertainment platform more politically aligned to the non-profit ABC, some members of Nine’s board are now pushing openly for the removal of company CEO Hugh Marks.
In a week in which “Hollywood Hugh” Marks addressed Nine investors and indicated the media company is ready to cut ties with embattled long-time sports partner the NRL, Nine insiders spoke about rising panic within the company.
Executives and board directors alike have become increasingly concerned about Nine’s revised business strategy under Marks which sees it move away from the free-to-air broadcaster’s grassroots television audience and the CEO’s lack of attention to longstanding business alliances.
Former Fairfax publishing executive Chris Janz, Nine’s chief digital and publishing officer, is currently favoured as Marks’ replacement.
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Former Nine CEO David Gyngell is also rated an outside chance of returning to the company for a third time to lift plummeting morale borne of what internal sources call Marks’ remote and spreadsheet-obsessed management style.
There are also concerns his lack of industry pedigree is starting to be evident in his business decisions, something that makes TV-hardened Gyngell an attractive alternative even in the short term.
Gyngell and TV presenter wife Leila moved to Byron Bay after he quit the TV landscape but friends say they are reconsidering their home base as they begin evaluating school options for children Ted, now seven, and Gwendolen, almost six.
Yet despite the threatened coup, Marks put rumbling dissent — and month-on-month declining revenue — aside on Wednesday to treat his attentive executive assistant to a picnic in a Sydney park.
Marks and his EA Jane Routledge stretched out in the sun at a Clifton Gardens park, laughing easily during a long, languid lunch.
The newly separated media executive lay down on the grass and relaxed during their first public sighting since reports of Marks’s growing reliance on his EA first leaked from inside the Nine bunker six months ago.
Dressed casually in jeans, runners and polo shirt and carrying fish and chips from nearby Balmoral Beach takeaway Bottom of the Harbour, Marks arrived on foot about 2pm for the lunch with mother-of-two Routledge.
According to TV sources, the blonde, who has a reputation for being hyper protective of her boss when the pair are ensconced in Nine’s Willoughby office, has been accompanying Marks on out-of-office expeditions since January 2019 when the pair were sighted together at an Australian Open reception in Melbourne.
In November Marks confirmed he had separated from his wife of more than two decades, Gayle, mother of his four children.
“This is a private family matter and a painful time for us all. Please respect our privacy and in particular that of our children,” he told this newspaper.
A Nine spokeswoman maintained that despite the separation, Marks continued to live in the family home in Artarmon with his wife and younger children, the youngest of whom is believed to be about 13, and asked for the report to be held over to give the couple time to tell their family.
Marks has emphatically denied being in a relationship with his EA. Soon after, Marks quit the family home and moved into a rental house in nearby Mosman.
The CEO, whose remuneration in the year to June 2019 was $3.2 million and who owns $3.2 million in Nine shares at the current $1.40 market price (up a bolshie $1.2 million from $1.9 million following his NRL-related advice to the ASX on March 30 when Nine shares were trading at 86c), has spent recent months selling off family assets including a luxury retreat near Berry which sold in February for over $4 million.
Two weeks ago, on April 21, he handed over 216,216 Nine shares — valued at $250,800 — to his estranged wife Gayle, a lawyer, as part of the couple’s divorce.
Routledge, in the meantime, has quit the family home she previously shared with husband Kit and two daughters in Frenchs Forest.
British migrant Routledge joined Nine in November 2015, the same month Marks started in the CEO role, after quitting her job at Warner Bros Australia to work for Marks, a grandson of high-end Sydney jeweller Percy Marks, and before 2015 the boss of TV distribution company Southern Star Group.
A Nine spokeswoman said the pair were on a working lunch. It was a nice day and they had fish and chips in the park, the spokeswoman said.
Tied to the loss of confidence by some in Marks – on whose watch a 60 Minutes crew had to be rescued from a jail in Beirut in 2016, the Today show’s ratings have collapsed and Nine’s digital strategy has changed and changed again – is the loss of confidence in Nine chairman Peter Costello, former federal treasurer and Liberal MP.
Costello outraged journalists within Nine’s merged “always independent” Fairfax ranks last year by supporting a $10,000-a-head Liberal Party fundraiser at Nine HQ.
His support of 2GB broadcaster Alan Jones despite the collapse of revenue in Nine’s newly acquired radio division, had also caused deep division within Nine’s executive.
Veteran media war dog Nick Falloon, currently Nine’s deputy chairman and a former Nine CFO, is favoured to replace Costello.
As chairman of Fairfax Media, Falloon was one of the architects of the 2018 $4 billion Nine-Fairfax merger and is one of the most seasoned players in the current media landscape.
Having gambled against the early recovery of Nine’s long-time broadcast partner the NRL in March when Marks informed the ASX Nine stood to make $130 million in savings with the COVID-19 cancellation of NRL games, the Nine CEO told a Macquarie investor conference on Tuesday the media company had “agreed to nothing this year” concerning NRL broadcast rights.
The advice was a slap in the face to the NRL which for three decades has bolstered Nine’s bottom line with its rugby league State of Origin series, traditionally three of the top 10 highest rating TV events of the free-to-air calendar year.
Insiders say “Hollywood Hugh’s” decision to put the NRL on notice has dumbfounded Nine stalwarts coming, as it does, just two years after Marks raised eyebrows during broadcast rights negotiations with Cricket Australia.
Nine lost the cricket rights when it was outmanoeuvred by Seven and Fox Sports, bringing to an abrupt end Nine’s 40-year history with a game that has long been part of the broadcaster’s DNA – something media magnate Kerry Packer was prepared to risk bankruptcy to acquire for his Nine Network.