Nine’s return on McCabe’s passion project still in the future

The former digital boss is now an ‘old messiah’ says one Nine veteran

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Helen McCabe collects powerful mentors like most corporate women collect Birkins or directorships, and gratefully acknowledges each whenever the opportunity arises.

“John Hartigan was really powerful in helping me make the decision,” she said of the former News Corp boss who, a decade ago, encouraged McCabe to quit News (while he was chairman/chief executive) and move to Bauer Media as editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly in 2009.

“Angelos Frangopolous … didn’t quite get (my decision to move from The Sunday Telegraph into women’s magazines) but … soon did,” she told the same online publication, intheblack.com, identifying the then Sky News CEO as a member of her cheer squad.

Future Women founder Helen McCabe. Picture: John Feder

“I learnt about fearlessness from Chris Mitchell, the editor-in-chief of The Australian,” she added, nominating the newspaper veteran as a mentor.

Ex-CEO of Nine Entertainment David Gyngell, the executive who recruited McCabe to the Women’s Weekly, was regularly singled out for high praise.

He was, after all, “an alpha male” and a “massive breath of fresh air”, or so she informed The Australian in 2011.

But the greatest praise she might wish she’d saved for Hugh Marks, the man who replaced Gyngell at the helm of Nine in 2015 and came calling with a job offer for McCabe in 2016 after she left The Australian Women’s Weekly in January after the magazine’s circulation figures plummeted.

Former News Corp boss John Hartigan.

Former Nine CEO David Gyngell.

In July 2016 Marks announced McCabe’s appointment as head of Nine’s lifestyle division, overseeing websites including 9Honey, 9Coach and 9Kitchen and the rebranded nine.com.au — a role demanding an understanding of digital technology, the digital environment and its audience.

Marks waxed lyrical about McCabe’s potential in a statement announcing her appointment: “Helen has a strong creative vision, a valuable understanding of the content that drives audience engagement and very longstanding commercial relationships.”

He might have also added she possessed a breathtaking flair for self-promotion. Nine insiders last week hypothesised such self-belief had not been in evidence at the TV company since game show host Eddie McGuire seized the role of Nine CEO in 2006, only to relinquish it a year later following a maelstrom of negative headlines.

Former editor-in-chief of The Australian Chris Mitchell.

Former Sky CEO Angelos Frangopolous.

There was no mention in the appointment statement of Marks sinking an estimated $2 million into Future Women, a new premium online subscription platform McCabe pitched him during her job interview. It was a concept McCabe had been finetuning since her days at The Australian Women’s Weekly where an earlier iteration was dubbed Women Of The Future.

By 2017 Marks was talking up the platform aimed at professional women aged 25-54 that aimed to harness the talents of Nine’s female stars, for a fee.

In her new role at Nine, McCabe was to answer to Nine’s chief digital and marketing officer, Alex Parsons.

This she did — for a year.

In September 2017, Parsons — who had been managing director of Ninemsn and charged with the task of separating Nine Digital from the Microsoft joint venture and launching the Nine’s digital platforms — quit.

McCabe soon assumed the role of digital content director, effectively replacing Parsons.

“Helen and her team have done a stellar job building out 9Honey in less than a year to have more than 1.9m Australians reading it each month,” Mumbrella reported Marks telling staff in an internal email, explaining McCabe’s promotion.

Insiders say there had been tensions between Parsons and McCabe over the future direction of 9Honey, which, as Parsons pointed out in his exit statement, he had launched — in 2015 — along with 9Now.

Nine Entertainment CEO Hugh Marks.

McCabe would later claim, in an internal email to staff, to have “launched (9Honey) in November 2016”.

By August 2018, two years after McCabe started at Nine, Nielsen data would show 9Honey’s unique online audience had grown to 2.5 million but was still well behind News Corp’s lifestyle site, Whimn, with 3.5 million, news.com.au’s Lifestyle vertical, also 3.5 million and Mamamia.com claiming an audience of four million-plus.

Finally, in July 2018, McCabe’s passion project, futurewomen.com — with ex-Kidspot.com.au columnist Jamila Rizvi at the helm — was launched.

Billed confoundingly as a “premium content-led destination aimed at professional women through events and workshops, an on-platform community and quality journalism” it included plans for an “FW Academy”, a vehicle offering consultants to businesses wanting to address subjects such as diversity, leadership and bias with “business leaders, change makers and marketing and HR professionals”.

Critics of Future Women said McCabe’s idea was largely to emulate the hugely successful Business Chicks women’s networking model but the offering, when it finally came — and at a cost of somewhere between $7 a month and $3000 a year — had largely arrived too late to capitalise on the #metoo Zeitgeist.

By the time Nine merged with Fairfax in December, McCabe was missing from Marks’ leadership team as Nine’s digital plans expanded in scope with the CEO under new pressure to give Fairfax properties such as Domain and its newspaper brands greater attention.

Talk soon swirled that she was out of favour.

In favour, now, was Chris Janz, the managing director of Fairfax’s metro publishing operations
who was appointed Nine’s managing director of publishing — overseeing digital and McCabe — following the merger.

“She’s no longer the new messiah,” said one Nine veteran last week. “She’s the old messiah — and the halls (at Nine) are now filled to overflowing with new ones.”

In January, Parsons returned to the business to sell Fairfax’s media assets.

Then in February, the much-hyped Future Women was missing from Marks’ financial results statement: “(It’s a) small component of what is a very large business now,” he said.

In March came news 9Honey’s unique browsers had lifted to 3.8 million ahead of Whimn, largely on the back
of content spun-off from Nine’s runaway success, Married At First Sight.

The lift came too late for McCabe who in May was replaced as Nine’s digital content director by her deputy, Kerri Elstub — a “hard worker” with a production background at A Current Affair.

McCabe is now putting her energies exclusively into Future Women, with Nine CEO Marks no doubt hoping that by keeping her focus there he may one day recoup his seven-figure investment in the concept — although with prices for some memberships dropping from $7 to $1-a-month last month that could take a while.

@InSharprelief