3AW broadcaster Jacqui Felgate continues with 11 lucrative sponsorship deals despite ACMA investigation and falling ratings

Melbourne radio presenter Jacqui Felgate has a lucrative deal to spruik the Grand Prix and she had a few Dorothy Dixers when she recently interviewed the event’s boss.

3AW broadcaster Jacqui Felgate has 11 paid sponsorship deals.

Melbourne’s 3AW former food reviewer turned drive host Jacqui Felgate, who divides her time between her on-air duties and spruiking events and products via her Instagram page, continues to plug her endless stream of endorsements.

Felgate’s latest paid gig is with the Grand Prix Corporation, where she’s been signed up to do event appearances, social media plugs and plenty of PR, which has all been approved by Nine Radio’s managing director, Tom Malone.

Felgate told listeners last week in an on-air segment about the Grand Prix that she absolutely loves the annual event in Melbourne and isn’t afraid to say so, even if she is getting paid to do it.

“I’m an ambassador this year so I unashamedly love it, as does my seven-year-old daughter, Georgia,” she boasted.

And don’t we know it. Felgate posted numerous photos of herself on Instagram last month nestled alongside a dark blue Hot Rod at the Albert Park track, telling her followers in a paid post: “It’s going to be an incredible four days of motorsport, glamour, entertainment and fun.”

But Felgate’s glowing appraisals of the F1 didn’t stop there. She told listeners on Monday that the F1 has “taken off in the last few years” and “a lot more women are interested in F1”, before asking callers to respond to her hard-hitting question: “Is this your first time to the Albert Park circuit and are you going?”

Felgate then interviewed Grand Prix CEO Travis Auld about a range of things, from ticket sales to the Aussies competing and the event costs, before hitting him with a Dorothy Dixer: “If you’re not a Formula One fan and you’re listening today, can you convince the listeners why it is worth it to the Victorian economy?”

But Sky News Australia host and Herald Sun columnist Steve Price certainly isn’t one to agree. He wrote late year that the entire event should be dumped because Victorian taxpayers can no longer afford it, as it cost them more than $100m in 2022.

Sky News Australia presenter and Herald Sun columnist Steve Price.

Felgate concluded her friendly interview with Auld by again asking callers another tough question: “Are you going to the Formula One (and) why is it so popular?”

Diary asked Nine if Felgate’s paid deal with the Grand Prix is appropriate given her role as a drive host but was offered no comment.

To date she has 11 paid partnerships while drive host, including with BMW, Chadstone Shopping Centre, Chemist Warehouse, Racing Victoria and Smile Solutions.

Felgate became embroiled in a sponsorships saga after The Australian revealed last year she had 15 lucrative deals that were not disclosed by the station, and she even spruiked on air a BMW electric car she was driving around in without telling listeners she was in a commercial partnership with the German car company.

Commercial deals across 2GB, 6PR, 4BC and 3AW remain the subject of an investigation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority after numerous hosts, including 2GB’s Ben Fordham and 4BC’s Sofie Formica, held paid partnerships that were not disclosed under ACMA rules on the station’s website.

Felgate had a horror first ratings result last week since taking over from Tom Elliott in drive, recording the lowest results for the 3AW in more than a decade.

She lost 66,000 listeners and the program fell from second to equal fourth alongside Triple M and smoothfm.

Wick’s successor

Darren Wick’s resignation became a hot topic of conversation on Friday night at the Quill Awards, hosted by Nine’s Melbourne news presenters, Alicia Loxley and Tom Steinfort (who unsurprisingly made no acknowledgment of it on stage).

Several Nine heavyweights, including Nine’s Melbourne director of news, Hugh Nailon, and weekend newsreader Peter Hitchener, wereamong those present.

Nine Melbourne's director of news, Hugh Nailon.

One insider told Diary it will be interesting to see who prevails from within the “House of Wick”, whose occupants include bosses running Nine’s capital city newsrooms across the country, put there by their now departed boss.

Names being bandied around include Nine Sydney news director Simon Hobbs – some say the most likely candidate if Nine goes for an internal pick – Nine Brisbane news boss Amanda Paterson or Melbourne’s Nailon.

To have the top news job vacant for weeks on end isn’t ideal for the network, particularly when its national audiences for the 6pm news and breakfast program Today have remained well behind rival Seven this year.

Wicks burns out

Nine Entertainment news boss Darren Wick’s sudden departure has left more questions than answers.

The official line is that the polarising newsroom figure is “tired” and, after a few long walks on the beach in recent weeks, decided to pull the pin on his 29-year career at the network.

While rumours of his looming departure had been swirling throughout Nine’s newsrooms for weeks, Diary has been told staff were shocked by the timing of his farewell email, which was sent at 6.36pm on a Friday – traditionally, the deadest of dead news zones in media land, as Wick well knows.

The night-time news bulletins have already aired, newspaper deadlines have (mostly) passed, and, on this night at least, most of the Melbourne news media was attending the annual journalism awards, the Quill Awards.

Are we being a bit cynical, here? Maybe, maybe not.

Since the beginning of the month, Diary has been asking Nine about Wick’s extended absence from the newsroom but no on-the-record explanation was ever given by the media company’s communications team.

We got vague briefings on “background” that there was absolutely nothing to see here. Any suggestion that “Wickie” was leaving Nine was all unsourced scuttlebutt, we were told.

But when the boss of the most-watched TV newsrooms in the country goes walkabout for weeks on end, and his staff have no clue when – or if – he’s coming back, we reckon that’s an intriguing media story.

Diary recently reported Wick had scrubbed all traces of photos shared on his Instagram account, @wickied9, and hadn’t been seen at Nine’s North Sydney offices for weeks.

As late as Friday morning – seven hours before he announced his resignation – Nine’s comms personnel again told Diary there was “nothing to add to what we have said”; that is, there had been no discussions within the company about Wick leaving Nine.

If we take them at their word, Wick, who had been away for about two months at a critical time of the year for commercial news media, decided to suddenly throw it all in on a Friday afternoon, without any significant talks with Nine management.

As one Nine insider tells us, the whole saga was strange.

“So, the guy has been there forever and says he’s tired and then leaves the whole company? No parachute into somewhere else (at Nine)? Just gone. Bizarre. Totally weird.”

In his farewell email, Wick said he would be taking a “very long break” but did not elaborate on what he would do next.

Depending on who you talk to inside Nine, Wick was either a visionary, an unlikely captain of the toughest TV newsrooms in the country, or a tough boss who sometimes “played favourites”.

He was described by some as a man who worked 24/7, and sometimes burned the candle at both ends – in 2021 he was sentenced for high-range drink-driving after recording a blood-alcohol reading of 0.227 after a work get-together.

But whatever the truth about his departure, Wick’s 13 years running Nine news and current affairs is no small achievement. 

Elliott v ABC

The big surprise of last week’s first radio ratings survey of 2024 was the performance of 3AW mornings host Tom Elliott. Having inherited the timeslot from Melbourne talkback king Neil Mitchell at the beginning of the year, Elliott has managed to build on Mitchell’s audience share, with his combative style obviously resonating with listeners.

Elliott loves a good media scrap, and last Wednesday he hit out at partisan, Greens-loving journalists from the ABC.

The 3AW host became wound up by talkback caller “Rob”, who phoned Elliott’s talkback line to complain about ABC 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson’s fiery interview with opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien the previous night.

Ferguson had cut O’Brien off less than 30 seconds into Tuesday’s one-on-one live interview about nuclear energy, even admitting herself it was early on in the piece to interrupt him after querying how many nuclear power stations the Coalition would build and how long it would take.

“I’m just going to stop you, I know it’s jumping in very quickly, but forgive me because we’ve spoken to a lot of experts,” Ferguson told O’Brien.

But the ABC presenter’s style didn’t wash with old mate “Rob”, nor with Elliott.

Rob said: “It was supposed to be a discussion about uranium … and it was the most aggressive, bullying and interjecting interview I’ve ever heard, it was just a total waste of time.

“The shadow minister couldn’t put a sentence together without having himself cut off by Sarah and it was just a total shutdown of the whole thing, and I’m just wondering why the hell they had him on?”

3AW broadcaster Tom Elliott and ABC 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson.

That was more than enough for Elliott to work with.

“That is the ABC for you, the ABC is very relaxed with Labor government people, it absolutely loves the Greens and thinks whatever comes out of their mouths just has to be listened to in silence,” Elliott started.

“When they get a Coalition spokesperson on … they argue, they are not journalists, they pretend that they are, they have their point of view and they don’t like anybody disagreeing with them.

“If someone at the ABC is wondering why nobody bothers watching you, or not many people do on TV or radio anymore, that’s part of the reason.”

Elliott’s comment about the ABC’s shrinking audience was particularly prescient – the very next morning, the public broadcaster’s dramatic audience slump was laid bare with the release of the first radio ratings survey of the year.

The official GfK poll showed the ABC lost audience share in every capital city market in the first two months of the year.

As for Elliott, he recorded a 16.8 per cent audience share in the competitive mornings timeslot, a 0.5-percentage-point rise on the final survey for Neil Mitchell, who hung up his microphone in December.

Elliott trounced long-time on-air ABC rival Raf Epstein, who registered an audience share of just 7 per cent in the Melbourne’s mornings slot.

  

Cheers, Aunty

How many ABC radio execs does it take to go to Munich and talk shop? Three, apparently.

Last week, a trio of hand-picked radio boffins from ABC travelled to the beer capital of the world to chat about the wireless, with like-minded people from around the globe.

Sounds fun.

But the timing wasn’t great, coinciding as the conference did with the release of the first official radio ratings survey of the year.

As mentioned above, the national broadcaster didn’t exactly set the radio world on fire, shedding listeners in every capital city market.

As one ABC Radio insider pointed out, the expense of sending three staffers to Munich could have been much better invested on attracting another much needed producer.

Rude Rabbitoh

NRL superstar Latrell Mitchell lit up the airwaves with f-bombs in his on-field post-match interview on Thursday night, following South Sydney’s loss to the Brisbane Broncos.

Speaking to Triple M reporter Ben Dobbin, the Rabbitohs fullback said five very naughty words in a 30-second interview, before the host of the broadcast, commentator Dan Ginnane, put a stop to it, in the way that a school bus driver might tell a bunch of kids to watch their potty mouths. “All right, all right, ay, ay, ay, thank you, Latrell.”

Triple M radio presenter Dan Ginnane.

Ginnane later told The Daily Telegraph: “You can let one or two profanities go but this was too much.

“We had to cut it. It was very odd and it wasn’t doing Latrell any favours. Funny thing, I don’t think we got one complaint about it.”

But Diary wonders what the hell happened to the dump button? Did the Triple M team forget to press the relevant knob in the studio? A spokesperson for Southern Cross Australia, owner of Triple M, tried to explain.

“All sporting matches are broadcast without profanity delay due to the live nature of the event. The interview was concluded as soon as possible.

“Triple M apologised during its NRL broadcast at the time and we apologise to our listeners for any offence taken due to some of the language used in this live environment.”

Which is a bit odd. If there’s a seven-second delay on, say, ABC Classic FM, where the airing of a swear word is likely to be an annual event, maybe it’s time for post-match footy interviews to follow the seven-second delay model?

The Latrell Rule, perhaps.

Nick Tabakoff is on leave