Newsrooms are interesting places at even the most boring of times. But few could be more colourful than on the rare event when The Australian Financial Review’s star columnist Joe Aston and senior correspondent Aaron Patrick were in the same fourth-floor newsroom at Nine’s new North Sydney headquarters last week.
As Diary revealed late last year, there’s bad blood between the pair that goes back to a now infamous text message sent by Patrick to Aston’s courtroom adversary, former Blue Sky Alternative Investments director Elaine Stead in December 2019, in which he told her of his colleague: “Success is the best form of revenge.”
So imagine the surprise of virtually the entire AFR newsroom when Patrick bowled up to Aston’s desk and stuck out his hand to greet the Rear Window columnist like a long-lost friend. We’re told Patrick’s motivation was to clear the air with his colleague.
Did the gesture go down well? You be the judge.
Diary is reliably informed that the dialogue between the pair, who we’re told were both on the phone at the time, went something like this.
Patrick: “I’d just like to shake your hand.”
Aston: “I’m on the phone.”
Patrick: “Why don’t we shake hands anyway?”
Aston: “I’m not going to shake your hand, you’re a f---wit.”
Patrick (loudly): “What did I ever do to you?”
A partial answer to that last question may lie in the December 2019 text that Patrick sent to Stead. “Hi Elaine. We haven’t met, but we have something in common: we’ve both been trolled by a certain AFR columnist.”
The columnist Patrick was referring to, of course, was Aston.
Patrick went on: “If you ever have any stories, or article ideas, you wold (sic) like to share, I’m all ears. Success is the best form of revenge. Cheers, Aaron Patrick.”
Judging by that text and now last week’s encounter, Diary is pretty sure a beautiful friendship between Aston and Patrick isn’t imminent.
Albo deals with leadership pandemic
Media coverage of Labor’s alleged leadership troubles are about as contagious as COVID-19 at the moment.
Diary has learnt that during January, stories about Anthony “Albo” Albanese’s Labor leadership woes reached new highs.
In research done for Diary by Streem, the media monitoring group conducted an analysis of the word “Albanese” appearing within ten words of “leadership”.
The results were telling: in the three months since Joel Fitzgibbon shocked colleagues by resigning from the Labor frontbench, stories about Albo’s leadership dramas have risen exponentially.
In the three months before Fitzgibbon’s move, media mentions involving Albo’s leadership averaged a mere 55 distinct items per month in metropolitan TV, print, radio and online media across the country.
But in the three months after Fitzgibbon’s move, the mentions spiked, culminating in 418 references to Albo’s leadership problems during January. That’s almost ten times the number the mentions of “Albanese” and “leadership” in October, the month before Fitzgibbon made his move.
So if the aim of Fitzgibbon was to start a media leadership pandemic for Albo, he succeeded brilliantly.
Dan TV: After Dark
Forget last week’s keenly-awaited debut of Seven’s putt-putt golf show Holey Moley, or even the return of Nine’s Married At First Sight.
The TV show that everyone in Melbourne has been talking about is the unexpected sequel that nobody asked for: the dramatic return of 2020’s breakout daytime television hit, “Dan TV”, following yet another quarantine hotel COVID-19 outbreak.
That’s right folks, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is back once more as a rugged TV star. Only this time, unlike last year’s marathon unbroken run of 120 daily appearances of him fronting the cameras at around 11am each day during Melbourne’s four-month lockdown, Dan’s newest incarnation as a programming star last week was as a tonight show host.
Diary is dubbing it: “Dan TV: After Dark.” At about 10.30pm last Wednesday, most of the major networks in Melbourne broke into the most competitive ratings week of the year so far to feature Chairman Dan’s return to live TV.
It was shades of the one-time late-night tonight show stalwart, the Don Lane Show. And just as Don used to have Bert Newton as his trusty co-star, Dan had his own roster of faithful “second bananas” on Wednesday’s show.
Not every network got their introductions right, of course: as is now common knowledge, ABC presenter Bev O’Connor made the Freudian slip of introducing the Premier as “Dan Murphy”.
And what a line-up Dan TV: After Dark featured. His guest of honour was, of course, Victorian chief health officer Brett “Heart-Throb” Sutton, but there was also Health Minister Martin “What happened to Jenny Mikakos?” Foley, Police Minister Lisa Neville and of course, the dramatically-titled “COVID-19 testing commander” of Victoria, Jeroen Weimar.
No word yet on whether Dan’s North Face jacket will make a comeback — but the prospects look promising. Dan has indicated he’s ready to front up daily until the latest scare is over.
New job vacancies in Danistan
While last year was a rough year in the media world, at least there’s one mogul who’s still hiring.
Noted TV megastar Dan Andrews has just put out an ad on LinkedIn looking for a multitude of senior media advisers in the Office of the Premier in Victoria.
But Andrews and his new director of media, Sabina Husic — until recently Anthony Albanese’s deputy chief of staff — haven’t been doing much of a sell job on their exciting new opportunities.
Husic posted to LinkedIn on the weekend: “Sadly, it’s not a role in which you will have a lot of time to get on the beers.” Andrews’ ad was also equally downbeat, noting, Jeremiah-like, that working with him “regularly involves out of hours work — particularly early in the morning and on weekend”.
Come on, Dan, you’re a TV star and mega-producer — you can make it sound more glamorous than that.
How about we give your pitch the Diary treatment?
“Key skills: Must possess a track record in handling the significant egos and demands of diverse and experienced ‘TV talent’. Script writing essential and ability to spin large numbers and shenanigans also will ensure application is considered. Experience in a North Face retail store desired, but not essential.
“Candidate would ideally have experience running high-rating daytime TV panel shows for a network channel.
“Please send resumes with TV show reels to Dan Andrews, c/- 1 Treasury Place, Melbourne, Victoria.”
There you go Dan — that should get the CVs flooding in.
Fletcher gives Google the Bing
As the argy bargy continues about Google’s future in Australia — and in particular, local CEO Mel Silva’s threat to “stop making Google Search available in Australia” — the government is forcefully letting the search giant know it has other options.
Diary has obtained a leaked copy of a new video to be released on Tuesday by Communications Minister Paul Fletcher about online safety — featuring Fletcher doing his own searches on the internet.
And guess which search engine Fletcher chose to use in the video? Why, Microsoft Bing, of course.
That’s the very company that PM Scott Morrison has been holding talks with in recent days about filling the void if Google abandons search in Australia.
Bing may currently only have a 4 per cent market share in Australia, but Fletcher’s video clearly shows him searching for the government’s eSafety website on Bing, not Google. The message? Bing could become the new Google in Australia.
Over the weekend, Fletcher rubbed salt into the wound by telling Sky he’d been using Bing and DuckDuckGo for six months.
Like the minister, we’ve also had no choice but to resort to alternative search options in recent days. That’s after your columnist discovered he was included among the 1 per cent of Google’s users whose access to news content is now almost non-existent as part of the search giant’s weird “experiment”.
Annastacia’s lifeline to Survivor
The saga of just trying to make a series of Ten’s Survivor continues.
You’ll remember that right at the time of the first shutdown of the national borders nearly a year ago, Ten was forced to urgently recall the show’s crew from Fiji and cancel the series.
A year on, and Diary hears that for 2021, it looks like being: “Goodbye Fiji, hello North Queensland.”
Hot on the heels of Annastacia Palaszczuk’s urgent plea to help out the state’s tropical north after a dive in domestic and international tourism following the state’s lockdowns, it seems Survivor could heed the call.
We’re told that if the Queensland government offers sufficient sweeteners to make it worth the show’s while, the Jonathan LaPaglia-hosted Survivor may be persuaded to scout out a challengingly rugged island somewhere in the Rockhampton to Cairns corridor. That should generate a few jobs, Annastacia!
We’re told Ten wants production on the new series to start around April.
Queensland is well-known to have an “attraction fund”, solely devoted to attracting productions to the state. The state has a new movie in pre-production, Thirteen Lives, with Hollywood director Ron Howard already on the Gold Coast. That follows stars like Tom Hanks being based in Queensland for extended periods in recent months for big budget movies, so it seems Annastacia has the capacity to open the chequebook for the “right” productions. Survivor looks like being one of them.
‘Death threats’: Age editor snaps
Who would have thought a story about a worker visiting a kebab store and Kmart could cause such dramas?
The Age editor Gay Alcorn has stormed off Twitter after she revealed to Diary the paper received “death threats” over its much-debated feature about a Melbourne COVID-19 quarantine worker’s weekend moves.
The story traced every after-hours footstep of the COVID-positive quarantine hotel worker through Spencer Street institution Kebab Kingz (even publishing its “4.5 star” reviews on Google), Kmart, Bunnings and other locations.
But after Alcorn tweeted out the story on Thursday, along with a tongue-in-cheek message about the worker’s “busy” social schedule, Twitter erupted into furious criticism and in many cases, abuse.
Some of the milder tweets accused The Age of both “snobbery” towards the worker, and of blaming him for the outbreak. One that we can print came from ABC News Breakfast host Michael Rowland, who asked: “What are you trying to get at with this story?”. Meanwhile, author and former Age columnist Marieke Hardy sarcastically tweeted: “Fantastic. Great move. Well done Gay.”
After other much less printable messages, Alcorn — in two late-night tweets the same day — finally had enough. She dramatically announced her break-up with Twitter: “(I) am out of here.”
Speaking to Diary on Sunday, Alcorn said her Twitter exit was not an over-reaction, but a response to the fact that the author of the controversial story, Tom Cowie, had received death threats.
“People don’t have to like an article,” she tells us. “They can say it was awful or lacked nuance or could have been done better. But the frenzied and increasingly enraged Twitter reaction was totally disproportionate, ending with vile private messages threatening violence against a reporter, threats we take seriously.”
Alcorn says she had tried since becoming The Age’s editor last year to embrace Twitter, and adopted a philosophy that “we must engage with our audiences and think deeply” about criticism.
“But in the past few years, Twitter has become so abusive and furious it is all but impossible to have those conversations. The usual response that: ‘It’s only a few people, most Twitter users are great’, no longer feels true.
“People have told me that they wanted to respond to the fury but were too nervous to do so for fear of being abused themselves.”
Alcorn is now turning to “ways to speak with our readers and subscribers” that don’t involve Twitter.
“They won’t always be comfortable conversations, but hopefully they won’t end with death threats,” she says.
The fine print on TV game shows
With troubled star Andrew O’Keefe’s much-publicised woes in his personal life, Seven is said to have been weighing up whether to ditch several months of episodes of The Chase recorded while he was still under contract to the network.
And if you happen to have been a successful contestant who has won money on one of those un-aired episodes of The Chase, that would make you nervous.
That’s because Diary understands that for many years, there has been an established loophole for major commercial networks that has been written into the standard contracts of game show contestants.
The contract fine print warns contestants if their episode doesn’t go to air, networks aren’t obligated to award either prizes or prizemoney that are supposedly “won” on the show.
There may be no obligation on the part of networks because of the fine print of contracts. But in some Australian cases in the past, such as when The Price is Right didn’t air all episodes, media pressure has ultimately resulted in networks choosing to honour the prizes won by contestants.
So if not all Andrew O’Keefe-hosted episodes of The Chase go to air, it will be fascinating to see if Seven decides to pay out all prizes anyway.
Tonagh quits ABC board early
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland and an independent panel will now need to find a replacement for the ABC’s deputy chairman just months out from a federal election.
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