ABC boss David Anderson candidly told The Australian back in October: “We’re facing an ABC of the future that has less people.”
But how many “less people” will the ABC have?
Diary can today reveal that the corporate toe cutters from management consulting firm LEK have been helping the ABC with its budgeting dilemmas. And the strong mail is that they have already been talking numbers on how many staff the ABC needs to cut to meet its budget.
The latest word to Diary suggests that a redundancy round of upwards of 120 people is being considered internally, after LEK, an ABC favourite, was asked to find solutions to Aunty’s $84m budget shortfall. LEK is already said to have influenced decisions such as the ABC’s ditching of its radio coverage of the Tokyo Olympics.
But no ABC staff will be losing their jobs for now. Diary has been told that any redundancy program will not take place until next year.
Aunty’s senior management wouldn’t play Christmas Grinch by implementing a round of redundancies in December. So staff shouldn’t expect any announcements on numbers of job cuts until March at the earliest, after Anderson has outlined a five-year plan for the ABC. That will give time to put in place a voluntary redundancy program, rather than the “hunger games” cherry-picking process that has characterised previous ABC redundancy rounds.
An ABC spokesman confirmed on Friday that LEK was “still doing some work for us for the next couple of weeks”. The spokesman denied LEK was “embedded” at the ABC, but was working “on a temporary basis to assist our own project management team as they work to identify the savings required to meet our budget shortfall”.
Regrettably, it’s usually job cuts that are the lowest-hanging fruit when management consultants are asked to find “savings”. LEK would be only too aware that half of the ABC’s $1bn-a-year budget is made up of staff costs.
Boss gets chop after Jones email
Last Tuesday Macquarie Media’s long-serving national sales director Mark Noakes put out an unprecedented note to 2GB sales staff. The subject was star broadcaster Alan Jones.
The message in Noakes’s note — exclusively obtained by Diary — was remarkable, given it concerned the holidays of the nation’s highest-paid broadcaster.
In essence, it could be summarised as: “Let’s use Alan Jones’s summer holidays to make some money!”
Noakes’s leaked email referenced 2GB’s recent advertiser boycott.
“From this Thursday Steve Price will be hosting Breakfast (along with John Stanley over Christmas) for the remainder of the year and over January. Can we reapproach clients who have opted to not advertise in breakfast as a matter of urgency. Many thanks. PS: We are thinking about a ‘back to breakfast’ pack.”
A back to breakfast pack! But exactly 24 hours after that note was sent out, Noakes was made redundant by Macquarie, which told staff he had left “with our best wishes and thanks”.
The moral of the story?
If you’re going to knock your network’s biggest-name broadcaster, maybe don’t do it in writing.
Welcome to London
Sky News’s long term ex-boss, Angelos Frangopoulos, was caught up in the chaos surrounding Friday’s terror attack in London, Diary can reveal.
Frangopoulos, who only last year decamped to Abu Dhabi to run Sky News Arabia, had just been telling friends his latest personal update: that he’s mysteriously moving from the UAE to Britain next year.
But not even a seasoned news professional like Frangopoulos would have expected to become the story himself in his new adopted home.
Frangopoulos was forced to shelter in the London Bridge Fitness First gym as Friday’s events unfolded. He told friends on Facebook: “It’s quite surreal when you’re having a coffee and the police burst in and say: ‘I need your attention — follow me and run.’ ”
He lauded Coral, the gym’s manager: “She is a hero. While we were all running (as instructed by the Met Police) she stood in the street directing us to shelter in the Fitness First she manages, just as London Bridge was in the midst of mayhem.”
Meanwhile, Frangopoulos has confirmed his London move. “Life‘s an adventure … We’ve had an amazing time in Abu Dhabi. It’s a city that will always have a place in our hearts.”
He’ll have “more news“ in coming weeks: “Post Brexit Surrey, here we come!”
Seven’s POO hits the fan
What’s in a name?
Plate of Origin, Seven’s new star vehicle set up for its marquee ex-MasterChef signings, Matt Preston and Gary Mehigan, is having a difficult birth — mainly because of its troubled title.
As Diary revealed a few weeks back, Seven insiders have quickly discovered to their embarrassment that the program’s acronym spells POO — about the least tasty moniker for a food show you can get.
Since we pointed this out to Seven’s chief revenue officer Kurt “Alert” Burnette on Derby Day last month, executives have gone to great lengths to ban the POO moniker at Seven.
There have even been directives at the highest levels of Evan Wilkes’s unscripted content division at Seven to give POO, which is due to start filming in February, another abbreviation. Staff have been beseeched not to call the show POO, but “Plate”.
But despite their best efforts, the POO has stuck and become a standing joke for giggling staff members. This has led to yet another concerted effort among Seven’s POO Police in recent days to mandate any other working title among staff.
Their latest effort? “PlateOO”. Seriously, you couldn’t make this stuff up.
TA salty on Court
Tennis Australia’s PR flacks got pretty salty with Diary when we pestered them last week about dragging their feet on releasing a media plan to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Margaret Court’s grand slam.
What annoyed TA was our suggestion that they may have made a bigger media splash a year ago about Rod Laver’s 1969 grand slam than about Court’s 1970 slam.
We pointed out that the start of the 2020 Australian Open was mere weeks away — yet when we called, there was little evidence of any program to celebrate Court.
Well, lo and behold, Diary’s calls seemed to swing TA into action. A press release suddenly dropped in our inbox late in the week to promote “a significant program of events throughout the tournament” to celebrate Court’s achievements.
But clearly because of her vocal opposition to same-sex marriage, a Court celebration remains a fraught issue for Australian tennis.
The same TA release pointedly said Court’s views “do not align with our values of equality, diversity and inclusion”. TA even promoted a new “major diversity and inclusion initiative“, called #Open4All. We’re sure Marg’s going to love it.
MAFS marital bliss
More than a decade ago, two US TV show imports on Seven, Desperate Housewives and Lost, famously ended decades of ratings dominance by Nine.
This time around, it is an Australian “reality” juggernaut that has swung the ratings pendulum back the other way, with Nine winning the ratings year ending last week. The drunken dinner party arguments, cheating narratives and even physical altercations of Nine’s dating show, Married at First Sight, have finally ended Seven’s 12-year run atop the ratings. MAFS’s ratings obliteration of MKR came to define the 2019 ratings power shift.
But with filming of MAFS’s next season now well under way, Diary hears that Nine CEO Hugh Marks has lobbied for a new tone to the show next year. Put simply, it is: “Less scandal, more love.”
Marks has a point. But will Nine really dial down the scandal on MAFS if it means the difference between winning and losing the ratings?
Drought breaker
Alan Jones was in fine form during his tour of drought-affected country towns in recent days.
Jones hit Bourke eight days ago for a scheduled appearance with NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Deputy Premier John Barilaro about the drought. Ever punctual, Jones turned up early at the Port of Bourke pub.
Heading straight to the pub’s pool room and spotting a microphone, Jones played rev-up man for the crowd — whipping them into a frenzy about the drought. As one person present put it: “It was one of his great spiels.”
When Berejiklian and Barilaro arrived, Jones was in full flight, lashing out at a lack of rural funding from the NSW government. “You two are obsessed with surpluses,” he told them.
NSW’s two top pollies became mere bit-part players in Bourke’s unique version of The Alan Jones Show. The pair took the rev-up in good spirit — laughing along in their chosen roles as pantomime villains. And they still appeared on Jones’s 2GB show later in the week.
No Trioli Conversation
The big changes are clocking up among ABC’s radio on-air talent ahead of the formal announcement of Aunty’s entire 2020 local radio line-ups on Thursday.
Since taking over ABC Radio Melbourne’s morning shift, Virginia Trioli has been hosting a Melbourne-only version of The Conversation Hour at 11am each day, a dedicated answer by the city to Richard Fidler’s Conversations that airs around the rest of the country. The Melbourne version of the Conversation Hour is a legacy of Jon Faine’s long era on the morning show.
But Diary can now confirm that Trioli won’t host the show in 2020, with the ABC to formally reveal just that on Thursday.
Intriguingly, her replacement won’t be Fidler either. Diary is told the power of southern parochialism has won out and a separate Melbourne version of The Conversation Hour will stay, featuring other ABC talent.
New host for Bath time
Another big change at ABC radio is the replacement for high-profile broadcaster Chris Bath as ABC Radio Sydney’s evening host.
Diary can now reveal that veteran ABC broadcaster Sarah Macdonald will take the Bath role.
Macdonald’s promotion to the weekday evening shift will be formally unveiled on Thursday.
When that happens, it will create another vacancy at ABC local radio. Macdonald has been the national host of ABC Radio’s late-night Weekend Nightlife, a shift shared with national weekday host Phil Clark.
Meanwhile, Bath’s three-year experiment as a radio broadcaster is at an end. She will now concentrate on her role as Ten’s national weekend newsreader.
The ghost of Red
It was the ghost of Red Symons that saw comedian Sami Shah and Jacinta Parsons axed from the crucial ABC Radio Melbourne breakfast shift, exactly two years after the sacking of Symons himself from the same slot.
Diary hears the show never recovered from Symons’s controversial 2017 departure, after a tumultuous year during which he was at one point forced to issue an on-air apology for comments he made on the show.
Symons had spent 15 high-rating years in the ABC Melbourne breakfast slot before his 2017 departure. As the ratings of Shah and Parsons in 2018-19 will attest, some of Symons’s loyal listeners disappeared after his sacking, with some feeling the former Skyhooks lead guitarist was harshly dealt with.
All of which has been tough on the well-regarded Shah and Parsons. While Symons often rated 12s and 13s, they have mostly rated 9s and 10s.
To rub salt into the wound, Symons now has a fortnightly spot with top-rating Neil Mitchell on rival talk station 3AW.
The Symons factor leaves new Melbourne breakfast host Sammy J plenty of ground to make up when he starts next year.
Expensive night
Seven’s move to send two of its marquee current affairs brands, Sunday Night and Today Tonight, to TV heaven in the past week is down to one factor: money.
Diary hears the axing of the two shows has saved Seven $17m a year: $12m for Sunday Night and $5m for the remaining Adelaide and Perth editions of TT.
At TT, 25 staff have been made redundant. Just 14 have been redeployed into newsrooms.
Of the Sunday Night crew, we hear Melissa Doyle and Angela Cox will stay on with Seven in as-yet undefined news roles, while Matt Doran has moved to Weekend Sunrise.
But most of the show’s remaining talent are leaving Seven — including Gold Walkley award-winning journalist Steve Pennells. Tough industry.
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