Mike Sneesby finally torches Nine career after run as CEO
After 3½ years as Nine Entertainment chief – which followed his reign as boss of Stan – Mike Sneesby has handed in his ID pass at the front desk.
Mike ‘Torch” Sneesby has left the building.
After 3½ years as chief executive of Nine Entertainment – which followed more than six years as boss of the company’s streaming service, Stan – the 50-year-old handed in his ID pass at the front desk of the media giant’s North Sydney compound on Friday, bringing an end to his turbulent tenure at the organisation.
Before he left, Sneesby sent a farewell email to all staff, thanking them for their “commitment to Nine, for the friendships we’ve built, for the achievements we’ve accomplished and for the adventures we’ve shared over the past decade”.
“Notwithstanding the tough advertising market conditions, Nine is in great shape and placed exceptionally well for the future,” Sneesby wrote.
Not everyone would agree with that assessment. The company’s share price has been hovering around the $1.30 mark for the best part of the past month, and since the start of Sneesby’s reign as CEO in April 2021, it’s fallen 53 per cent, from $2.81.
Sneesby’s goodbye note also didn’t reference the unwanted “adventures” of the past six months – namely, the damaging revelations about widespread workplace misconduct across the company’s TV newsrooms, most notably in Sydney under former news boss Darren Wick.
Wick left the company in March with a serious allegation of harassment hanging over his head, with Sneesby reportedly aware of Wick’s misdemeanours.
Sneesby and then Nine chairman Peter Costello drew sharp criticism over the way they handled the Wick matter.
In early June, with Sneesby under immense pressure to keep his job, Costello provided a distraction of sorts when he dropped his shoulder into a journalist from The Australian at Canberra Airport.
Not a good look when your company is under siege over its blokey culture!
Costello’s demise bought Sneesby a bit of time but having already commissioned a review into the company’s workplace culture – the findings of which will be handed to the board at the end of October – it was clear that Sneesby’s presence at the top of the Nine tree was untenable in the long term.
Of course, Sneesby’s infamous decision to accept an offer to carry the Olympic torch on a leg of its relay journey through the suburbs of Paris in the days before the Games in late July – wearing nothing but a grin and a shiny white tracksuit – didn’t exactly boost his popularity rating among staff at Nine, given that his fancy jog coincided with strike action by employees in the company’s publishing wing. Last week, Sneesby attended one last meeting of the Nine board, headed by chair Catherine West, before bidding adieu.
Diary understands that Nine will throw Sneesby a farewell party in a few weeks, once he returns from a family camping trip.
Kim pushes mantra
Attention, young idealists at the ABC: your boss, Kim Williams, can’t stand activist journalists.
How do we know? Because every single time he gives a speech in public, or conducts a media interview, or talks to himself in his sleep, Chairman Kim mentions his frustration at reporters who can’t park their own biases at the front door when they arrive at work.
In the past month alone, Williams has thrice raised this particular bugbear in public, with the most recent mention being at last Wednesday’s annual Lowy Institute Media Lecture in Sydney.
“Many younger members of the journalistic fraternity … many of our younger journalists have a much more activist view of the role of journalism, and they have a much more policy-prosecutorial approach to journalism,” he told the captive audience at the Lowy.
“In the case of the ABC, that is simply not available to those journalists. And not only is it to be discouraged, it is to be ardently opposed. The ABC Act is very clear on this point.”
Earlier this month, when delivering the esteemed John Monash Oration, Williams referenced Marty Baron, creator of the famous investigation team at the Boston Globe.
“Having grown up in a world of ubiquitous social media and identity politics, some of Baron’s younger journalists were starting to regard themselves not as objective reporters but as activists and partisans,” Williams said.
“Tempting as it is to want to take sides, I think all of us in the media and cultural institutions generally must resist.”
And on August 31, The Saturday Paper published an interview with Williams for the benefit of its 100-strong readership that stretches from Sydney’s Darlinghurst to Melbourne’s North Fitzroy, but nowhere in between.
“I think there’s clearly a generational schism between a traditional view of journalism and one which is more given to activist participation in journalism,” Williams said.
“The ABC, of course, has to be guided and informed by its Act. The Act is not a trivial matter. It is, in fact, the law that establishes the ABC, and it is the basis by which we must operate.
“One recognises that there’s a number of young journalists who, in their eagerness to be active participants and contributors to social conversation about public policy and directions in our society, have views that are incompatible with the guardrails and the fundamental settings of a body like the ABC.
“And I don’t know any polite way to accommodate that, because our guardrails and rules are defined.
“They’re explicit and we have a whole set of corporate policies that follow from them.”
So, are Williams’s tirades becoming repetitive? Yes.
Would we bet our last 10 bucks on him mentioning the issue of “activist journalists” in his next public speech? Yes.
Is he right to recognise the problem as one of the biggest challenges facing the ABC? Hell, yeah.
But how to fix it? The ball’s in your court, Kim.
Robbo to hang up boots
Fox Footy’s Mark Robinson looks set to farewell AFL 360 after 14 years at the helm of the popular show.
News Corp’s chief football writer is expected to front the program for the last time on Monday night for the annual post-grand final episode.
Robinson, affectionately known as “Robbo” by most in the industry, co-hosts AFL 360 alongside the highly respected Gerard Whateley.
Talk of Robbo’s impending exit started to spread among footy media types in the days leading up to Saturday’s grand final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
On Sunday, Diary called Robinson to ask if Monday night’s episode would be his last but the football guru wasn’t giving anything away, and declined to comment.
It remains unclear if the veteran journalist and broadcaster will make reference to his expected departure from AFL 360 on Monday night’s show.
The program is Fox Footy’s flagship football analysis show, airing on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays throughout the AFL season, and features the sport’s top players and coaches.
Robinson has led the program since it launched in 2010.
Spies told Diary the program could feature a rotating roster of co-hosts to accompany Whateley in 2025.
Likely candidates include those already at Fox Footy, such as former AFL stars Garry Lyon, Jack Riewoldt and Jordan Lewis.
Lyon is the favourite to play a key role on the program in 2025.
The word is that Robinson may join the channel’s Midweek Tackle program, which is hosted by Herald Sun scribes Jay Clark and Lauren Wood and features many of the paper’s AFL reporters including Jon Ralph, Glenn McFarlane, Josh Barnes and Scott Gullan.
It airs three nights a week, Tuesday to Thursday.
Fox Footy boss Steve Crawley was contacted but declined to comment.
Robinson is one of the AFL’s most prominent journalists and is based at the Herald Sun in Melbourne.
He took over as chief football writer for the News Corp masthead in 2012 following the retirement of legendary football journalist Mike Sheahan.
Eddie goes for Seven
Nine’s Footy Classified host Eddie McGuire got into the spirit of grand final week by bagging Channel 7 over its coverage of the AFL.
McGuire, who was the frontman of Nine’s AFL coverage for several years when that network held the broadcast rights to the sport, told former Geelong star turned 3AW radio host Jimmy Bartel “Channel 7 has finally decided to lean into football a bit”.
Of course context is everything. In the past week, Seven executed an audacious poaching of Nine’s premier on-air footy talent, namely ex-Port star Kane Cornes and Age football columnist and reporter Caroline Wilson.
“I think (ex-Nine Footy Show host and SEN boss) Craig Hutchison is helping them along the way there, which makes another interesting play, whether that’s got an SEN component to it, time will tell,” McGuire told Bartel.
But Eddie didn’t stop there in letting his disdain for Seven be known.
“I’ve always joked, for 30 odd years, that Channel 7 are channel copycat, they have knocked off everything,” he said.
With regard to the departure of Wilson to Seven, McGuire remarked: “The knock-on effect of that is going to be profound, with what happens with Caroline Wilson at (Nine-owned) The Age and 3AW.”
When Diary caught up with McGuire on the weekend he doubled down on his criticism of Seven, before walking it back, ever so slightly.
“I don’t think any of them have covered it with the news values that Nine did back in the day but that’s because we attacked it with news and these days a lot of coverage, they want to cover the game as opposed to covering the news of the game,” he said.
“Seven evolved that over the course of the finals series and did a pretty good job,” McGuire conceded.
“I think their preliminary finals stuff was really good.”
McGuire was at the MCG for the AFL grand final on Saturday, occupying prime networking real estate in the MCG’s famed Olympic Room.
We’re not sure if he offered his unsolicited views on Seven’s AFL coverage to the network’s billionaire owner, Kerry Stokes, or new-ish CEO Jeff Howard, who were also enjoying the best seats in the house.
Premiership hangover
While many of the Brisbane Lions’ premiership players were nursing sore heads on Sunday morning after smashing the Sydney Swans by 60 points in the AFL grand final, the team’s media department was in overdrive, scrambling to line up interviews.
Perhaps given it’s 21 years since the Lions won a flag, the Brisbane club’s comms team, headed up by Nick Brown, wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of media requests on the morning after the day before.
Weekend Sunrise co-host Matt Doran made light of the Lions’ apparent disorganisation, telling viewers: “To give you an idea how sort of last-minute this is all panning out, the Brisbane Lions media manager said ‘yeah yeah, we’ll get you someone, we won the grand final, it’s kind of a big deal, we’ll give you someone, maybe a player, we’ll just see if we can rustle someone up’.”
Looking at his watch at 8.15am, Doran added: “That’s supposed to happen in 10 minutes and still crickets.”
Co-host Monique Wright suggested: “Perhaps they’ll just bring someone out on their bed.”
Doran, bemused, pondered how it might be playing out behind closed doors.
“I reckon they’ll have someone roaming the hallways, and they’ll go: ‘Can you come and do that?’,” he said.
Enter 20-year-old Jaspa Fletcher, one of the Lions’ young guns.
Once he got behind the microphone, Fletcher confessed he’d only had about four hours of shut-eye, but insisted he was doing far better than some of his teammates.
“I reckon there’s a few boys rolling in as breakfast was served this morning,” Fletcher admitted.
So how did Fletcher get picked to be the early morning face of the premiership-winning club?
Fletcher explained that he had emerged bleary-eyed from his hotel lift only to be greeted by a stressed Lions media manager who conducted a quick fitness test before giving him the green light to address the nation.
“Our media manager rolled out to me and said, ‘how you feeling?’ and I said I was probably the best out of some of the boys, and he said: ‘Righto, Sunrise 8.15’.”
And the interview went off without a hitch.
Ratings nerves
It’s a big week for a number of high-profile radio presenters.
On Tuesday, ratings research company GfK will release the sixth radio survey of the year, and with industry bosses getting to the pointy end of finalising their on-air line-ups for 2025, quite a few hosts will be eagerly awaiting the results.
In Melbourne, the focus will be on the performance of KIIS FM’s Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson.
The controversial Sydney-based duo’s program has been on the Melbourne airwaves for five months and, despite a relentless marketing campaign by the station’s parent company, ARN, the show hasn’t gelled with listeners in the Victorian capital.
In the most recent GfK survey, the pair recorded an audience share of the Melbourne market of just 6.1 per cent, compared to their 14.3 per cent slice of the Sydney market, where they are nipping at the heels of the city’s dominant talkback breakfast program hosted by 2GB’s Ben Fordham.
Diary approached ARN boss Ciaran Davis last week to see if he wanted to discuss Kyle and Jackie O’s uneasy entrance into Melbourne but he declined.
On the AM dial, ABC Radio National breakfast show host Patricia Karvelaswill be looking for a ratings bounce.
August’s survey showed her program had 79,000 listeners in Sydney, which was down from 100,000 in the corresponding survey in 2023.
Karvelas had 64,000 daily listeners in Melbourne, according to the most recent ratings survey, having lost a fair chunk of the 94,000-strong audience she enjoyed in winter.
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