Kim Williams says he did not leak any information and has no regrets

KIM Williams has broken his year-long silence on News Corp, criticising editors for failing to understand the advertising model he introduced.

Kim Williams, at his Sydney home, says editors are employed for journalistic talents rather than expertise in advertising sales. Picture: David Moir

KIM Williams has broken his year-long silence on News Corporation, criticising newspaper editors for failing to understand the advertising model he introduced at the company.

In a fiery interview, the former News Corp Australia and Foxtel chief executive said he found highly offensive “conspiracy theories” that he had leaked News Corp’s 2013 financial results to generate publicity for his new book, Rules of Engagement.

The results showed a sharp drop in revenues and profits across News Corp’s flagship Australian newspapers between the 2012 and 2013 financial years, which many blamed on the advertising sales model Mr Williams had introduced.

Mr Williams defended his News Corp legacy, maintaining his model was the correct one and that newspaper editors’ opinions on it were “worth very little”.

“I will certainly make it very clear that the advice from editors on issues of advertising sales and on the management of advertising sales in a sophisticated, blended media economy, which has been profoundly impacted by digital technologies, is worth very little,’’ Mr Williams said.

“I think editors are employed for reasons of journalistic judgment and journalistic leadership. They are not employed in order to offer definitive views in relation to ad sales, and I say that very, very firmly.

“The kind of skill sets, the kind of advocacies, the kind of representation, the kind of hard sales force that is required to compete effectively in a modern hybrid digital era is not the sort of skill set that reposes with editors.”

His comments on the para­meters of a newspaper editor’s skill sets came minutes after he opened the interview by saying he had avoided all critical commentary about News Corp in the year since his departure. “It’s not my way,’’ he said.

In the hour-long interview at his home in Sydney’s Queens Park yesterday, Mr Williams said the leak of News Corp’s “Blue Book” had overshadowed the release of his own book, a mixture of autobiography and business, ­social and literary commentary.

Mr Williams promoted his book in several interviews last week but strongly rejected any suggestions the financial results were a deliberate leak to gain publicity to help sell his book. “I will thank you not to say it has been an effective strategy for me and I find that allegation profoundly offensive. I really resent it in the strongest possible terms,’’ he said.

“Am I expected just to stand there and take hits and not respond? Am I meant to be some passive person who says simply ‘Hit me again, hit me again’? That’s not my style. I won’t do that. I’ll stand up and say that’s not so. And what’s more, I will respond robustly.”

Responding to allegations he was the only person Machiavellian enough to leak the Blue Book, Mr Williams said: “I do not have a Machiavellian bone in my body and anyone, anyone who has worked with me knows I play an absolutely straight hand.

“The one thing that has been consistent throughout all of my working career is the fact I deal very directly with people. I have an open and transparent agenda and I pursue the agenda very publicly.”

On the contrary, Mr Williams said the financial results were one of many leaks against him since he began at News Corp and he complained that leaks to Crikey and Fairfax “happened again and again and again and again” during his time at the company.

“I have already indicated to you that I think the intention is not particularly attractive towards me. I think that there was an intention to have a sledge and have a go at me. It’s not the first time. It won’t be the last time,’’ he said.

When pressed over whether he accepted responsibility for any of the decline in revenue that ­occurred under his watch, Mr Williams defended the use of consultants, his centralisation of the company’s advertising team and the growth of the human resources department.

Mr Williams famously introduced a one-company strategy at News. There was considerable support for this within the company and an acknowledgement that there were enormous efficiences to be achieved by harmonising backroom operations.

However, critics say the plan removed the local experience, key to driving revenue, from individual newspapers around the nation.

This failure was most acute in the area of ad sales where a centralised, capital-city approach alienated advertisers in regional centres such as Townsville, Geelong and Cairns. Local News ad sales reps in those cities left the company, destroying strong ­relationships that had been built up over a considerable period.

“Kim thought advertising would come in purely on the basis of good rates,” one observer ­explained. “That’s not how things work.”

One News Corp insider ­described the national sales model as “ill-conceived”.“You can be penny wise, pound foolish looking for efficiencies where the loss of local connections and revenue far outweigh the perceived savings seen on a spreadsheet,” he said.

Another senior source said: “Most advertising sales people sell about five to six times their salary in ads each year, so your downward impact on revenue is many times the savings achieved.”

When Julian Clarke took over from Mr Williams as News Corp Australia chief executive, he made the point that success depended on acknowledging that while it was one company, it was made up of individual businesses.

Mr Williams’s centralised ­advertising model has since been reversed and many experienced advertising managers who were made redundant during the ­restructure have been rehired.

Since then, advertising revenue has recovered, with The Australian , for one, halving its losses in the past financial year.

When asked about this yesterday, Mr Williams argued that the sales model he embraced was appropriate and adopted in response to feedback from advertisers and buying agencies.

The problem, he said, was reversing it too soon. “Clearly in the case of most of the advertising sales work, the adjustments were starting to be made and then people shut down the whole program. I’m not going to accept responsibility for things that I have no control over — of course not, that’s a ridiculous thing to say,” he said.

“Let’s remember the changes were announced in July 2012. The implementation of the program then rolled out over a period of 12 months. The implementation was reaching its full force around May or June 2013 and I left the company in August 2013.”

The negative revenue outcomes outlined in the Blue Book, he argued, were not a result of his time at the company, but reflected the “hurricane-like intensity” of the changing media landscape.

Advertising revenue throughout the print media industry was falling at that time, he said, and News was consistent with the market. “We’re living through a period of momentous change; the nature of that change is something unstoppable,’’ he said.

Mr Williams, a classically trained musician renowned for his creativity, nevertheless relied on advice from The Boston Consulting Group and other so-called experts. Rejecting suggestions this suite of consultants had damaged News Corp financially, Mr Williams praised their situational analysis on parts of the company, noting they were hired four years before he was appointed CEO.

Another key criticism of Mr Williams’s time at News was his creation of an overly large people and culture department at a time when journalists, ad sales staff and staff at the print site were being retrenched.

On this front, too, Mr Williams was defensive. “I did not grow the HR department dramatically. What I did do is for the first time highlight how many people were working in that area, and did some reorganisation of it,’’ he said.

“There was no actual organisational framework that defined where all the people inside the company were working. I called for there to be a proper mapping of how the company was organised and then set about reorienting that so it was focused on outcomes rather than just a blind adherence to processes, many of which were based in the 1970s and 80s. I don’t apologise for that.”

Mr Williams was defiant in his defence of his record at News. “I don’t apologise for anything I did. Anything at all,’’ he said, while ­admitting: “I’m the first person to say that in any kind of strategic appraisal of a business not everything goes according to the way in which it will come.”

While his non-compete period concluded on August 9, he said he was not in a desperate rush to sign up to a new role.

Interestingly, he said he had not been in talks with any of the mainstream media companies.

And as for speaking to prospective employers or boards, Mr Williams, who was born in 1952, said he felt his age was a disadvantage, and lamented the fact that Australia was a “fairly ageist society”.

“I’ve always found it enormously attractive in America that the opposite pertains: that people actually see people with age as having learnt something, as having a lot of experiences, as having encountered a number of difficulties through the course of their life and probably having developed some perspective, and having the capacity to absorb knocks and ­respond to them in some fashion. But in Australia it’s often seen as a disqualification,’’ he said.

“It’s never explicit of course. It’s something that you sense.”

Mr Williams has spent hundreds and hundreds of hours over the past year engrossed in writing his book — a proposition he rejected when he was first approached by Louise Adler from Melbourne University Press.

But Mr Williams changed his mind the day journalist Tim Elliott left his house after interviewing him for a feature in Good Weekend. Elliott had asked some deeply personal questions relating to Mr Williams’s religion (including asking whether he was circumcised), along with his past relationships and periods of darkness — matters Mr Williams did not feel should be brought into the public domain.

“When he left this house I picked up the telephone that day, I rang Louise and I said I’ll write your book,’’ he said.

The section on his mother was the most difficult to write, along with the chapter on politics.

He writes frankly about many politicians, including former communications minister Stephen Conroy, whom he fought against on media regulation.

Mr Williams details his close relationship with his mother and how, since she passed away, he has seen her ghost or spirit on a number of occasions. While describing himself yesterday as a “rational sort of person”, Mr Williams said the experience of seeing his mother after death was “immensely unsettling”.

“I know it sounds crazy but my mother did visit me and would rigorously wake me up and she manifested in other ways a few times which I found very disorienting and very difficult to deal with,’’ he said.

One chapter of Mr Williams’s book is on literature, where he writes that Captain Cook was one of his many role models, admiring the way he adhered to the assignment he had been given while always maintaining a duty of care to his crew. Explaining why Captain Cook had been a role model in his life, Mr Williams said “he was a substantially self-taught man, a man of enormous skills, enormous insight and terrific talent”.

“He was a man who had a terrifically close and astonishingly supportive relationship with his crew, who were all deeply moved when he was killed in the Hawaiian islands,’’ Mr Williams said.

While not specifically analysing News Corp Australia, Mr Williams’s book does discuss the media industry.

A vast media consumer, Mr Williams said the current flurry of commentary on Israel and Gaza had moved to extreme polarity, where commentators adopt opinions first and information later.

“There has been a long vein in the Australian media of anti-­Semitic coverage and it is an enormously troubling thing,’’ he said.

“I am probably unusually and acutely sensitive to anti-Semitic coverage because I feel quite strongly about it and it is something that has to be held up whenever it happens.”

The book also covers a wide range of other subjects, from education, wine, the media and politics to television, cinema and friendship.

“The book may be many things but I trust that it’s not boring,’’ Mr Williams said.