Media Diary | ‘Ring-in’ Wippa joins Sam Armytage on Today, sparking Nine chaos
Michael Wipfli’s unexpected appointment to co-host the brekky staple with Samantha Armytage has sparked significant internal unrest at Nine, setting tongues wagging and hinting at a changing of the guard.
Just when you thought it was safe to switch on the Today show, there’s been yet another wild casting call in at Nine that’s sure to create even more chaos behind the scenes on the country’s perennially second-placed breakfast program.
Diary can reveal Nova funnyman Michael “Wippa” Wipfli is set to co-host the brekky staple alongside Samantha Armytage for at least a few weeks over the summer, with the unexpected appointment already setting tongues wagging throughout the company.
Network sources said word of the impending double-act had not gone down well in some sections of the stable, with a number of the television channel’s aspiring Today show hosts feeling they had been unfairly overlooked in favour of a “ring in” radio star.
Of course, Wipfli will be no stranger to audiences in Sydney, where he hosts the Harbour City’s third most popular breakfast radio program alongside his Nova co-stars, former footy player and one-time Big Brother housemate Ryan “Fitzy” Fitzgerald and Home and Away favourite Kate Ritchie.
The comedian also fronted Nine’s nostalgic 20 to One alongside Fitzgerald in 2016, and competed in the channel’s now defunct reality odd job show, The Celebrity Apprentice Australia, in 2021, both showcasing his humour to the network’s national audience.
The decision comes hot on the heels of revelations in Diary this month that Nine television Svengali Michael Healy had long harboured a not-so-secret, decade-long desire to slip Armytage into a permanent co-hosting role on Today in the hope she could help the network finally overtake fierce rival, and her former home, Seven’s Sunrise ... and that the move was being seriously discussed within the broadcaster’s top ranks.
Not only that, we hear Healy has always been obsessed with pairing a blonde female and brunette male in the coveted leading roles ... and that Nine has only offered Today’s incumbent presenters, Karl Stefanovic and Sarah Abo, short, one-year extensions on their current deals.
Do we detect a changing of the guard? As with all things in television, stay tuned to find out.
Shock jock’s ‘naked story’
There might be eight million stories in the naked city, but one of Nine Radio’s biggest names seems to be playing a starring role in all of the best ones right now.
Diary can reveal Mark Levy – who replaced radio king Ray Hadley as host of the network’s flagship 2GB morning show last summer – is allegedly the middleman in a high-interest, six-figure loan between a bare-knuckle boxing promoter with ties to former world champ Anthony Mundine and a trucking fleet boss with historical links to the Nomads outlaw motorcycle club.
Indeed, back in 2006, the transport magnate’s business partner brother was slapped with a maximum nine-year stretch in prison for “maliciously” stabbing an enemy, and also hoarding an arsenal of illegal firearms at the height of a ganglands war with the Hells Angels … just weeks after he was shot in the “buttocks” in an inner-city nightclub.
And all this on top of Levy’s other ongoing off-air dramas: with his Italian/Balkan eatery, Pronto Sylvania, being forced into liquidation over unpaid debts – rumoured to be worth the better part of $1m – and recent revelations in Diary that his executive producer, Olivia Wilbury, quit his show in June after a blistering blow-up with the host.
Details about the former national Wide World of Sports radio presenter’s latest extra-curricular activities have come to light after bulk haulage boss Benjamin Yammine launched legal action in the NSW Supreme Court last week against fight promoter Oliver Joseski over an unpaid debt.
Although the matter was adjourned, sources told Diary that Levy was named as a party to the proceedings because he’d agreed to act as a personal guarantor for Joseski … and had been the one who put him in touch with Yammine when he sought the radio host’s help to secure a short-term loan believed to be worth about $100,000.
Levy, who has been with Nine’s Continuous Call rugby league commentary team for 18 years and won six Australian Commercial Radio Awards, has been a long-time mate of Joseski, both having held prominent roles in the Sydney-based Macedonian Rugby League football club and a shared friendship with Mundine.
The former boxer even visited Levy’s now shuttered restaurant, while Joseski partnered with Mundine’s promotions company to bring the World Bare Knuckle Fighting series to Australia ahead of its inaugural fight night in Brisbane last month.
Sources said Levy effected the introduction between Joseski and Yammine through the haulage king’s business partner and brother, entrepreneur and philanthropist Norman Yammine.
Although Norman is now best known for his extensive charitable work with the Knights of Malta and the Police Citizens Youth Club, he has a dark past as a Nomad bikie.
He was already behind bars when he pleaded guilty to repeatedly stabbing a man “with a knife, similar to a fish filleting knife”, puncturing one of his lungs, in Terrigal in November 2005, according to a decision to uphold his sentence for the attack in the NSW Criminal Court of Appeal.
The court documents also revealed Norman was “shot in the buttocks at a nightclub” in Sydney four months later, in March 2006, and that he believed the hit had been ordered by Hells Angels gang member John Zaiter, claiming in an intercepted phone call the club rival had “put a fifty on my head … $50,000 to kill me”.
The conversation was recorded after a string of retaliatory drive-by shootings between Zaiter and another Nomads member, Paul Younan, earlier in the day.
According to court documents, Norman told Younan “they” – the Hells Angels – had also “hit his car and shot at him three times” and demanded Younan come to his house in Auburn, in Sydney’s west, so they could hole up together.
He then called another associate and asked him to drop by his place with his “girlfriend” – a word prosecutors later argued was a code for firearms.
Fearing an imminent bloodbath on the streets of western Sydney, officers swarmed Norman’s home just after 8.30pm and seized a cache of firearms, including four loaded handguns and two assault rifles, as well as a bulletproof vest.
Norman confessed under cross-examination that, at the time of the incident, “he was paranoid … off his head on drugs (and) thought they (the Hells Angels) would come to kill him”.
Since his release, Norman has dedicated himself to atoning for his sins and helping prevent other youths from walking a similar, dangerous path.
Of course, there is absolutely no suggestion his past misdeeds are in any way connected to his brother’s present-day financial dealings with Joseski or Levy (they aren’t), much less that there has been any criminality perpetrated by anyone involved in this whole affair (there hasn’t been).
But this has honestly got to be without doubt one of the greatest Sydney stories you’ll never hear on Nine’s national talkback network … nor in any courtroom for that matter.
Diary understands that just one day after scant details of Levy’s involvement in the looming legal drama were made public last week, the outstanding debt was repaid and the whole matter wrapped up in a bundle of nondisclosure agreements. Fancy that.
Wilkinson’s history
One-time television personality Lisa Wilkinson is taking a leaf out of author husband Peter FitzSimons’s book and penning a historical nonfiction title.
She will be releasing a tome in April about Australian-born nurse Evelyn Marsden, who was on board the Titanic in 1912 when it struck an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage.
Let’s hope it’s more accurate than her previous supposedly nonfiction work: her autobiography, It Wasn’t Meant To Be Like This.
In that effort, she did a little bit of historical rewriting while offering a contentious account of her final day at Nine.
Wilkinson claimed she promoted what would prove to be her last outing on the Today show during a live cross with co-host Karl Stefanovic in the early news at 5.15am as then reporter Airlie Walsh read the news.
But that wasn’t quite right. Reporter Kate Creedon had been reading the news.
Wilkinson then claimed an uncharacteristically cold Stefanovic failed to mention her recent wedding celebrations or honeymoon during the cross.
Turns out that wasn’t quite right either. Video of the exchange showed Stefanovic saying: “It’s a big welcome back to Lisa, nice to see you again. How was your honeymoon?”
Smiling, Wilkinson replied: “It was great, thoroughly recommend it,” before Stefanovic added: “We are going to hear all the details about it … in the show.”
Not done, Wilkinson even went on to claim she had been virtually sidelined from proceedings during her final show, with Stefanovic dominating all the interviews and segments.
But, you guessed it, again, it appears that wasn’t quite right. Show rundowns, seen by The Australian, indicated an almost equal split between the co-hosts’ duties during the key segments and interviews.
And to think … that was in a book about herself! We hope she’s also followed Fitzy’s lead and hired a team of researchers to do a fact check this time around.
Seven acing it
When it comes to creating compelling television, the trick, they reckon, is to say it with feeling … and Seven certainly did a far better job of demonstrating the raw emotion and defining moments only television can truly capture at its annual Upfront last Wednesday than rival Nine’s very corporate affair a week earlier.
The big red channel rolled out its best and brightest names – from Natalie Barr, Matt Shirvington and Kylie Gillies to televet Chris Brown, Larry Emdur and Sonia Kruger – to pitch the power of its network and free-to-air television overall to advertisers in the Winx stand at Royal Randwick.
But it was the star appearance Kruger’s newsman hubby Craig McPherson made at Seven West Media chairman Kerry Stokes’s cherished Telethon on the far side of the country days earlier that had everyone talking down the back at the Upfront.
Particularly after he was spotted deep in conversation with the media proprietor and his hard-hitting editor-in-chief Christopher Dore (who we hear will be hitting the flavoured milk rather hard over the next 12 months after winning a year’s supply of the stuff from Gina Rinehart’s Bannister Downs Dairy operation in the event’s silent auction).
The big question is, will Seven tap McPherson to make a triumphant return to the network – in some capacity – as it prepares to launch an all-out assault on Nine’s nightly news offerings in what’s predicted to be a very bloody battle for eyeballs next ratings year?
There are certainly whispers he could be asked to help rebuild the channel’s national news dominance following the madcap, short-lived reign of his starry-eyed successor, Anthony De Ceglie.
McPherson notched up an unbeaten decade of rating wins for the network’s news and current affairs division, both nationally and across the lucrative five-city metro markets, before ceding control to De Ceglie in April 2024.
He was then forced to watch on from a distance as the television news novice surprised everyone by managing to blow up everything McPherson had achieved in 10 years in just 13 months before showing himself out. Hey, if you’re gonna fail, at least fail fast, right?
Although Ray Kuka is now Seven’s top national news boss, there is little doubt he would be overjoyed for the cavalry to arrive … even in a consultancy role.
De Ceglie cleared out pretty much every Seven news executive with more experience than him (which was all of them … and even a few of the cleaners) before going fully rogue and introducing astrology segments to the channel’s serious primetime news bulletins, but Kuka has been around long enough to know it’s better to surround yourself with proper news stars such as McPherson when you want to win.
Will it happen? Who knows? All we can say for sure is that the Gold Coast will be the first frontline in the ratings war – after De Ceglie made the baffling decision to shutter Seven’s local news bulletin even though it is one of the country’s biggest audience and advertiser growth markets.
Sources claimed he made the call under the misapprehension his Nine counterpart, Fiona Dear, had covertly agreed to do the same thing … silly boy, that would have been market collusion.
Prize cheapskates
If there was ever any doubt that industry backslapping ceremonies were anything other than brazen money-making enterprises designed to flog overpriced tickets to awards nights, check out this embarrassing effort by the prize cheapskates over at the Walkleys.
Walkley Foundation chief executive Shona Martyn has written to all previous Gold Walkley winners to personally invite them to attend next month’s annual gala dinner so they can be honoured as part of the event’s 70th anniversary.
The Gold Walkley has been Australian journalism’s top prize since it was first awarded to The West Australian’s late investigative health reporter Catherine Martin in 1978 after she exposed the high incidence of death and disease among asbestos miners.
Since then, it’s been bestowed upon some of the craft’s greats, and Martyn wants to get a whole host of them together on journalism’s night of nights. Whether they want to sit next to each other, well, that’s a different story.
“(We) are keen to see as many past Gold Walkley winners as possible at the gala dinner,” Martyn explained in her email.
“Unless otherwise indicated by you, we would aim to seat you with other Gold Walkley winners on the night. Your presence will be acknowledged during the course of the evening.”
Only snag? Martyn apparently expects them to pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege of being honoured on the night.
It’s not all bad news, though. She promised she could swing them “discounted tickets” for the low, low price of “$250 per person (plus GST and booking fee)”. What? No steak knives?
The invitation caused much consternation among some Gold Walkley winners, and a number of copies dropped into Diary’s inbox within moments of it being sent out last week.
“A lot of us no longer work in the industry, and we’re being asked to pay $250 – plus GST, plus a service fee – under the pretence that we’re being recognised as part of the anniversary,” one past winner said. “Finalists and judges get free tickets, but the people they’re supposedly honouring have to pay? They’ve got to be kidding.”
Don’t despair, it’s not just past Gold Walkley winners being asked to cough up. The Walkley Foundation has been in touch to let us know that, these days, they actually expect finalists to pay to attend the awards night, too!
Who says these ceremonies are all about selling tickets? Oh, that’s right, we do.
Sending out an SBS
If there was ever any doubt that Ten’s new flagship nightly news show 10 News+ was anything other than a titanic failure, there is now rampant speculation the network’s boss, Beverley McGarvey, could be about to scramble into a lifeboat and flee the sinking ship.
Industry sources reckon Ten’s loftily titled “president” and Paramount ANZ chief is on the short list to replace James Taylor as the SBS’s new managing director.
Taylor, who commanded almost $970,000 while in the taxpayer-funded job, stood down in August after accepting the chief executive role – and a $300,000 pay rise – with billboard giant oOh!media after Cathy O’Connor handed in her notice.
SBS marketing and commercial chief Jane Palfreyman has been filling in as acting managing director as the service “conducts a global search” for a full-time replacement … though word is the hunt hasn’t extended much further than Ten’s Pyrmont studios.
It’s been a difficult year for McGarvey and Ten, with the network canning woke nightly gibberfest The Project in June and replacing it with the overhyped and underperforming 10 News+.
Ten’s content boss, Dan Monaghan, parted ways with the network last month after shouldering much of the blame for the program’s poor reception, while new reporting recruit Bill Hogan has already quit in favour of a job spinning for the NSW cops.
Scuttlebutt McGarvey could be the next to depart as Ten’s newly merged parent company Paramount Skydance axes thousands of jobs across its international empire this week as part of a push to wipe more than $3bn from the media giant’s global budget.
Of course, it’s never a bad thing to be linked to top jobs, especially at a time of upheaval. McGarvey politely declined to comment.
Who’s buying this?
Respected academic Marcia Langton is apparently among a secret group of 100 “subscribers” forking out $100 a month to breach newspaper paywalls from across Australia by having stories copied into group messages and uploaded on to a “hidden Facebook page”.
The rort was exposed after Central Australian Aboriginal Congress chief medical officer Dr John Boffa revealed he was also paying for the stolen story service while giving evidence in Central Land Council boss Lesley Turner’s defamation case against Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price last week.
Asked by Senator Price’s silk, Peter Gray SC, how he managed to stay across the news about her spat with one of the country’s biggest land councils, Boffa explained he got paywalled stories sent to him by a semi-retired media adviser on Facebook Messenger.
“I subscribe to a social media service on Aboriginal Affairs that’s actually run by a man called Colin Cowell … and there’s a lot of people subscribing to it,” he said.
“He provides a service where, on a daily basis, he will send every story in the media on Messenger.
“Every story that he thinks is significant … from all media and he’s able to copy stories that would be in newspapers that you are not a subscriber to and provide them to you. You get the whole story and the picture. I assume the story I saw (about Senator Price) was probably from The Australian, but this one I’m referring to may well have been the NT News. I’m not sure. One of the issues with the social media platform is that, when the story comes, the only thing you can see is the date, and you don’t necessarily see the author of the story.”
One of the issues with the social media platform? Is he serious? It sounds like it’s just one guy ripping off journos’ yarns and selling them to his own subscribers for a marked-up price.
So we reached out to Cowell and asked what the deal really was … and, yep, that was precisely it.
He was more than happy to confirm that he gets paid $100 a month by more than 100 prominent Australians across the worlds of politics, business and academia (and rattled off a bunch of names, including Langton) in exchange for access to his “private media monitoring service”.
That could add up to more than $120,000 a year to cut and paste other people’s yarns. Apparently stories by Diary’s own colleague Paige Taylor have proved particularly popular. How nice.
The only drawback? Cowell reckons he keeps getting pinged with pesky invoices for breach of copyright, and has received at least three of them – for between $500 and $1000 – for republishing Australian content without permission in the past few months alone. Dang, there’s always some sort of catch when you’re stealing and selling other people’s work.
“So we had to set up a hidden Facebook page so only the subscribers can see the stories we’re republishing from the NT News, and The West Australian, and The Australian, and The Sydney Morning Herald,” Cowell said.
Poor fella. Otherwise, he reckons it’s just a “normal media monitoring service, a 100 per cent honest service” … we’re sure that’s what subscribers such as Langton must think, though we couldn’t reach her at the weekend to find out.
Except “100 per cent honest” media monitoring services pay licensing fees … and don’t need to post stolen stories on a hidden Facebook account to avoid detection.
Dressing down
For a bloke who never stops banging on about his love of music, Anthony Albanese sure is a bit tone deaf.
The Prime Minister knew he would attract headlines after dressing down as he disembarked his government jet in Sydney last Thursday on his return from his first state visit with US President Donald Trump.
But the wisdom of wearing a Joy Division T-shirt, given its symbolic reference to the abhorrent war crimes committed against Jewish women, is beyond strange considering the last living Jewish hostages had only just been released by Hamas in the Middle East.
Former Leo Burnett Australia chair Nigel Marsh told him precisely what the English band was controversially named after while talking music on his Five of My Life podcast in April 2022.
“I’ve always had an issue with the band’s name and I don’t know how to resolve that … I feel slightly guilty,” Marsh said. “You know where the name comes from?”
“No, I don’t actually,” the Prime Minister replied.
“It’s awful,” Marsh said. “In 1955 a Holocaust survivor wrote a book called House of Dolls … and it’s about, unfortunately, the truth of the Germans in the concentration camps had divisions of women who were forced into enslaved prostitution for the SS and they were called joy divisions … and that’s where they got the name from.”
Albanese was understandably shocked. “Oh my God,” he said. “It’s very dark, isn’t it … you should edit that out of the podcast for the sake of the listeners so they can continue to enjoy (the band) … I wish I didn’t (know).”
Yes, but sadly, he does.
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