Media Diary: Project replacement gets schooled by Neighbours in ratings bloodbath
Channel Ten’s new current affairs show is bombing spectacularly just two weeks after launch, pulling fewer than 100,000 viewers and getting thrashed by repeats of the axed soap staple.
Come in spinners! Because Ten desperately needs your help after the latest devastating ratings nosedive for its new nightly current affairs show.
Diary can reveal the ailing program, 10 News+, is now being beaten by repeats (yes, repeats) of axed soap staple Neighbours on its sister 10 Comedy multi-channel.
Just two weeks after it replaced woke nightly gibberfest The Project, the program has fallen out of the top 40 most-watched program each night, with less than 100,000 viewers tuning in on average across the country’s critical five-city metro market.
That’s less than the number of people watching late night repeats of Griff’s Great Australian Rail Trip on the ABC and British period drama Father Brown on Seven, according to the official figures.
Just as well we hear the program’s hosts, Seven defectors Amelia Brace and Denham Hitchcock, insisted on signing two-year contracts with the struggling network rather than run-of-show deals – because even they must be wondering how much longer things can continue before someone intervenes and pulls the plug.
Of course, no one actually wants to see the program fail and more journos out of work.
The Project’s former host, Sarah Harris, whose show made way for 10 News+, is even desperately hoping the program can turn things around.
“I’m still decompressing after a big couple of years so I have only caught bits and pieces (of it),” Harris told Diary when we got in touch with her last week.
“But I‘ll always root for local-made TV news and I’ve got mates who work on that show and I want them to do well! A rising tide lifts all boats ... and TV ratings boxes!”
Let’s pray for a flood.
Molan’s 69X truth
The idea was simple enough: launch a low-budget current affairs show on social media, cram it full of adolescent sex and drug puns, and install recently released Sky News Australia presenter Erin Molan as host.
And then, of course, challenge the world’s traditional media outlets for global domination.
Turns out, though, that’s easier said than done. Although ambitious crypto-entrepreneur Mario Nawfal’s 69X Minutes managed to pull off the first part of the plan, his program seems to have already failed in its grandiose promise to be “the next nail” as the “legacy media comes smashing down”.
In fact, the meandering online offering – largely centred around lengthy, low-cost zoom interviews – has been flat out nailing down regular episodes since it launched five months ago, let alone the “legacy media”.
While Nawfal claimed “the most dangerous show on the internet” would deliver an exciting, new instalment “every Sunday” as it dragged “the truth kicking and screaming into the spotlight”, the truth is he managed to roll out less than a dozen episodes before the program hit a virtual roadblock more than a month ago.
The 69X Minutes account maintained by Molan hasn’t been updated with a full episode since June 6, when she posted the program’s 11th show, two days after Nawfal last uploaded a clip from the show to his 69X Minutes feed.
And while Molan has been busy covering the war in the Middle East over the past month, there appears to be some confusion over who her online interviews – such as her “exclusive” with Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog – were actually for.
Nawfal posted vision of that conversation on X on July 6 all badged up as if it was for his show ... even though Molan has already uploaded it as an exclusive for her own online program – Erin Molan Show, Truth to Power – weeks earlier.
The amateurish inconsistency of Nawful’s 69X Minutes comes in stark contrast to the over-inflated self-importance that surrounded its premiere.
Of course, the reality is the program has been all a bit of a joke from the very beginning.
It was rushed out little more than a fortnight after billionaire Elon Musk laughed about creating a current affairs show under the sexually suggestive name on his social media platform, on February 7, asking: “Anyone want to create a hard-hitting show on X called 69 Minutes? I will actually fund it!”
And Nawfal announced his 69X Minutes program would be uploaded each Sunday at 4.20pm Eastern Time in the US in yet another gag, this time referencing marijuana use.
Despite the juvenile jokes, Nawfal has simultaneously insisted the show be taken seriously and seen as the next evolution in news reporting.
“Served unfiltered, unbiased and raw. I bet we get higher ratings than the other old hack of a show that ‘shall not be named’,” the excitable 31-year-old promised online. “We are the media now.”
All right, calm down Spartacus. Because, somewhat unsurprisingly, that bold prediction hasn’t quite played out.
Nawfal’s live feed of the show’s first instalment has clocked up just 62,000 viewers on X, while the “Elon Musk Inspired News Revolution” fared even worse on YouTube, attracting just 13,000 hits for its first episode on Molan’s channel and dropping to just 430 views by its ninth outing. Take that, legacy media!
Despite the show’s sporadic performance, Molan assured us there were no plans to can the project just yet and it was apparently still business as usual on the show.
“Yup – filming it this arvo,” she said when we asked about the program on Friday.
“It doesn’t always run as a full show – (69 X Minutes) runs as segments and interviews too.”
Quite the evolution, indeed.
Missing the Mark
It might seem unpalatable to some but Mark Twain rightly reckoned media censorship was a bit like telling a man he can’t have steak just because a baby can’t chew it.
Indeed, while “unflattering” photos of convicted killer Erin Patterson arriving at court during her triple murder trial might have been difficult to digest, there’s no question the adult public had a right to see them.
So, it was almost impossible to comprehend the ABC’s top editorial policy boss Mark Maley’s decision to last week fire off a directive banning the public broadcaster from showing the photos of her ... because they might impinge on her “distress/privacy”.
Her distress? Patterson was on trial for murdering three people she professed to love by serving them poisoned portions of beef Wellington she’d made over an intimate lunch – and trying to murder a fourth.
And her privacy? The images captured her raw emotion as she arrived in the back of a prison van at a public courthouse – the very place where she would be found guilty of one of the most heinous crimes of the century.
Maley’s desire to spare Patterson’s feelings – contained in leaked emails we revealed in the wake of her guilty verdict – was all the more puzzling for the fact he’s actually a veteran journalist with a proud history of protecting the public’s right to see and hear the full, uncensored truth on the ABC.
It wasn’t so long ago he was defending Four Corners’ right to broadcast distressing vision of a father participating in stoning his daughter to death under the ISIS regime in Syria.
He also defended Four Corners’ decision to air one-time Fair Work Commission vice president Michael Lawler’s full, unedited description of his relationship with former union boss Kathy Jackson, while claiming he had been characterised “at the very best, as somebody who’s been bewitched by an evil harridan, namely Kathy; that I’m c..t-struck and that I have been utterly taken in by somebody who is a serious crook”.
Later questioned about the decision to put those elements to air, Maley maintained their clear news value had been the top priority.
“Both were shocking in quite different ways,” he reflected in 2017.
“The stoning was among the most awful things I’ve ever seen on television.
“The editorial importance was unquestionable but was this vision just too shocking for a prime-time audience?
“Regarding the language used by Michael Lawler, the question was whether it was editorially important enough to justify offending viewers.
“In both cases, my view was that while it’s important to warn the audience of distressing or offensive content, if content contributes to understanding an important story, we should publish it, not censor it.”
Somehow that prevailing wisdom didn’t extend to showing the far-less confronting images of Patterson last week.
Thankfully the ABC’s Victorian news editor and rising star (at least in our books), Sarah Jaensch, was having none of Maley’s missive.
“While it’s far from a flattering picture, she is now a convicted triple murderer who was photographed while being conveyed to court for her murder trial,” she replied in the group email.
“If we are not using any vision of her distressed, we wouldn’t use the vision of her crying on her doorstep, which was used many times before she was a convicted murderer. That was also invading her privacy but the public interest argument won over.”
Jaensch’s argument rightly won out again.
Now can someone please give her a promotion – because she’s precisely the sort of journo we need running things at Aunty.
Flower power
By his own account, Daily Mail Australia journo Wayne Flower reckons he filed “hundreds of thousands of words” about Erin Patterson throughout the killer’s exhaustive 10-week trial.
But it was little more than 90 of them that saw him go viral online last week.
After bashing out eight yarns after her guilty verdict was handed down, Flower was tasked with filing a first-person piece about the months he spent covering the gruesome case.
And he most certainly put himself out there.
Over the course of a 4000-word polemic, he offered up a candid appraisal of not only the trial but his personal tribulations while following the case in the tiny Victorian town of Morwell before ending the piece with a shock confession of his own.
“At home, a long way away, my life and family were imploding,” he wrote.
“The grind and my absence had made my partner of 24 years – the mother of my two children – come to realise she no longer needed me in her life.
“Days after my 50th birthday, for which she had organised a surprise party with all my friends and family in attendance, she told me she no longer loved me and I was discarded like yesterday’s newspaper.
“But the trial went on and so did I. Perhaps the last sad victim or Erin Patterson.”
The story divided opinions and newsrooms across the country.
While some praised his candour, others were less kind, with a few fellow journos even deriding Flower – both on social media and rival websites – for putting himself at the heart of the yarn. Not that he was aware of any of that when we got in touch with him over the weekend.
“That’s news to me – I’ve had no calls or emails from anyone having a go at the story. It’s all been very supportive,” he said.
“I was asked to write an honest account of my personal experience covering the Patterson trial, and that was it: I was away from home for months covering a challenging story while my marriage was breaking down in real time.
“As much as I would have loved to have been able to write a different, happier story, this was the genuine truth about my awful time covering the case. So that’s what I wrote.
“Would I do it again if the boss asked me to write my honest first-person account?
“Of course, I would. I’m a journalist. That’s my job.”
Healy on the rise
Could the three people at Nine who haven’t been made an “executive director” of something please raise their hands?
Amanda Laing has been handing out the flashy job titles like they’re lollies since returning to Nine from Foxtel in April to head up the company’s newly merged streaming and broadcast division.
So far, Nine’s director of television Michael Healy, director of news and current affairs Fiona Dear and director of programming Hamish Turner, streaming platform Stan’s chief content officer Caliah Scobie, and managing director Dan Taylor have all been “promoted” to lofty “executive director” roles under a major restructure.
Only problem is no one is quite sure what any of the titles actually mean or, indeed, if they mean anything at all.
“There is a lot of tension and fighting over the new structure because it’s not clear who is making decisions,” one network executive (though, not an executive director, mind you) told us. “Amanda has made the mistake of trying to please everyone by telling everyone they’re a winner and giving them a new title but it actually ended up pleasing no one.”
One thing’s for sure, though – Healy is most definitely on the up and up under the new regime.
We hear the long-serving star-maker is this week trading his lavish corner office on the network’s executive ninth floor for even more lavish digs up at Stan on the 20th level, where he will enjoy even better – unobstructed – views over the city.
Aunty’s double vision
There’s no doubt there’s a cultural revolution under way at the ABC as chairman Kim Williams and managing director “Hollywood” Hugh Marks focus on putting the broad back in broadcaster – and ensuring the taxpayer-funded outfit once again appeals to more than the inner-city set.
And it seems ABC staff members won’t have to wait too much longer to receive a copy of the duo’s new manifesto.
Diary hears Marks – a former chief executive of Nine Entertainment – will outline their vision for the ABC to employees across the country at the end of the month after finalising a full review of the operation since getting his feet under the desk in March.
It couldn’t come soon enough.
Cheque please
They were as thick as thieves for decades but Derryn Hinch has revealed he once had a fiery bust-up with late celebrity chef Peter Russell-Clarke that was so explosive the pair didn’t speak for more than half a decade.
Dairy checked in with the human headline after his famous lunch partner – also renowned as the host of the ABC’s 1980s cooking show Come and Get It – died at home a week and a bit ago, with his wife of 65 years, Jan, and children Peter and Wendy by his side.
Hinch told us he became firm friends with the TV chef after they both made cameo appearances in the 1983 Australian comedy flick At Last ... Bullamakanka: The Motion Picture, alongside fellow stars John Farnham, Ian “Molly” Meldrum, Frank Thring, Angry Anderson and Simon Townsend.
“We hung out together so much while we were making the movie together, everyone called us ‘The Bearded Bookends’,” the 81-year-old told us.
“We were great mates for years – he was an incredibly talented person. He was not only our first TV chef but he made cooking look easy and he spoke our language.
“He only had one bad habit: he would also engineer an argument over lunch and storm out – leaving you to pay the bill! He did that more than once!”
It was one argument over lunch with another dinner-mate – about their beloved North Melbourne Football Club – that would see them go the better part of a decade without speaking.
While the precise details are now lost to time, Hinch said fate eventually brought them back together.
“We didn’t speak for five years – but fortunately we were both featured in a book called Amazing Aussie Bastards (by Sydney Morning Herald scribe Lawrence Money),” he recalled.
“We both went to the launch and made up and we were mates again – and I’m so glad we did because he was wonderful company and one of the greatest friends I have ever known.”
Robbing Ross
We were intrigued to see the niche news site Crikey’s anonymous column Truffle Pig having a crack at a former 60 Minutes reporter named Robert Coulthart last week.
Not because it was about Coulthart’s latest Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena investigation (or UFO yarn to us laymen) but namely because we’d never heard of this Robert fellow at all.
Was there a gap in our Sixty knowledge? Surely not.
Still, we tracked down former 60 Minutes reporter Ross Coulthart, who was speaking at a top neuroscience conference in Barcelona, to ask him if he’d any idea who they were banging on about.
“Robert’s my evil twin,” a bemused Coulthart laughed, before having a few digs of his own at Crikey’s expense.
“It’s sad to see another tabloid webzine getting basic things wrong as usual, ignoring the fact that UAPs are no longer a wacky conspiracy theory as Truffle Pig snidely imputes.
“The US government has actually formally admitted UAPs are an authentic mystery worthy of serious scientific investigation.
“The public is interested in serious investigation into these allegations and the Truffle Pig clearly has his head too deep in the swill to notice.”
Crikey!
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