Clementine Ford’s not-so-fond farewell
Clementine Ford’s issues with editorial management pre-date Nine’s takeover of Fairfax, sources reveal.
High-profile former Sydney Morning Herald and The Age columnist Clementine Ford implied in her explosive resignation tweets last week that Nine’s takeover of the papers had been a factor in her falling out with the organisation.
In Ford’s much-publicised Twitter rant, she attacked the new regime at the papers under Nine as “new FFX”, shorthand for “new Fairfax”.
But SMH sources claim Ford’s issues with its editorial management pre-date Nine’s December takeover of Fairfax.
As it became clear last week, there was an issue with Ford breaching the paper’s social media policy in September, when they suspended her with pay for two weeks for her much-publicised Twitter comments calling Prime Minister Scott Morrison a “f..king disgrace” (which she referenced in her series of tweets this week).
Four months later, in January, there was a separate dispute about a Ford column due to run in the Daily Life section of the SMH and The Age.
Diary has been told by one senior SMH source the column was about “calls” for laws in Australia to be relaxed to allow women to carry guns.
The SMH operative claimed Ford was given “some unremarkable editorial feedback” on the column by her section editor. “Her decision to resign was a surprise to everyone here,” the high-level SMH source said.
And what of Nine, or “new Fairfax”? Did its senior management play any role in her departure? Diary has been told the first anyone at the Nine network’s Willoughby bunker knew of Ford’s resignation was Wednesday afternoon, after she resigned on Tuesday night.
Ford tweeted at the end of last week that she had picked up some work at Morry Schwartz’s The Saturday Paper and at ABC Life, the public broadcaster’s lifestyle site.
Keeping up with Jones
Since last week’s item about 2GB’s Alan Jones, there have been some developments on making a deal with the high-profile broadcaster.
Conversations have started about Jones’s contract, with Diary hearing Nine boss Hugh Marks’s preference is for Jones’s current $4.5 million-a-year contract to be renewed.
But under the current structure of Macquarie Media, the decision is not solely for Marks to make.
Macquarie remains a separately listed company.
While Nine is its majority owner with 54.5 per cent, and therefore has the biggest say, it is just one of several Macquarie shareholders that also include John Singleton, Mark Carnegie and Jones himself.
Instead of Marks, it is Macquarie Media CEO Adam Lang who has to make the final decision on whether to offer Jones a deal.
Marks’s apparent support may push Lang over the line on that. However, any offer from Macquarie could possibly come with terms and conditions attached, following a high-profile defamation judgment brought down against Jones and 2GB last year.
Ultimately, the final outcome of negotiations could ultimately come down to Jones himself.
The big question is whether Jones will choose to accept any new terms and conditions Lang wants to put on his contract.
BuzzFeed feels fallout
As the fallout from last week’s bloodbath at BuzzFeed continues, questions have arisen about whether the digital media group will keep its coveted position on the judging board for Australia’s most prestigious journalism awards, the Walkleys.
Walkley Foundation chief executive, Louisa Graham, hints to Diary that if BuzzFeed lays off all or most of its local journalists, its position on the board may have to be reviewed.
“They’re on the Walkley judging board because they’ve got an operation that employs Australian journalists,” Graham says. “If that changes, the board would have to make an assessment on it.”
BuzzFeed’s place judging on the Walkleys board has been held since 2017 by its Australian boss Simon Crerar.
Graham defends the decision to have BuzzFeed represented in judging the Walkleys: “The Walkley judging board is representative of the Australian media landscape, and Simon brings a digital expertise from a company that has employed a number of Australian journalists.”
There was another twist in the tale late in the week, with well-sourced speculation emerging that Crerar may himself be looking to take a redundancy from BuzzFeed.
When Diary reached Crerar on the weekend, he stopped well short of denying it.
“We’re currently in a consultation process,” he told us. “I’ll have more to share in coming days. While this is a sad moment, I’m confident BuzzFeed will survive and thrive in the future.”
Fassnidge follows Ramsay recipe
Seven has secretly hatched long-term plans to make celebrity chef Colin Fassnidge the Gordon Ramsay of Australian television, Diary can reveal.
Fassnidge’s big promotion comes as the network fast-tracks a bold bid to breathe fresh life into My Kitchen Rules, once the country’s top-rating TV show.
Seven surprised media watchers late last year by announcing two seasons of MKR would screen in 2019 for its 10th anniversary year.
Network bosses now plan to make MKR 2.0 (as the second season has been dubbed internally) a tour de force for Fassnidge as Australia’s answer to Ramsay, the hot-headed, foul-mouthed international uber-chef. Ramsay has built a food empire worth hundreds of millions by becoming a TV mentor to numerous emerging and struggling chefs.
The elevation of Fassnidge, currently a MKR judge, may be just the tonic the show needs. Last week, MKR lost the first key skirmishes of what will be a long 2019 ratings war between Seven and Nine, when it was beaten by an average of 189,000 viewers a night by Nine ratings juggernaut Married at First Sight.
While it still attracted a respectable average of 806,000 viewers a night in the five cities last week, Seven bosses have decided they need to bring something new to the traditional MKR template for the second season.
Diary hears that means the Fassnidge-hosted MKR 2.0 (to run later in 2019) will be a restaurant competition. It looks like being a cross between the now-defunct 2004 show My Restaurant Rules (which featured Curtis Stone as host) and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.
Fassnidge, in his guise as a Ramsay-style mentor, will be used to give tough love to aspiring chefs on the show, visiting struggling restaurants to help them reach their potential, as part of a competition with other kitchens.
Diary imagines there will be plenty of bleeping as Fassnidge cajoles the best out of his charges.
A network-wide promotional blitz heavily promoting Fassnidge is expected to be launched in the coming months. If it succeeds, the Fassnidge-hosted season may well become a trial run for future incarnations of MKR.
And how will regular MKR hosts Pete Evans and Manu Feildel be used in MKR 2.0? Apparently, they will still get plenty of airtime as both judges and mentors.
Seven bosses are fans of Fassnidge’s outspoken on-air persona. They believe he is ready to carry a show on the main channel on his shoulders, and that he will become increasingly important to the Seven brand going forward, given it has just launched a dedicated food channel.
MKR’s new menu
While the Fassnidge option will now be the main course on Seven’s kitchen table for MKR 2.0, two alternative formats were floated internally at the network before executives ultimately decided to back the Fassnidge restaurant-based version.
One was a virtual “Celebrity MKR”, involving Seven network personalities and others cooking competitively in their own homes.
The other option that was closely considered was a sort of “MKR All-Stars”, in which the show’s greatest heroes and villains over the past 10 years would have been brought back for a drama fuelled cook-off.
The new format is crucial for the second instalment of Seven’s ratings golden goose because of the risk of cannibalising the show’s overall ratings. There are big concerns that if it is too similar to the MKR season currently underway, the network could risk over-exposing the format.
Seven has in the past few weeks been hiring producers, editors and other staff for MKR 2.0, even advertising on industry Facebook sites for “experienced” staff for the next month.
Cashing in on Clive
The major TV and radio networks have been making doubly sure that they have a bulletproof way of getting paid for Clive Palmer’s bizarre multi-million-dollar ad blitz, which continued during both MKR and Married at First Sight last week.
Diary understands that means Palmer is shelling out for his ads upfront in cold, hard cash.
To coin the words of the Twisted Sister song that Palmer has shamelessly ripped off for his campaign jingle, the major networks aren’t gonna cop anything less.
Media companies could be excused for being worried about where the money is coming from. Palmer remains locked in a Queensland Supreme Court battle over the 2016 collapse of Queensland Nickel, which resulted in 800 job losses and left liquidators seeking hundreds of millions from the mining tycoon and others.
But with his current ad campaign, there have apparently been no such problems. One senior network source told Diary: “He volunteered to pay upfront, and we very happily accepted.”
That arrangement has proved financially lucrative, with Palmer seemingly leading a one-man revenue revival for major media companies, particularly Nine, Seven and Macquarie Media. He spent an extraordinary $3.5 million on TV and radio ads in the first 21 days of January, more than three months before the federal election is due.
Party’s passing parade
The media-heavy guest list at the annual Australia Day bash held this year by Lisa Wilkinson and Peter FitzSimons at their handsome Neutral Bay harbourside home reflected the media power couple’s evolving job affiliations.
That meant employees of the Sydney Morning Herald, where FitzSimons works, and the Ten Network, now Wilkinson’s employer, were high on the invitation list. However, Wilkinson’s former colleagues at Nine appeared to be largely left out this time around, just over a year after The Project host walked away from her gig at the Today show.
Wilkinson invited plenty of her new Ten buddies, including Studio 10’s Sarah Harris and her Sunday Project co-host Hamish MacDonald. Plenty of long-standing mates from Wilkinson’s magazine days at ACP also attended, including Mia Freedman and ex-Australian Women’s Weekly editor-in-chief Deborah Thomas.
But unsurprisingly, Karl Stefanovic was nowhere to be seen, and other Nine talent was thin on the ground, apart from Wilkinson’s ex-Today colleague Ben Fordham. However, Nine’s breakfast show apparently remained a significant talking point at the barbie.
From the former Fairfax side, there were SMH opinion writers Jacqueline Maley and Julia Baird, and former SMH columnist (and FitzSimons’ ex-2UE co-host) Mike Carlton, who was along with his partner, Four Corners supervising producer Morag Ramsay.
Completing an eclectic media mix at the Australia Day gathering were ex-ABC managing director Mark Scott, and the male half of WSFM’s Jonesy and Amanda, Brendan Jones.
Desk job for Lisa
Still on Wilkinson, the absence of Carrie Bickmore from Ten’s The Project on maternity leave will see the former Today co-host scale down her international celebrity interviews in the coming months.
There were jealous mutterings at rival networks last year when Wilkinson lured exclusive interviews with huge international names, such as Serena Williams (days after her much-debated US Open dummy spit), David Beckham, Celine Dion and Sally Field.
In 2018, Wilkinson was constantly on the Sydney/Los Angeles red-eye in between her hosting gigs on The Sunday Project, as she carved out a niche for getting the big interviews at her new network.
But Bickmore’s enforced on-air absence in the coming months means Wilkinson will be virtually chained to the desk as the main female host of weekday editions of The Project.
“While Carrie’s on maternity leave, we have good reason to have Lisa here, and not shuttling back and forth overseas,” a Ten insider tells Diary. “She will be the main female host Sunday to Wednesday while Carrie is away.”
The Sydney-based Wilkinson will be spending plenty of time in Melbourne hotels in the next few months. The Sunday Project, which unlike its weekday sibling is generally filmed in the harbour city, will set up temporary camp in Melbourne until April, while Ten’s Sydney studios are used to film other shows.
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