Media Diary: ARN secretly investigates replacing human hosts with fake presenters
The media giant is asking listeners if they would ‘miss’ or even ‘care’ if presenters such as Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ were eventually dumped and ‘replaced by an artificial voice’.
Forget video, it turns out it’s artificial intelligence that killed the radio star – or, at the very least, is threatening to kill them, bury them in a shallow grave out back and assume their on-air identities.
Diary can reveal the nation’s leading metropolitan radio network, ARN, is investigating axing on-air presenters and replacing them with robotic, AI-generated hosts as part of an extreme cost-cutting purge that will irrevocably alter the face – and voice – of Australian radio.
The media giant, which owns the top-rating KIISFM and Gold FM networks and the country’s No.1 podcasting publisher, iHeart, is currently home to some of the country’s best-known and paid presenters, including Kyle Sandilands, Jackie “O” Henderson, Amanda Keller, Brendan Jones and Christian O’Connell.
And while the headline-making hosts have been critical to the company’s enduring success and are presumably safe (at least for now), behind the scenes, ARN has been asking listeners if they would “miss” – or even “care” – if the networks’ radio hosts and news, weather, traffic and sports presenters were eventually dumped and “replaced by an artificial voice”.
In fact, that particular line of inquiry is among a series of very troubling questions featured in a monthly survey fired off to key members of ARN’s national audience database last Friday.
Diary managed to get its grubby mitts on one of the questionnaires which was emailed to loyal listeners of the organisation’s popular Hot FM outlet on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.
As part of the survey, they were asked to what extent they agreed or disagreed with nine revealing statements about AI-generated radio hosts, including: “If I cannot tell that a radio voice hosting a show is artificial (ie sounds like a robot) then I do not care”; “I have no problems with an artificial voice hosting a radio show compared to a real human voice”; and, “I can tell the difference between human and AI voices”.
Worryingly, it seems many listeners would actually have to say that they “strongly disagree” with that final suggestion.
After all, ARN quietly employed an AI-generated host, known simply as “Thy”, to present a four-hour weekday hip-hop radio show on its CADA station in Sydney for six months before the ruse was revealed by Diary’s media-savvy colleague Stephanie Coombesback in April.
Naturally enough, the fake presenter was modelled off one of the network’s beancounters and created in tandem with international voice-cloning outfit ElevenLabs before being unleashed on the airwaves with absolutely zero disclosures. (Oddly enough, the only disclaims on the CADA’s shows website remains a bullet point noting “Thy makes use of AI for her radio show” rather than disclosing that Thy actually is AI.)
ARN defended the project at the time ... sort of ... before adding: “While the trial has offered valuable insights, it’s also reinforced the unique value that personalities bring to creating truly compelling content.”
While that statement sounded very much like a ringing endorsement for the longevity of real-life human radio hosts, if you actually read it again ... it’s not.
It notes only that “personalities” are important.
Whether audiences are OK with those personalities being artificially constructed in a computer lab, well, that’s what ARN’s surveys are all about.
Stay tuned – sounds like things are going to get ugly.
Bev’s second coming
Ten’s ironically named 10 News+ has claimed its first casualty, with the network’s content boss, Dan Monaghan, revealing he is parting ways with the country’s largely overlooked commercial television outlet just months after the program’s disastrous launch.
The popular television executive, who had been in the role since 2021, last week announced he was quitting Ten and making a beeline for a similar content gig at Aussie streaming service Binge, after Wendy Moore was promoted up the Foxtel food chain.
Monaghan’s departure comes after Ten sources repeatedly told Diary he was being targeting with much of the blame for 10 News+’s diabolically poor reception (and even helpfully offered to spell out his name for us) following the brutal axing of its vastly more expensive – and popular – predecessor, woke nightly gibberfest The Project.
Hosted by Seven News refugees and novice presenters Denham Hitchcock and Amelia Brace, the new show has been derisively dubbed The High School Project by TV execs, given its cheap sets, amateurish production values and questionable news judgments.
Worse yet, it continues to attract a mere fraction of the audience that tuned in for The Project and its more polished hosts – including Waleed Aly, Sarah Harris, Lisa Wilkinsonand Peter van Onselen – along with Steve Price.
Indeed, while The Project always rated in the top 20 most-watched shows each night, 10 News+ rarely features in the top 50 and has a national average audience of less than 100,000 people (compared to the more than one million that tune into both Nine and Seven’s rival nightly news offerings).
Little wonder Monaghan made the decision to jump. It follows a similar decision by another key Ten exec, content acquisitions boss Azar Marashian.
It’s quite the predicament for Ten’s top boss, Beverley McGarvey, for whom the departures come at the most inconvenient of times.
But fear not, we’re told, all is not lost – turns out she knows just who to turn to help save the day: herself.
“Now that Dan and Azar are gone, Bev has been telling people that she is going to dive back into content,” one network insider told Diary. “There is now no one left there – except her – with any programming experience.”
To give McGarvey her due, Ten’s last halcyon days came under her reign as head of programming, when she oversaw the launch of MasterChef Australia, Australian Survivor, I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!, Have You Been Paying Attention, Gogglebox Australia, and, of course, the show she just canned, The Project.
So she certainly knows good content when she sees it, which makes the continued existence of 10 News+ all the more baffling.
Cash splash at Nine
Move over Jerry Maguire, it’s Nine Entertainment chief Matt Stanton’s turn to start screaming: “Show me the money!”
Having finalised the sale of Nine’s controlling 60 per cent stake in real estate listing firm Domain to US property giant CoStar for a cool $1.5bn, Stanton is ready to turn his attention to the company’s next prospective sale: its talkback radio division.
Ongoing speculation suggests Nine will look to offload its national AM network, including 2GB in Sydney, 3AW in Melbourne, Brisbane’s 4BC and 6PR in Perth, while Stanton continues to make doe eyes at SCA and its more profitable Hit and Triple M networks in the background.
Meanwhile, Australian Digital Holdings has already given Nine 42 million reasons to sell them the talkback network – in cash, upfront.
Nine sources confirmed to Diary that ADH had not only lodged a formal offer for the radio business with the media giant’s chair, Catherine West, on March 10, but that company’s bosses also promised “all proceeds” of the $42m deal would be paid “upfront”.
What’s more, ADH chairman Maurice Newman and chief executive Jack Bulfin insisted in the submission they would continue to invest in an “attractive ongoing affiliation” between Nine and ADH with “synergies” across sales and news programming.
Although, the ADH bid does fall a little short of Nine’s desired $50m price tag (even if its own newspaper, the Australian Financial Review, helpfully suggests the business radio division is only worth half that), word is they could up that bid and that the two parties could well come to terms once due diligence was completed. Let’s see.
Ace up their sleeve
Any potential Nine Radio deal almost certainly won’t come with the right to own and operate all of the media giant’s AM stations.
Diary can reveal Ace Radio is on the verge of renewing its multi-year lease on the outfit’s secondary capital city outlets along the eastern seaboard.
The radio company, which is privately owned by Victorian husband and wife duo Rowland and Judy Paterson, took control of the Nine-owned Sydney talkback station 2UE, Magic 1278 in Melbourne and Brisbane’s 4BH – under a four-year deal on January 14, 2022.
Since then, they have turned the string of metro stations into a popular classic hits network, with 4BH now even attracting double the audience share that tunes into the Nine-run 4BC.
In fact, Ace’s management has been so successful, Nine apparently wanted to up the rent ... but we’re more than reliably informed that won’t be happening and that Ace will be triggering its extension option on the stations at the current rate in the coming weeks.
What’s more, the Patersons are prepared to work closely with new landlords in the coming months, were a sale to go ahead.
Freshwater runs deep
Who cares what people say? Certainly not the bosses at the Australian Financial Review.
Diary hears the slimline business tabloid is sticking with pollsters Freshwater Strategy even though the firm fundamentally misread voter intentions in the lead-up to the federal election.
Fun fact: Freshwater’s final poll for the AFR just prior to the national ballot concluded Labor would attract a modest 1.5-point swing and likely form a minority government with about 76 seats. That prediction was a far cry from the electoral bloodbath that actually played out. Unfortunately, the Liberals, which forked out $1.5m for Freshwater founder Michael Turner’s analysis, based much of their campaigning on his flawed findings, to their obvious detriment.
Not that any of that fazes the AFR’s top brass, or so we hear.
Although we noticed polling had been curiously absent in the news sheet in the wake of the May 3 election, Denison St insiders told us the masthead was in discussions with Freshwater about undertaking a new poll as early next month.
The AFR is not the only media outfit sticking with Freshwater – the pollsters have also retained partnerships with free UK business tab City AM and one-time Fairfax Media stablemate, regional New Zealand paper The Post, in Wellington.
So it seems the Fin is in suitably prestigious company.
The Groan-iad
If you thought the lyrics to Sting’s hit tune Every Breath You Take were a little stalkerish, try reading the Guardian. The niche news site can’t seem to stop writing obsessively about News Corp.
Just last week, the site’s weekly media wrap was again largely dedicated to stories about the biggest employer of journalists in the country, with 80 per cent of the items centred around the company (we know, we know, they’re slipping, right?)
One that caught our attention was a piece about a ruling by the Australian Press Council’s finding on a feature the inimitable Alan Howe had penned for this masthead back in January about the conflict in the Middle East. Of course, that had all been published by the Oz earlier in the week, so it was hardly news. But it did strike us as somewhat hypocritical.
After all, unlike The Australian and its fellow News Corp publications, the Grauniad refuses to sign up to the APC and its standards.
What are they so worried about? It’s hard to tell, it’s not like the press council has any rules against unchecked sanctimony or anything.
When we reached out to the Guardian, they told us that, like seemingly everything else in life, they were also the ones best-placed to handle grievances about their own publication through their Trust-appointed “readers’ editor”, Elisabeth Ribbans.
On the move
Mark down the date in your diaries for future reference because the great journo migration has begun – for this year, at least.
The ABC’s former chief defence correspondent Andrew Greene observed the end of his 15-year career with the public broadcaster in Canberra last week.
Demonstrating the respect that the news veteran commands among his parliamentary press gallery peers (despite that now long-forgotten press junket drama), pretty much the entire ABC Canberra bureau was spotted at the Statesman Hotel (where legendary political corro Laurie Oakes was famously leaked the federal budget back in 1980) for his send-off last Thursday.
Insiders host David Speers, federal politics editor David Lipson, national affairs corro Jane Norman, foreign affairs reporter Stephen Dziedzic, 7.30 political editor Jacob Greber and a catalogue of junior journos and crew all turned up to wish Greene well in his new job at Seven West Media.
We hear there would have been even more attendees had the festivities not clashed with a farewell bash for The Australian’s equally popular young newshound Rhiannon Down across town at that other iconic Canberra watering hole, the Kingston Hotel.
The enterprising journo, who is off to London, was joined by some of the country’s leading news breakers, including the Oz’s political editor Geoff Chambers, foreign affairs and defence corro Ben Packham, senior political scribe Sarah Ison, Nine’s press gallery journo of the year Paul Sakkal, The Daily Telegraph’s chief political corro Lachlan Leeming and his Daily Mail counterpart Max Aitchison.
There was plenty to toast with both Leeming and Aitchison also on the move and heading in the direction of the lush green pastures that await at the Oz’s newsroom.
The farewell played out mere metres away from Trade and Tourism Minister Don Farrell, Minister for Industry and Innovation Tim Ayres, Assistant Agriculture and Resources Minister Anthony Chisholm and Labor senator Raff Ciccone who had separately gathered at the pub to knock the top off a few cold ones.
Back in Sydney, Aitchison’s Daily Mail colleague Stephen Johnson was also enjoying his own send-off, with the news site’s senior economics reporter set to join Seven West Media editor-in-chief Chris Dore’s pdf newspaper, The Nightly.
Johnson entertained staff with a parody song set to the tune of the Ajax Spray and Wipe advertising jingle that paid homage to the news site’s past life as a “cut-and-paste” operation under former global chief Martin Clarke.
“I was writing to a headline, I was given on its deadline, I had to file fast, had the News Ed on my arse” he crooned for amused colleagues. ”Had to file it quickly, was feeling very sickly, it’s ‘Cut And Paste All Purpose’, it covers every surface!”
We hear the Mail’s bosses, past, present and emerging, all got a nod in the sketch, including founding editor and current day Nine newspapers’ executive editor Luke McIlveen, his successor Barclay Crawford, who has since moved to New York to run the Mail’s US operation, current editor Felicity Hetherington and her deputy Dan Piotrowski.
The Mail’s bosses are unlikely to be too upset about two strong reporters being poached, though, because their former journos seem to have developed a knack of finding their way back to its Kent Street newsroom of late.
We last month revealed Sydney crime queenTita Smith was returning to the Mail after just six months at Seven’s short-staffed 7news.com.au site.
Now, fellow former Mail scribe Charlotte Karp is completing the last piece of the great migration puzzle and is also returning to the masthead after an impressive year-long stretch on the national news network at Holt Street.
ABC gets defensive
The ABC has finally settled on a new defence correspondent after going without for months (fortunately it’s not like a war was going on in Ukraine or the Middle East or anything).
Diary can reveal Olivia Caisley, who changed channels and joined the ABC from Sky News in the lead-up to the federal election, has been tapped to take on the coveted role.
In typical ABC fashion, the top brass announced her “acting” appointment (while the obligatory “formal” selection process was conducted) to staff on Friday – even though Caisley was on leave and presumably left to learn of the details second-hand.
We’ve absolutely no doubt the rising star will immediately prove herself more than up for the challenge.
After all, like many of the ABC’s most prolific journalists, including Four Corners incomparable former executive producer Sally Neighbour, global affairs editor John Lyons, news presenter Patricia Karvelas and Four Corners reporter Louise Milligan, Caisley honed her skills while working on the Oz.
Child’s play at Aunty
And if there’s any question about the glacial pace at which things move inside the ABC, this is it.
More than a year after Libbie Doherty stepped down as the public broadcaster’s head of children and family content, ABC management are still searching for a successor.
The award-winning television boss quit the ABC in May 2024 after an outstanding reign during which she commissioned a string of hit programs including global behemoth Bluey – and even acted as the phenomenally successful series’ executive producer.
ABC family commissioning editor Mary-Ellen Mullane stepped in to replace Doherty on an “interim” basis last June while the broadcaster searched for a full-time successor ... 15 months on, that search continues.
The ABC’s managing director, Hugh Marks, last month said he wanted to focus on commissioning the “next Bluey” as part of his strategy for the organisation’s future.
If it takes more than a year to simply replace the exec who commissioned the last Bluey at the ABC, replicating the show’s success could be quite a long time coming.
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