Nine digital content chief Helen McCabe’s secret to success

For every question I throw her way, Nine exec Helen McCabe answers articulately, with confidence. Except one. | PODCAST

Nine executive Helen McCabe. Picture: John Feder

For every question I throw her way, Nine digital content supremo Helen McCabe answers it articulately, with confidence, thoughtfulness and lean-in brio. Except one.

For example, how does the journalist-turned-executive keep landing jobs for which she has little experience, such as editing The Australian Women’s Weekly (her first magazine role) and her current job, running nine.com.au?

“I don’t know,” she responds lightheartedly. “Maybe I’m just really like a bloke?”

The exception is Fairfax. Nine has bought the venerated newspaper publisher for $2.16 billion, so what role will McCabe play?

McCabe tells The Australian’s Behind the Media podcast that she will be examining Fairfax’s digital assets. Many of these, particularly its news and lifestyle sites, will tie in well with nine.com.au, which is desperate to knock news.com.au off the perch to be No 1.

“That is on my to-do list to think about, but I haven’t,” McCabe says. The deal completes in December, she has been busy launching paid digital initiative Future Women, “so I’m conscious that making any remarks on that would be kind of inappropriate, really”.

“But look, we’re incredibly excited at Nine. By the possibilities and any conversations I’ve had with friends at Fairfax, they are excited too.”

Video looks set to be a key component, she mentions.

What about running the Fairfax print titles? I don’t mention this to her but several media executives assume that she will.

“Would that make you happy?” she laughs in response to my suggestion that would make her the boss of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald executive editor James Chessell, whom she knows well.

But Nine executives have clearly been told not to frighten the horses before the deal clears the regulator. “Look, I can’t stress enough that that is just not something I can comment on.”

McCabe is critical of the ABC’s new lifestyle site, ABC Life, which in some ways is a direct competitor to Nine’s female-focused website 9Honey.

“When the ABC is being attacked on a number of levels already, I feel a bit protective of it, to some extent on the public-interest journalism side,” she says.

“So to divert resources from their capacity to tell stories or investigate stories or travel to tell stories to me is a little bit baffling and a bit disappointing.”

ABC Life will also compete with Future Women, the digital project for “forward-thinking women” who will pay from between $7 a month to $3000 a year.

“The quick answer is that it’s a club and you can access it wherever you want.”

McCabe, who says she has a minor stake in the business and the idea, dissects her audience for the premium product. There are the Generation Z women hungry for content to help get on in the world, C-suite women at the top of their careers and aiming to stay there, and a much larger middle group “whom I am really interested in” — returnees from raising a family into a world that has moved a little bit beyond their comfort zones.

Will future women want to pay up to $3000 a year? “Well, we’ll find out.”

For those that don’t, there is nine.com.au’s free 9Honey lifestyle site. And people paid for her magazines, she points out.

McCabe tends to fend off questions about how tough she is and if there is steel, which many say there is, it is well sheathed while we talk.

“I have days where I’m really confident and days where I’m not at all. I’m just trying something, and it’s probably ambitious, and I cross my fingers that it works,” she says.

After working for Seven and then News Corp in the Canberra Press Gallery, McCabe spent two years in the London bureau, before heading to the backbench of The Australian, then moving ­upstairs to be deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph during the infamous Pauline Hanson fake nude photo scandal. From there she was appointed editor in chief of The Australian Women’s Weekly in 2009.

“So I remember walking into the Weekly and thinking if I was walking into the floor of a newspaper, I’d have no problems at all. But I had no idea about magazines. I guess my advice to anyone listening to this is don’t let that stop you.

“If you’ve got a core confidence in the core of the job and that is finding a story and putting it on to the platform then that’s all that matters. That’s what I’ve always had confidence in.”

That confidence was shaken in 2009 when The Sunday Telegraph, under editor Neil Breen, splashed on its front page nude photos of the One Nation leader that quickly turned out to be fake. “Every single step along the way there was a mistake made,” McCabe admits.

“I often to say to young journos, something like this happens at some point in your career, and it was devastating to all of us that we got it so wrong. And it is at the forefront of my mind whenever I make big calls. We regretted it enormously and we will be asked about it our entire careers, which is not great.”

As a result McCabe is more likely to applaud editors taking brave decisions, particularly as the blowback for mistakes is now so vicious on social media.

“There’s an assumption that we are always wrong, there is an assumption that if there is anyone to blame, blame the media.

“ Which to me, as a committed lifelong journo to my DNA, is worrying. Because most journalists go into the profession to do really great work. To have quality journalists treated poorly in the eco-chamber of social media because belief in the profession has been so undermined in the broader community is alarming to me.”

When McCabe was a Seven News political correspondent in the Canberra press gallery in 1996, she picked up a fax to learn she had been sacked. She was walked from the building. It made her alive to the possibility that no one owns a position.

“I think that’s a really good thing to be aware of. It’s not your entitlement. It’s a privilege to work in media and it’s a privilege to edit products and that was the lesson I took from it.

“I probably got a bit tougher.”