Rear Window columnist Joe Aston’s attempts to defect to News Corp are over

WHILE Fairfax journos consider strikes to score a pay rise, Rear Window’s Joe Aston used an imaginary offer from The Oz to raise his salary

THE Australian Financial Review’s Rear Window columnist, Joe Aston, complained today that Media Diary had not been tough enough on him.

Being attacked by Diary was like “being led to the firing squad only to find your executioners are chewing paper and armed only with blowguns.”

Challenge accepted.

Getting a few facts wrong is not surprising for Aston given his column usually features as many corrections each week as news items.

It was Aston, not Diary, that broke confidentiality about pay discussions with The Australian.

Aston used the so-called job offer, which never eventuated, as leverage for a pay rise at Fairfax in a year when his colleagues are resorting to strikes after being offered close to nothing for salary increases.

Indeed, he was so loose-lipped about his discussions with The Australian that word of it came back to us numerous times.

We first asked Fairfax Media’s news and business group director Sean Aylmer in June whether Aston had used an imaginary job offer from The Australian to negotiate a higher pay rise at The AFR.

Aylmer didn’t deny it. He wrote back: “Congratulations on the column. On Joe, I won’t comment on anyone’s remuneration.”

When yet another senior Fairfax executive complained last week that Aston had done well financially following discussions with The Australian, we thought it was time to set the record straight.

Text messages sighted by Diary show The Australian was only prepared to offer Aston a 25 per cent pay rise, taking his salary to $225,000 cash plus superannuation etc.

Aston had made it clear he was more than happy to leave Fairfax. But he wanted $400,000, which was rejected out-of-hand.

While there were informal text exchanges, no formal offer was ever made to Aston. The discussion stopped with his absurd request for a salary of $400,000.

This morning, Aston claimed The Australian’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Mitchell asked him to lunch last week. This was purely social after Aston made initial contact the weekend before last.

Management at News Corp would not have Aston in the building now, so there is no prospect of any future negotiation.

He will have to be content with his salary package at the AFR.

And while Aston’s bosses may have been misled during his last pay negotiations, Fairfax seems to have a bargain for an in-house spinner.

In response to our interviews with former Fairfax CEO, Brian McCarthy and businessman, John Singleton on August 11, Aston wrote one of his longest ever column items, a whole 551 words, sledging both executives.

In spin that came directly from Fairfax’s accident-prone PR woman, Sue Cato, Aston leapt to chief executive, Greg Hywood’s defence, writing of Singo: “Thirty years since his glory days writing ads for opposition leader Bob Hawke (the idea to use Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home for Qantas was not his, despite urban legend), the septuagenarian is suddenly a media industry polymath. He derides Hywood’s digital nous, despite his own major media asset being a talkback radio company, patronised overwhelmingly by purple-rinsed biddies.”

He then reiterated Hywood’s version of why McCarthy left Fairfax. Others had heard similar lines from Cato. Who is Hansard now, Joe?

In any case, The Fin’s business readers would not have bought the bitter company line. Singo has a well-established reputation for immense success as a businessman. Success he has repeated over and over again during his many decades in the industry.

Lastly, this Diarist’s salary was also wrong. But we’re not helping him to correct that one.