Nat Fyfe’s climate advice to Scott Morrison

Cartoon: Johannes Leak.

He is no Greta Thunberg, but Fremantle Dockers captain and Brownlow medallist Nat Fyfe had a light-hearted chip at Prime Minister Scott Morrison on climate change.

Fyfe said it may be PM Morrison didn’t need any advice as he was going pretty well. But while it was “easier said than done” to address climate change, maybe he could go a little harder.

Browlown medallist Nat Fyfe. Picture: Getty Images

Fyfe’s Dockers’ major sponsor is big greenhouse emitter Woodside, where AFL chairman Richard Goyder also presides over the board.

That got Diary thinking about this weekend’s NRL decider between the Sydney Roosters and the Canberra Raiders.

How will Morrison feel if Canberra get up and he has to award the trophy to the Huawei Raiders, given his decision to rule them out of participating in the new mobile network? Perhaps leave his mobile in the stands?

Scribes gather for grand final

This week’s media Diary comes to you, at least in part, from the Olympic Room at the MCG on Grand Final Day, where 700 of the AFL’s nearest and dearest were wined and dined.

It was a room of mixed emotions — and not just related to the result of the game. The happiest media execs in the room were News Victorian managing director for editorial Peter Blunden and Herald Sun editor Damon Johnston. Both are Tigers fans and were salivating at the prospect for a Richmond victory putting on tens of thousands of extra copies of the Hun.

But broadcaster Seven’s boss Kerry Stokes and son Ryan might not have been so happy. Ratings were down from the blow out result, but it was also the way the score accumulated. No goals and therefore no ad breaks until the last few minutes of the first quarter, and then a run of unanswered goals to Richmond that put the result beyond doubt and likely ensured fewer eyeballs were on all those Toyota HiLux ads.

MORE: John Stensholt at the AFL’s ultimate power lunch

English a Giants fan

Back in the Olympic room, rabid league fan and Daily Telegraph editor Ben English was spotted buying, on his way into the MCG, a Giants scarf to back the Sydney team on the day.

At the end of the function there were several Giants scarfs left behind on the back of chairs but Diary’s spy was not sure if one of them belonged to English.

Courier Mail editor Sam Weir, meanwhile, was overheard insisting the Brisbane Lions would have put on a better show on the big day than the GWS Giants, who knocked the Lions out of the finals two weeks earlier.

Weir is from SA and went to the same prestigious private school as AFL boss Gillon McLachlan and Giants captain Phil Davis. But, like a lot of expats, he seems to have given up on the local team, the ­Adelaide Crows.

Nine a bit of a no-show

While Kerry Stokes’ Seven Network and Patrick Delany at Foxtel are the broadcasters of AFL, the disappearance of newspaper publisher Fairfax Media into rival broadcaster Nine Entertainment raises issues for the AFL when inviting media execs to the function.

Nine broadcasters — aside from Eddie McGuire — were thin on the ground at the MCG, but two of Nine’s newspaper editors, The Australian Financial Review’s Michael Stutchbury and the Sydney Morning Herald’s Lisa Davies, were there cheering on the Giants.

Star writers leave Hun

Herald Sun editor Damon Johnson has had a good week, topped by his glee at the Tigers victory.

He was also on hand in Sydney last week to pick up a handful of awards for the Herald Sun at the News Media Awards.

But he still has a little Canberra challenge to deal with.

Just as the footy season wraps up, the Hun’s trio of hard-hitting Canberra reporters have all but gone. Rob Harris has joined the SMAge and Anthony Galloway is poised to replace David Wroe at the SMAge. James Campbell, the Melbourne-based national politics editor and regular Sky commentator, is moving to head up the Hun’s new investigative unit in Melbourne.

The tabloid boys were some of the best news-breaking journos in Canberra and led the airing of ­George Christensen’s questionable travels to The Philippines that were under AFP investigation.

Johnson has his work cut out to find similarly skilled writers to repopulate the Canberra gallery offices. But he tells Diary “plans are under way to ensure our agenda-setting coverage of national affairs continues”. Ellen Whinnett has returned from Europe, where she has been the Hun’s correspondent since 2016 and will be part of the new look team. Stephen Drill replaced her few months ago. Its expected other names will also be called to the national capital. Watch this space.

The traffic is not all Nine’s way. The SMH’s city editor, Jacob Saulwick, has called time on his media career and is heading off to practise the law.

Nice little AFL earner

Sports media publisher and broadcaster Pacific Star had accounts out on Friday that shed a little light on just what a profitable niche the AFL has become.

Pacific Star in 2018 shelled out a headline price of $8.1m for AFL Publications, which publishes the match day bible the AFL Record and is already well on the way to recouping its outlay.

That headline price shrinks to a cash outlay of $2.24m after adjustments including working capital and $2.25m of prepaid advertising retained by the AFL and another $2.35m of identifiable liabilities.

And what do they get in return? As well as the Footy Record — average weekly circulation 23,851 — and a few other related titles, AFL Publications generated revenue of $6.85m and a net profit of $2.27m.

It came to Pacific Star — owner of sports broadcaster SEN — via another deal last year, the merger with Craig Hutchison’s Croc­media in March 2018. Crocmedia has been an umbrella holder of AFL rights since 2016 and the sale to Pacific delivered the Walkley Award-winning former newspaper journo and broadcaster 49.4 million Pacific Star shares, making him the second biggest shareholder, with 24.4 per cent of the company, behind non-executive chairman Craig Coleman.

Hutchison is well ahead on the pay stakes. As chief executive of Pacific he took home $757,405 last financial year, including $222,339 in share-based payments on top of his fixed pay.

Diary expects Crocmedia and The Record to perform better than the other trade it did in 2018, the sale of Morrison Media Services.

Pacific sold the creator of the Frankie and Smith Journal publications for $2.4m and booked a $506,0000 profit on the sale.

But let’s not forget that it bought the business for $10.8m in 2014 when it was looking to diversify its portfolio away from sport.

It closed loss-making titles Slow, Surfing Life and White Horses in 2017 and the profit represents a gain on the written-down value of what was left.

Credlin heads south

Earlier this year Sky After Dark host Peta Credlin was linked to a move back to her home state of Victoria for a run at the federal election.

That never came off. But the move back to Melbourne has.

Peta Credlin. Picture: Getty Images

The former chief of staff to Tony Abbott was absent from screens this week as she packed up in Sydney and headed back to the southern capital. The Sky host is one of a number of high profile identities who have bought into the “Tower of Power” as The Eastbourne on the edge of the Fitzroy Gardens has been dubbed, with buyers including former Labor PM Paul Keating and lawyer Liberty Sanger.

Credlin will be back on air this week, this time from the Southbank precinct where she will be sharing studio space with Andrew Bolt, Rita Panahi, Derryn Hinch and others.

Diary gathers she’ll also be a regular visitor to Sydney for her weekly Sky show with 2GB breakfast host Alan Jones.

Most of the Sky broadcast infrastructure is in Sydney. But the offices on the banks of the Yarra where Credlin will be based are also home to Foxtel chair Siobhan McKenna and News Victorian managing director for editorial Peter Blunden.

Media support wobbly

Is it time to ask whether the federal government’s full-throated support for action to help the economics of commercial media might be weakening?

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s “almost” use of the term “fake news” to describe critics of his climate policies has already been well documented.

(Morrison accused climate activists and media of spreading “completely false” information about climate change, but when asked if it was “fake news’’, responded: “I’m not saying that”).

Less well covered (except in this fine journal) were the remarks of Communications Minister Paul Fletcher to a breakfast packed with media types on Wednesday morning about what the government plans to do with the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission recommendations from the digital platforms inquiry.

Standard Media Index, co-founded by Diary’s former colleague Jane Ratcliffe, released a statistical series to celebrate its 10th birthday. Fletcher was full of praise for SMI’s work and said it would be used to help inform the government’s response.

But it was some of his other comments that had media execs wondering if the government might not be as committed to the ACCC prescriptions as they initially hoped.

“(The data) tells some quite interesting stories, because there’s a conventional wisdom about the media and communications sector, which is that the new digital platforms are dominating and the traditional Australian businesses in the media sector dying,” Fletcher said.

“Of course, negative stories always get a good run … and some of those perspectives are very much what’s reflected in the recent Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s digital platforms review. What I think is interesting from the … data is that the story is a bit more nuanced than that.”

The comments followed the release of a report on advertising spending which revealed a ­decline for television, magazines and news media, but growth for radio, out-of-home and digital over the past decade.

Diary would hate to think that anyone in the media is giving Canberra too rosy a view of how the industry is coping with the digital onslaught.

Devil’s in the detail

Fletcher’s comments were certainly more nuanced than when he fronted the media to announce the government’s support for the ACCC report in July.

“The government recognises that news and journalism is an important public good and that with digital platforms collecting and using large volumes of personal information, consumers need to be properly informed about the data collected, how it is being used and by who,” Fletcher and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said in a joint statement.

“It therefore accepts the ACCC’s overriding conclusion that there is a need for reform — to better protect consumers, improve transparency, recognise power imbalances and ensure that substantial market power is not used to lessen competition in media and advertising services markets.”

Submissions are still coming in from the industry but it’s been notable the digital platforms have been very active in making their case to avoid the tougher recommendations such as an enforceable code of conduct between them and the traditional media, curbs for digital mergers and an investigation of the advertising technology industry.

A little while ago Google changed its algorithm to favour original news content and last week introduced changes to give publishers more control over how much of their content appears in search results.

And, of course, there was an interview with Sundar Pichai, the Google chief executive, in the national business daily on Friday, for which the reporter was flown to California at Google’s expense.

Nice new digs

Diary has always thought real estate is the most reliable barometer of how a company is faring.

And so it is with the media.

The multi-headed beast that is the Nine Entertainment Co will one day next year be moving into spruce new digs in an office tower in North Sydney.

Thus the paper union of the newspaper and television companies realised last December will be made manifest, with Nine moving out of its Willoughby offices cum studio cum Liberal Party fundraising venue.

The move for Fairfax is more of a two-step.

Fairfax has been headquartered at a five-story campus-style building at Pyrmont since 2008, bequeathed by its then property mogul and Mr Melbourne chairman, the late Ron Walker.

Opened with pomp and ceremony by prime minister Kevin Rudd, it has since been steadily colonised by Google’s Australian operations — which we wouldn’t dare suggest is a metaphor for what has happened to its revenue.

The takeover will be complete later this year when Fairfax moves out of the Google offices to interim digs across the road, ceding the last two floors to its digital overlords.

Just don’t refer to the temporary digs as the Seven building.

Diary hears Fairfax staffers are instead being told to refer to the red-brick harbourside rabbit warren formerly occupied by the Seven Network as the Revy building, as it was known for more than a century when it was occupied by the Royal Australian Navy.

Google has overrun a trio of buildings on the mini peninsula flanking the Star Casino.

But the one that Nine newspapers will be keeping warm is the only one it actually owns.

ABC kicking goals

Following news of ABC placing its iview streaming service on the Foxtel platform — joining Netflix and SBS — Diary hears there may be movement on another piece of common interest.

As the Football Federation of Australia approaches the end of its four-year, $160m broadcast deal with Fox Sports and SBS, it is rumoured the FFA will announce a new deal with the ABC.

An A-League game would be broadcast on ABC TV at 5pm on Saturday while the W-League would return to the network at 4pm on Sundays under a possible two-year deal.

None of the commercial networks bid for the rights so the ABC is also in the running to pick up free-to-air rights for Socceroos qualifiers and the Matildas international friendlies.

Fox Sports would continue to broadcast all A-League, W-League, Socceroos and Matildas matches via Foxtel, helping to meet a commitment to niche and women’s sports.

Deegan off to NRL

Lastly, a fond farewell to Liz Deegan, who called time on a 30-year career at News on Friday.

A former UK correspondent and editor of the Sunday Mail in Brisbane, Deegs is heading off to the National Rugby League as chief corporate affairs officer.

You would never say a job with the NRL will be easy.

But she’ll have the off-season to get settled in. And if a career at News that ended as general manager of corporate affairs and relationships doesn’t make her eminently qualified to succeed, nothing will.