Channel Seven enjoyed historic television ratings of more than 7 million people for the Matildas’ semi-final match this week but the News Corp tabloids were not going to miss out on the nation’s soccer fever, rebranding three mastheads the Herald Sam in Melbourne, the Daily Tillygraph in Sydney and the Kerr-ier Mail in Brisbane on the day of the Matildas v Lionesses match.
Coincidentally, Herald Sun editor Sam Weir had at least one day of his tenure when he could say he’d made the paper truly his own.
The national head of PR at News Corp, Genevieve Brammall, explained a four-part Sam Kerr mega-poster series sparked chatter on Triple M Breakfast that the Courier Mail’s coverage of the Matildas had captured so much attention around Queensland it was “evolving into The Kerr-ier Mail”.
Brammall says she leapt on the idea and told editor Chris Jones, who embraced the moniker and re-made the masthead.
Snap now, pay later
While all media carried photographs of excited Matildas fans on Wednesday night as they gathered across the nation to watch the match, the Murdoch tabloids went one step further.
The Daily Telegraph had a “Matildas semi-final fan gallery: 300+ faces” of people who went to watch the match at Sydney’s Stadium Australia. But if any of those fans had clicked on the gallery to see their photo they would have hit a paywall.
Weekly Beast can reveal that the multiple fan images – hundreds of photographs on each website – are part of a subscription strategy to drive people to sign up to see their photo online.
News Corp sources said the various newsdesks will send an editorial assistant with an iPhone – or hire a freelance photographer – to a big event to take multiple photographs of punters, grab their names for the captions and contact details to send them a link. The photographer will explain that if they want to see the photo published online they will have to subscribe to the paper.
The giant galleries are not just for big sporting events. The subscription tactic is used for fashion events, graduations and even the Melbourne marathon, where one person took 900 photos of the runners over five hours.
Sources say not only do the galleries generate new subscriptions but they push traffic up when people scroll through to look for their pics. It’s the modern equivalent of giving away copies of the newspaper at airports to bump circulation.
Mushroom mystery
Channel Nine wasted no time getting a TV special to air about the story which has made headlines around the world: the mushroom poisoning.
The woman who cooked the lunch that left three people dead and a fourth fighting for his life, Erin Patterson, says the media has portrayed her as an evil witch and she has been trapped in her own home.
Media are camped out on the street where she lives and the Daily Mail has called her the “death cap mushroom cook”.
Paterson has said she is “devastated” by the deaths, also went to hospital after eating the meal and that she had bought the fungi from two stores. Police are investigating the deaths and previously said they were keeping an “open mind” about the incident.
Veteran TV host Liz Hayes is fronting Under Investigation’s episode on the mysterious saga, which has been rushed to air and will screen on Wednesday at 8.40pm.
“Liz Hayes and her team of investigators probe the mystery gripping Australia and the world,” the TV program guide says. “Three dead, another clinging to life, after a mushroom lunch in small-town Victoria.”
War on woke
The Daily Telegraph’s editor-at-large, Matthew Benns, was very on-brand with his unique take on Matildas fever, declaring that the team had freed us from woke-ness.
“Somehow in the woke world of not being allowed to actually enjoy anything or, heaven forbid, celebrate winning, the Matildas have given us our mojo back,” Benns declared.
The editor-at-large was relieved the Matildas didn’t refuse to sing the national anthem and “spark disunity” like the Americans.
“By contrast, in the US former President Donald Trump linked sport to politics and blamed the US team’s loss on its championing of LGBTQ rights.”
Trump wrote “WOKE EQUALS FAILURE” on Truth Social.
Soccer is anti-woke in Australia, and too woke in America – it’s a lot to take in.
Context is key
The literary editor of the Sunday Times, Johanna Thomas-Corr, has called out Penguin Random House for creatively editing her review of Jordan Peterson’s book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. She wrote the review when she was a critic for the New Statesman and she says the publisher’s back page blurb of quotes is a “gross misrepresentation”.
The Thomas-Corr quotes attributed to her are: “Genuinely enlightening and often poignant … Here is a father figure who takes his audience seriously. And here is a grander narrative about truth, being, order and chaos that stretches back to the dawn of human consciousness”.
I don’t have it in me to write some causally witty thing about how horrifying this is. The quote on the back of Jordan Peterson’s paperback is a gross misrepresentation of my 2,000+ word New Statesman review of his book. It should be removed. pic.twitter.com/vxzC2k6KpL
— Johanna Thomas-Corr (@JohannaTC) August 15, 2023
We looked at Thomas-Corr’s 2021 review to see what the publisher had excised to make a bad review look glowing.
Here are some choice quotes: “It is a lumpy soup of bromides about marriage … It reads more like a compendium of stodgy Sunday sermons delivered by a fire-and-brimstone preacher than a conventional self-help manual or political polemic … [there are] petty jibes at young environmentalists, censorious judgements about women who want babies after the age of 29, and hypocritical tutting at couples who cohabit before marriage.”
Thomas-Corr is not the only one to object.
James Marriott’s review of the Peterson’s book in the Times said Peterson should stick to YouTube videos and in a now-deleted tweet Marriott described it as “the most negative thing I have ever written”.
But that didn’t stop the publisher from featuring a line of it on the jacket which made it seem positive: “A philosophy of the meaning of life... the most lucid and touching prose Peterson has ever written”.
A doctor in the house?
A federal politics transcript sent to journalists this week had Sky News host Sharri Markson asking Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie a question about the Indigenous voice to parliament from the perspective of someone who was “a constitutional lawyer” and had “a PhD in the subject”.
Weekly Beast was among those who read the transcript and wondered if McKenzie had been hiding her academic credentials all these years or if Markson had got it wrong.
As it turned out, neither was true. Markson did not ask McKenzie any such thing. The transcript was wrong, and appeared to have mixed up two different interviews.
Unfortunately, the Australian Financial Review’s legal writer Michael Pelly published an article online on Thursday – Does Bridget McKenzie really have a PhD in constitutional law? – about the bizarre question which had to be taken down and corrected.
“The story relied on a transcript provided to the media by the Labor MP and Assistant Minister Matt Thistlethwaite,” a correction stated. “The transcript was incorrect, and the story has been retracted.”
