The News Corp tabloids and news.com.au have been running The Home Front all week, a sponsored housing special which kicked off on Monday with gloomy front pages across the nation declaring the “Great Australian Dream” of owning your own home was “in tatters”.
The six unsmiling young Australians pictured on the front pages of the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and their stablemates were not subjects plucked from the general population for interviews about their struggles with renting and the cost of living – they were the company’s own cadet journalists.
“Young Australians are at the coalface of Australia’s housing crisis so we tapped into our network of cadet reporters to power our Home Front series,” the papers said.
One cadet said she would never own a home and would rent for life. “If I decided to purchase a home or apartment, I would be in debt and any life changes or health issues could create serious financial hardship,” she wrote.
The whole exercise was sponsored by CommBank, complete with the bank’s yellow brand colours incorporated into the title of the series, Our National Housing Special.
The main story was based on a survey of 1,000 Australians conducted by an in-house research arm of News Corp called the Growth Distillery, in partnership with consultants SEC Newgate.
Much of the blame for the housing crisis was sheeted home to the government and the “intense public debate over federal Labor’s shock $77 billion tax hikes”.
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“The consumer price index has risen by nearly 20 per cent since Anthony Albanese came to power four years ago,” readers were told.
Wednesday’s papers offered gen Z tips to get into the property market. Tip number six was how to negotiate to increase your wage: “Check the market rate for your role, document what you’ve delivered, then book a conversation with your boss. Two women I know did exactly this, prepared together for an hour, and walked out with a combined $37,000 pay rise.”
We can’t wait to see how many of the company’s cadets take up their own advice and pull off a pay rise this big. For the record, News Corp recruitment ads offer cadetships that pay about $65,000.
Courting the wrong man
Readers of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age’s CBD column were quite surprised to read that the premier of Western Australia, Roger Cook, was going to launch Josh Frydenberg’s memoir, A Grateful Son, next month.
After all, Cook has been the Labor leader in WA since 2023 and Frydenberg is a former federal treasurer and high-profile Liberal.
Well we didn’t have to wonder for long, because CBD published a correction the next day: “An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that WA premier Roger Cook would attend Josh Frydenberg’s book launch. Former premier Richard Court will attend.”
Court was the Liberal premier from 1993 to 2001.
Chexit leaves hard feelings
It took about 24 hours for the resignation of the editor-in-chief of the Australian Financial Review, James Chessell, last Wednesday to unravel spectacularly.
Nine Publishing’s managing director, Tory Maguire, told the newsroom the AFR editor, Cosima Marriner, would replace Chessell, and his last day would be 12 October as he had resigned to join the former AFR columnist Joe Aston at his media startup, Rampart.
No surprises there as Chessell and Aston are close, having worked together on the staff of the Liberal minister Joe Hockey, but the speed at which Chessell jumped after just two years at the helm angered the troops.
Under Chessell’s editorship the former Rear Window columnist had signed a sweetheart deal with the Fin to write a column a month in return for the not inconsiderable support of Nine’s legal team. “There is no indication this arrangement will change,” the Age and the SMH reported on Wednesday.
By Friday Chessell was out of the door, along with Aston’s monthly column. Aston was put on notice that he had a few months to find himself a new legal team. All bets were off.
This extraordinary backflip was the result of an uprising of sorts on the floor of the AFR, where it has to be said Chessell was not as popular as the more benign character of Michael Stutchbury had been for 13 years.
Staff told Weekly Beast they felt Chessell had been a disruptive force – in his address he said some journalists would be relieved to see him go – and then had betrayed them to join a rival. They did not want him staying on for two weeks with access to the financial daily’s newslist. After all, he was about to edit another business publication.
Nine has always denied it, but staff see Rampart as a direct competitor to the AFR and believe it should not have been given the legal and editorial support it was.
At a town hall on Monday some staff voiced their concern over Chessell’s management style and Marriner said she would be a different type of manager.
This week Rampart poached another Nine journalist, Nick Bonyhady, the business editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. Bonyhady has relinquished his title and gone back to reporting while he works out his notice.
Nine’s sinking feeling
The near revolt at the AFR is small beer when it comes to the overall pain being felt at the moment at Australia’s biggest media company, Nine Entertainment.
In recent weeks 30 journalists have taken redundancy from the SMH and the Age after the company said it had to make cuts due to the “extreme state of disruption because of AI”. Nine is stripping out more than $160m in costs over a three-year period as it revamps its business.
Last week Amanda Laing, who was brought in to run a new streaming and broadcast division just 18 months ago, was made redundant. The chief executive, Matt Stanton, said the division, made up of the Nine Network, 9Now app and streaming platform Stan, would be subsumed into the group. With free-to-air television advertising in steep decline, Laing was under pressure.
Just five years ago under Hugh Marks, now the ABC’s boss, Nine was worth $5bn. Under Stanton it has fallen to $1.04bn.
The share price is down 42% over the past 12 months, and has been in freefall since early September, down to 68c on Thursday.
A giant of news
There are not many news chiefs who were as loved and admired as Peter Manning, the former head of ABC TV news and current affairs and Radio National, who died on Monday aged 81.
Manning was honoured last year by the Walkleys for his outstanding contribution to journalism. His name may not have been that well known by the public, but he was one of the most influential forces in public interest journalism behind the scenes.
His former ABC colleague Jonathan Holmes wrote a personal recollection of his friend’s life for ABC Alumni.
An author and academic in his later years, Manning oversaw a golden age for Four Corners between 1985 and 1989 and launched programs such as Lateline, Foreign Correspondent and Landline as well as the Labor in Power series.
At the Walkleys in December, the former Four Corners reporter Chris Masters and the Sydney Morning Herald’s chief investigative reporter, Kate McClymont, praised Manning for his outstanding contribution to investigative journalism.
Under his leadership, Four Corners won the Gold Walkley in 1985 for Masters’ report about the sinking of the Greenpeace protest ship Rainbow Warrior.
Manning also gave some of the biggest names in television their first break, including Stan Grant, Marian Wilkinson, Sue Spencer, Tony Jones, Deb Whitmont and Paul Barry.
He is survived by his partner, Carole, his children, Thea Burke, Paddy Manning and Megan Manning, and four grandchildren.
His funeral will be at St Brigid’s church in Marrickville on 9 October.
