COVID restrictions meant that the Melbourne Press Club (MPC) was limited to a maximum of 650 guests at the 2021 Quill Awards in the Palladium at Crown Melbourne on Friday night, and they did well to sell 600 tickets given the cheapest variety was $180 for life members.
As usual, it was a great night for media gossip, and here are few observations that haven’t been reported elsewhere.
Unlike Facebook, which has few staff in Australia and barely shows its face, Google is now up to 1800 Australian staff and they even hosted a table at the Quills, where guests included bosses from some of the smaller recipients of their funding deals, including The Conversation, The New Daily, Private Media, The Saturday Paper, and Melbourne-based Star News Group, which has doubled its stable of suburban and regional newspapers from about 20 to 40 since News Corp’s shock mass closure of more than 100 titles in mid-2020.
Unlike previous years when the party kicked on at Crown nightclubs with expensive cover charges, this time everyone decamped downstairs to the main Atrium Bar. It was still humming after 2.30am with the likes of Melbourne Press Club President and decorated Quill winner Nick McKenzie, Nine News Melbourne boss Hugh Nailon, The Age’s deputy editor Michael Bachelard, Sky News host Caleb Bond, and 3AW super producer and MPC deputy president Heidi Murphy still holding court as the numbers started to thin.
Disgraced former Melbourne lord mayor Robert Doyle AC is attempting to resurrect himself as a lobbyist for local property developers but isn’t gaining a lot of traction. (However, there’s no sign that he’ll lose his AC.) Sally Capp, his successor, was the senior politician in the room on Friday night, given that no state or federal MPs bothered to show up.
Neil Mitchell is arguably Australia’s most COVID-paranoid journalist. After hosting his 3AW Mornings show from home for almost two years, he finally headed back into the studio earlier this month, but certainly wasn’t going to risk catching COVID mingling with 600 guests inside Crown Melbourne.
As for the awards themselves, The Age’s long-time AFL guru Caroline Wilson was a popular winner of the lifetime achievement award, receiving a standing ovation after delivering an excellent acceptance speech. The introduction from long-time rival, friend and previous lifetime achievement-winner Mike Sheahan was equally good.
The seating and table arrangements at the Quills are often interesting. I’m always in the back row in the 50s as a troublemaker, and it was no different this year being seated on table 56 with a group of strays including three young female News Corp journalists forced to pay for their own tickets, along with three shortlisted finalists: Ballarat Courier cartoonist John Ditchburn, Age columnist Julie Szego, and Radio National’s Mahmood Fazal, none of whom secured the chocolates, unfortunately.
Guardian Australia clearly remains an establishment outsider in Melbourne media as its main table was next to us in the back row, but it did secure a couple of wins.
Crown Resorts remains the controversial host and a sponsor of the Quills, and had table 13, adjacent to Caroline Wilson’s crew, on table 12. The Crown table was hosted by its long-time PR boss Natasha Stipanov; I had great pleasure introducing her to former ACCC chair Allan Fels at the pre-dinner drinks as “the most senior surviving Crown Resorts executive after 100 people above her were all sacked”. This was largely due to the work of McKenzie, who clearly still hasn’t yet secured the numbers in the board room to ditch Crown and move the Quills to a more socially acceptable venue.
In total, there were 116 shortlisted entries across 31 categories (excluding the “Graham Perkin Australian journalist of the year” and the “Harry Gordon sports journalist of the year”) with close to 150 different journalistic names appearing on this finalists list, which partly explains how the club managed to get 600 people to a casino.
Seven of the categories are now sponsored, with the sponsor often getting a video package promoting its wares shortly before handing over the Quill in its chosen category. For instance, Victorian government entities sponsor categories such as “reporting on disability issues”, “reporting on multi-cultural affairs”, and “coverage of women in sport”.
However, the MPC clearly draws the line at allowing the Minerals Council of Australia to sponsor a “reporting on the resources sector” category, or allowing Alliance for Gambling Reform sponsorship of a “best coverage of gambling issues” Quill.
It is also a bit of a mystery why the club delivers a “sports journalist of the year” gong, taken out by the Herald Sun’s Mick Warner for a package including his magnificent book on the AFL, The Boys’ Club, without extending that to having a “business journalist of the year” or a “political journalist of the year”.
The tricky issue of interstate journos picking up Victorian prizes raised its head again this year when Canberra-based Samantha Maiden landed the Perkin for a series of stories last year on news.com.au about Brittany Higgins.
But there were few complaints in a football-mad town about the Gold Quill going to Mick Warner for his front-page Herald Sun news breaks about the Collingwood Football Club racism scandals that led to the demise of long-serving president Eddie McGuire.
Not that Eddie Everywhere seems to have suffered any setback from this fall, as he was back as MC and official talking head at Shane Warne’s private funeral service, alongside Crown Casino founder Lloyd Williams and a host of other luminaries.
