Media companies’ profits are dropping like flies, with Seven West and Nine results recently down by 53% and 40%, respectively, on the last reporting period. The downturn has been reflected in the Unmade Index, a tracker of ASX-listed media and marketing companies weighted by size. The index hit an all-time low this week of 566.1 points, down from 1,000 since its inception by Unmade Media in January 2022.
Unmade’s founder and publisher Tim Burrowes said that while the downturn represented an advertising downturn led by high interest rates, as media executives have said, some companies were better placed than others to recover.
“The ultimate question for them is [whether] that money which is going out, returns,” Burrowes told Media Briefs. “TikTok, Instagram and the rest — it’s actually not just an advertising downturn, it’s a change in spending habits. That’s the thing that scares and makes the TV industry nervous in particular.”
Asked about which companies he thought were best placed to recover from the perfect storm of an industry-wide advertising downturn and the withdrawal of Meta from Australian news deals, Burrowes said Nine, which has for the most part fared the best of the Australian commercial broadcasters (owing to their diversity of assets such as Stan and the newspaper division).
“One of the big questions at the moment is, while this Meta money was coming in, did the publishers do enough to prepare for the moment when it stopped?” he said.
“Particularly with Nine, I’ve been really looking out for evidence in the past few months that they’ve been doing the hard work to prepare for that moment … for when the Meta money stopped. I’m not saying work wasn’t going on, but I didn’t see much evidence from the outside.”
Nine’s chief sales officer Michael Stephenson told analysts recently that he was increasingly confident that the advertising downturn had reached its lowest point.
Burrowes is less confident. He said the advertising downturn was led by a high-interest rate environment and it would require a change in interest rates before the ad market started to bounce back — “but that could still be months away”.
Disclosure: Tim Burrowes has several stocks in companies mentioned in this article, including the majority of stocks listed in the Unmade Index.
Gone like the wind
A socialist architecture critic best known for ripping into McMansions wouldn’t be most people’s first choice to cover a Formula One race weekend, but that’s exactly what happened when Road & Track sent Kate Wagner to cover last year’s United States Grand Prix.
Wagner’s critique of her time at the Circuit of the Americas, titled “Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain”, was scathing.
“If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour,” she wrote of her time in Austin.
“The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.”
Wagner touched on her previous experience as a cycling journalist, where the press has a more adversarial relationship with sponsors and vested interests than in motorsport.
Wagner, who was flown around first-class courtesy of Mercedes-AMG and the sponsor petrochemical giant INEOS, went on to describe team driver Lewis Hamilton’s own (well-documented) critiques of the Mercedes car as it struggled to contain rampant rival, Max Verstappen. All of this made for a compelling long-form read, sending the article viral, particularly in media circles. Despite this, mere hours after publication, the article was ripped down from the Road & Track website.
Wagner, when contacted by online outlet Defector, said she stood by the story. When Road & Track editor-in-chief Daniel Pund was contacted, he told them “the story was taken down because I felt it was the wrong story for our publication”, and denied there was pressure from Formula One or any brands involved in the story.
“Had I been aware of the story I would have put a stop to it long before it was ever posted.”
How a 5,000-word longread disappeared or escaped the attention of the magazine’s EIC is perhaps another question. Mercedes and INEOS both denied having complained about the story, in statements made to The Washington Post.
The press’ tall poppy syndrome
Tall poppy syndrome is a powerful thing in this country. Not least when a queer woman of colour is our most prominent and successful athlete on the world stage.
When revelations dropped that Kerr had allegedly racially harassed a Met Police officer, the knives were out from Australia’s sporting media for the Matildas icon, who hadn’t informed the national team of an incident that was around a year old before charges were laid.
Seven’s Jim Wilson said Football Australia should be “reading her the riot act”, calling “the coverup … a disgrace by Sam Kerr”. News Corp’s Emma Greenwood called for her to lose the Matildas captaincy. Sports commentator Tracey Holmes said it put Football Australia in “a tricky place”.
It was later revealed Kerr was alleged to have called the officer a “stupid white bastard”. Your correspondent makes no comment on the severity or comedy of these new allegations.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter FitzSimons opined that “FA must stand her down, while the rest of us — in the absence of any explanation at all from Kerr — must gaze in incomprehensible wonder, at how this happened.”
Media Briefs spoke to Australian sports journalists as to their views on the coverage of the Kerr affair.
One noted: “Now, Kerr will be caught up in the culture wars. Instead of what the coverage should focus on, which is the systems and structures of oppression by ‘white bastards’ that got us here in the first place.”
Another simply said of the coverage generally: “The Peter FitzSimons yarn is a fucking joke.”
Moves
- Former Q+A host Stan Grant joins The Saturday Paper as a columnist.
- Former Age journalist Abbir Dib joins the ABC as a video and social lead.