By Annette Sharp
Copyright news
Twelve months after Seven cut 150 jobs nationally via redundancies and shed many more in contract terminations, network staff are holding their breath waiting to learn who might next get their marching orders.
According to insiders CEO Jeff Howard and his senior executive team are taking stock and looking to further streamline operations before merging with the radio network.
Feeling nervous, or so we hear, are newsroom veterans who somehow survived the chop in 2024.
Among them is said to be Sunrise sports presenter Mark Beretta who has been on the books at Seven for 30 years and on a sweet deal at the breakfast show for more than two decades.
The contract of chairman Stokes’s long time favourite newsreader Ann Sanders is expected to also be under review as Stokes makes plans to step away from board responsibilities, a move that will put an end to the protection he has long extended to old friends still on the books.
The contract of Michael Usher too is said to be up for renegotiation – something which may force to a head succession plans within the Sydney newsroom where Usher has for years been viewed as the likely successor to 6pm newsreader Mark Ferguson who is still yet to win the Sydney news hour.
Others on lucrative salaries that don’t much currently reflect the ratings achieved by their programs are Morning Show hosts Larry Emdur and Kylie Gillies, also Sunrise’s Edwina Bartholomew.
In the meantime a question mark hangs over Seven’s Perth publishing operations.
Once Stokes’s shareholding is reduced by the merger, his hold over media and power in his Perth hometown via the town’s only metropolitan newspaper The West Australian is expected to be diluted unless Stokes decides either to carve the business off and keep it – or alternatively to sell what in the broader scheme is a backwater operation though one of some value to local WA mining heavyweights such as Gina Rinehart.
Radio insiders have told this column SCA (Triple M, Hit Network including 2DayFM and B105FM, LiSTNR podcast platform) started looking for partnerships like the Seven merger following rival radio company ARN’s audacious bid to acquire SCA in 2023.
That bullish attempt ultimately came crashing down around the ears of ARN’s chairman Hamish McLennan and CEO Ciaran Davis after their finance partner Anchorage Capital backed out.
OUT AND ABOUT
A beanie-clad Sam Neill slipped into the Sydney launch party of director Bruce Beresford’s latest movie, The Travellers, at Sydney’s Cremorne Orpheum on Tuesday night putting to bed recent rumours concerning his health.
The much-loved actor, star of The Bicentennial Man, Jurassic Park and Evil Angels, had, it was claimed, endured a couple of challenging months in virtual seclusion battling the rare blood cancer with which he was diagnosed in 2022.
In recent weeks his friends in the creative industries, notably singers Tex Perkins and Jimmy Barnes, have posted shots celebrating Neill which only spurred more widespread concern for the actor.
Barnes’s post, a week ago, showing Neill in a blue beanie, stated the men were “celebrating friendship”.
Neill’s agent failed to respond when this column contacted them for a health status update.
Neill looks to have embarked upon a busy round of social engagements this past week.
We hear that despite some dramatic recent hair loss, he is in good form.
The actor doesn’t appear in The Travellers so shunned the red carpet – and photographers – on Tuesday night, choosing instead to mingle quietly in the background with actor mates including the film’s star Bryan Brown.
In 2023 Neill confirmed he’d been diagnosed with stage three Angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma and that, after chemotherapy failed him, he had undergone gruelling fortnightly infusion treatments that were “very grim and depressing” and will, at some stage, stop working.
“I’m prepared for that,” he said at the time.
CAN ARN’S NEW BOSS TAKE KYLE SANDILANDS BY THE HORNS?
This column predicted the departure of ARN CEO Ciaran Davis back in May following the company’s annual general meeting at which Davis sought to brush off concerns about the dismal Melbourne performance of the network’s KIIS FM breakfast duo Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson, Australia’s highest paid media personalities.
As we had revealed here in April, Irishman Davis purchased a home in his native Ireland months earlier and seemed to be openly making plans to be in residence in his new home by Christmas 2025.
That timeline is looking safe following news announced Thursday that Davis has resigned his post along with his role on the ARN board and will depart the Australian media company this summer
His departure clears the way for Michael Stephenson, former head of sales at Nine, to take over as CEO and deal with the ongoing impact of Davis’s astonishing and generous 2023 contract negotiations with Sandilands and Henderson, one which promised to deliver to the duo a $10 million-a-year payday each for 10 years.
However as revealed in August, the pair have had to take a substantial pay cut – put at around $3 million a year – due to their failure to meet targeted bonuses.
Insiders say a large portion of the duo’s projected bonuses have been redirected into expensive marketing campaigns in an attempt to lift their profiles and program ratings in Melbourne where they wallow in seventh place.
The duo’s success in the Southern capital has been hampered by ongoing investigations by media watchdog ACMA into the program’s “deeply offensive” content and Sandilands’ ongoing health issues and frequent on-air absences.
New CEO Stephenson’s management of star (read sometimes difficult) talent will be put the test in future months in tandem with his ability to run a radio network facing a revived threat from the recharged and newly merged SCA.
All eyes will be on him.
RICHO AILING
Graham Richardson has been battling pneumonia for the past fortnight.
The Sky News commentator was sighted at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital having scans but declined to be admitted – preferring instead to recover at home close at hand to son D’Arcy who graduated from high school last week.
Sadly Richardson was still not well enough to attend the graduation at Sydney’s Cranbrook School last week.
In April next year it will be 10 years since Richardson had his bowel, bladder, prostate, tail bone, rectum, a sciatic nerve, stomach muscles and a part of a hip removed to stave off aggressive cancer after doctors gave him six months to live without the surgery.
At the time he said he was having the surgery to extend his life so that he’d see his youngest son grow to be a man.
On the mend again now thanks to the miraculous care of his wife Amanda, Richardson was forced to beg off his 76th birthday lunch celebrations with regular lunch companions including Richard Wilkins, 2GB host Ben Fordham and Mark Bosnich on September 27.
The crew will no doubt reschedule as soon as Richo’s famous appetite has returned.
SEVEN JOURNO’S SOCIAL POST
Reports during the week about an unnamed Channel 7 journalist who had taken leave, it was claimed, over mental health concerns seemed to irk at least one Seven reporter.
Hours later Melbourne reporter Christie Cooper took to social media in a post containing a series of brusque denials concerning allegations said to have been made by a Seven colleague.
According to Cooper three claims published in a Melbourne newspaper were off the mark.
“A senior source at Channel 7 has just made comments … about a senior reporter at Channel 7, apparently saying she asked them to sponsor her YouTube channel (um … nope), that she made calls to them as late as midnight (hmm … nope!) and that she filmed a younger colleague without her consent (also … what?!),” posted mother-of-three Cooper before later deleting the post.
Cooper’s post was published days after a group of Seven journalists spoke to employment litigation firm Adero law about a potential class-action lawsuit against the network over the alleged underpayment of wages.
Seven has denied the accusations.
