Today in Media Files, the winners of the Our Watch Awards have been announced, with The Age taking out the top award, and an MSNBC anchor’s outtakes have been leaked.
Our Watch Award winners named. The Age‘s Gina McColl has won the 2017 Gold Our Watch Award for her investigation into sexual harassment in the workplace. The Our Watch awards were held in Sydney last night, and recognise reporting on violence against women. The full list of winners is here.
‘The control room is out of control’. A tape of MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell losing it at producers during commercial and story breaks in his program has been leaked, and could rival Bill O’Reilly’s infamous “we’ll do it live” dummy spit. In the clip, O’Donnell is first ticked off by a producer he can hear through his earpiece, and gets increasingly agitated and sweary as the show goes in, ready to storm out of the studio when he can hear hammering from outside. O’Donnell has since apologised for his outbursts on Twitter.
The revolving door. Nine’s digital boss Alex Parsons is leaving the network in a reshuffle that will elevate former Australian Women’s Weekly editor Helen McCabe to digital content director from head of lifestyle. Parsons has been in the role for three years, and will finish up at Nine at the end of the month.
The New York Times’ to add local restaurant critic. The New York Times will soon have a restaurant critic based Down Under. The Australia bureau chief Damien Cave dropped the news in his weekly Australia letter this week, which was answering some FAQs about what the NYT is up to with its expansion into Australia. Crikey spoke to Cave about the same topic last month.
Fairfax print ad revenues continue to slide. No sign of any let up in the remorseless slide in print ad revenues for Fairfax Media (News Corp too, but it doesn’t release its numbers). Fairfax has reported a slight acceleration in the slide compared to an update five weeks ago. Yesterday’s update was ahead of the final stage of Fairfax’s partial spin-off of its Domain property website business next month.
Over the past few years the company’s reports and updates have been a rather mournful affair. Overall revenue is sliding, enlivened only by the performance of the company’s new star, the Domain listings website, No. 2 in the market behind News Corp’s 61% owned subsidiary, REA Group. Fairfax will hand 40% of Domain to existing shareholders next month.
Overall revenues are down 4% to 5% from a year ago (which saw a spurt upwards with higher sending on the federal election campaign in July and August). That is slightly worse than the “around 4%” fall revealed with the full-year results in August.
Fairfax said yesterday that Domain’s digital revenue growth is up 22% so far in 2017-18 and total revenue growth is up 13%. Fairfax had forecast a 16% growth in total revenue for Domain for the current year with a 26% rise in digital revenues expected. — Glenn Dyer
Domain moves into insurance business. Fairfax has announced it will step into the insurance business, with its Domain Group to launch “Domain Insure” later this year. The insurance offering will be a joint venture with investment company Envest, and in a statement Domain CEO Antony Catalano said:
“Domain Insure adds to Domain’s suite of real estate products and services spanning home loans, utilities connections and trade services which together deliver on our ambition to meet the modern needs of property consumers throughout their property lifecycle of buying, owning and selling.”
Glenn Dyer’s TV Ratings. Sam, we have stopped listening to your rants and ravings. Viewers want something more these days. They are not watching listening (and watching), and the home AFL market — Melbourne — has gone right off you, The Footy Show and Eddie McGuire. They continue to abandon you and the rest of your Footy Show in favour of the gentler, funnier Front Bar on Seven. There was more free publicity this morning for yet another outburst from Newman on the program last night — this time bagging the AFL for supporting the Yes case in the postal survey. It’s out of whack with the reality of what is happening in the TV audience, especially in Melbourne. For whatever reason (clickbait?) News Corp websites gave Newman’s rant a lot of air this morning. Eddie McGuire gave as good as Newman last night, but the video clips are all of Newman’s ranting.
But fortunately viewers now see Newman’s ranting and ravings as what they are (decades out of date) and they are deserting Nine (when will the message get picked up by the network?). For the third week in a row, Seven’s modest Front Bar out-rated The Footy Show in Melbourne and nationally. In Melbourne the Front Bar was watched by 231,000 viewers, The Footy Show by 194,000. Nationally the margin was 419,000 for the Front Bar, 383,000 for The Footy Show (which would have been a weak night in Melbourne alone, when The Footy Show was at its peak).
Sophie Monk on The Bachelorette got more that 1.2 million viewers nationally — third overall and first in the metros. Like the Matildas (the Australian women’s soccer team for those of you not up with things), it’s the female version of the concept that is out-performing the male version (The Bachelor and the Socceroos, who are 50th in the world to the Matildas’ sixth).
While Seven had more people, Ten had the demos and that was the night. AFL and NRL finals tonight and tomorrow night and then we know what some of us will be shouting about next week and weekend: The Brownlow (AFL Best and Fairest) is on Monday night — and it is now longer than the Logies, and more boring.
In regional areas, Seven news was the most watched program with 498,000, followed by Home and Away with 420,000, Seven News/Today Tonight was on 418,000, then the 5.30pm part of The Chase with 360,000 and fifth was the 7pm ABC News with 313,000. — Read the rest on the Crikey website
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