Heralding a new age of newspaper design. The Fairfax metropolitan newspapers have launched their revamped looks today, with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age both changing to what they say is a more modern design: there’s more white space, and both editors Lisa Davies and Alex Lavelle say it’s a streamlined layout with simplified colours. Both newspapers will also have more world news, which both notes from editors say readers wanted. And while, as Lavelle said, it will give more space for their own correspondents’ work, we’re sure there’s also going to be plenty of wire and syndicated copy on those pages.

 

Brekky chatter as Sunrise dominates ratings. Nine is leaking like a sieve about its impending replacement for Lisa Wilkinson on the Today show with the best bet being Georgie Gardner. Over at Seven, it seems David Koch wants to lighten his load to four days a week from five. At age 64 Seven will accommodate him because he rates, and he has a financial services joint venture with the network called “New You Group Pty Limited (trading as Kochie Money Makeover)” according to Seven’s 2017 annual report.

Despite the weekend claims in the News Corp Sundays that Koch could be on the way out, he and co-host Sam Armytage, have the ratings on the board in 2017. Nationally they have won every week this year and in the metro markets, they have won 37 out of 46 weeks. Nationally Sunrise has averaged 513,000 a morning so far this year, Today has managed 421,000 — in the metros Sunrise has averaged 292,000 to 277,000 for Today. Last week it was 523,000 national viewers for Sunrise to 398,000 for Today. In the metros (which Nine seems to regard as the competition, as do some sections of the media) Sunrise averaged 303,000 to 265,000 for Today. This dominance was after Today (according to Nine) won the year in 2016 (ignoring the national figures). The big story from Nine is that Lisa Wilkinson picked the right time to jump. — Glenn Dyer

ABC in data leak. A Ukrainian cybersecurity firm has found a trove of sensitive data online from an ABC Commercial database, on a commercial cloud service. The ABC’s PM program reported on Friday that Kromtech used a simple search tool to find the data, which included email addresses, hashed passwords and database backups.

Front page of the day.

 

Glenn Dyer’s TV ratings. The ABC’s Insiders will remain on air until December 17 — the day after the Bennelong byelection in Sydney. Insiders is the premier political chat program in the country and the highest rating day-time program on TV. It was to have gone on holiday on December 3 as scheduled after the New England byelection the day before. Now it has been given two more weeks to talk about a poll that will keep Canberra nervous for quite a while, especially if the same-sex marriage bill hasn’t made it through the House of Representatives by then. Insiders had 551,000 national viewers yesterday — 376,000 on the ABC’s main channel and a high 175,000 on News 24. With those figures, and the program’s ranking, it was a sensible decision to keep it going until after the Bennelong poll. Nine, Seven and Ten have abandoned the space to the ABC on Sunday mornings.

Last night, the ratings were tight and the solid win in total people by Seven was due to the Thor movie on 7mate which attracted 275,000 viewers. The main channels result was basically a draw and Nine claimed better demos. That won’t save Family Food Fight though — just 743,000 national viewers. — Read the rest of TV ratings on the website