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A sponsored News Corp housing special featured its own cadet journalists as struggling young Australians, while the AFR editor departed amid a staff revolt and Nine cut costs.
News Corp's sponsored housing special, Home Front, launched on Monday with front pages across the nation declaring the Great Australian Dream of owning a home was in tatters.
The six unsmiling young Australians pictured on the front pages of the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and their stablemates were not members of the public. They were the company's own cadet journalists. Young Australians are at the coalface of Australia's housing crisis so we tapped into our network of cadet reporters to power our Home Front series, the papers said. One cadet said she would never own a home and would rent for life.
News Corp Home Front housing series
If I decided to purchase a home or apartment, I would be in debt and any life changes or health issues could create serious financial hardship, she wrote. The series was sponsored by CommBank, with the bank's yellow brand colours worked into the title Our National Housing Special. The main story drew on a survey of 1,000 Australians by News Corp's in-house research arm, the Growth Distillery, with consultants SEC Newgate.
Much of the blame was directed at the government and the intense public debate over federal Labor's shock $77 billion tax hikes. Readers were told the consumer price index has risen by nearly 20 per cent since Anthony Albanese came to power four years ago. The series offered gen Z tips to enter the property market, including tip number six on negotiating a pay rise.
Check the market rate for your role, document what you've delivered, then book a conversation with your boss, it read. Two women I know did exactly this, prepared together for an hour, and walked out with a combined $37,000 pay rise. For the record, News Corp recruitment ads offer cadetships that pay about $65,000.
AFR editor James Chessell resigns
Meanwhile, readers of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age's CBD column were surprised to read that WA premier Roger Cook would launch Josh Frydenberg's memoir, A Grateful Son, next month. Cook has led Labor in WA since 2023 and Frydenberg is a former federal treasurer and high-profile Liberal. CBD published a correction the next day. An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that WA premier Roger Cook would attend Josh Frydenberg's book launch.
Former premier Richard Court will attend, it said. It took about 24 hours for the resignation of the Australian Financial Review editor-in-chief James Chessell last Wednesday to unravel spectacularly. Nine Publishing managing director Tory Maguire told the newsroom that AFR editor Cosima Marriner would replace Chessell, whose last day would be 12 October. He had resigned to join former AFR columnist Joe Aston at his media startup Rampart.
Chessell and Aston are close, having worked together on the staff of Liberal minister Joe Hockey, but the speed of Chessell's jump after two years at the helm angered the troops. Aston had a column a month in return for the not inconsiderable support of Nine's legal team. There is no indication this arrangement will change, the Age and the SMH reported on Wednesday. By Friday Chessell was out the door, along with Aston's monthly column.
Aston was put on notice that he had a few months to find a new legal team. All bets were off. The backflip followed an uprising of sorts on the AFR floor, where Chessell was not as popular as the more benign character of Marriner. Staff told Weekly Beast they felt Chessell had been a disruptive force and then had betrayed them to join a rival.
In his address he said some journalists would be relieved to see him go. They did not want him staying two weeks with access to the financial daily's newslist, as he was about to edit another business publication. Nine has always denied it, but staff see Rampart as a direct competitor to the AFR and believe it should not have been given the legal and editorial support it was.
Nine turmoil, layoffs and leadership change
At a town hall on Monday some staff voiced concern over Chessell's management style and Marriner said she would be a different type of manager. This week Rampart poached another Nine journalist, Nick Bonyhady, the business editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, who relinquished his title and returned to reporting while working out his notice. The near revolt at the AFR is small beer compared with the pain at Australia's biggest media company.
In recent weeks 30 journalists have taken redundancy from the SMH and the Age after the company said it had to cut costs due to the extreme state of disruption because of AI. Nine is stripping out more than $160m. Last week Amanda Laing, brought in to run a new streaming and broadcast division just 18 months ago, was made redundant.
Chief executive Matt Stanton said the division, made up of the Nine Network, 9Now app and streaming platform Stan, would be subsumed into the group. With free-to-air television advertising in steep decline, Laing was under pressure. Just five years ago under Hugh Marks, now the ABC's boss, Nine was worth $5bn. Under Stanton it has fallen to $1.04bn.
The share price is down 42% over the past 12 months and has been in freefall since early September, down to 68c on Thursday. There are not many news chiefs as loved and admired as Peter Manning, the former head of ABC TV news and current affairs and Radio National, who died on Monday aged 81. He was honoured for his outstanding contribution to journalism.
News Corp Cadet Journalists Australian Financial Review Editor Nine Entertainment Cuts Peter Manning
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