Nine is bracing for an almighty battle of the blondes as Samantha Armytage and Amelia Adams scrap it out for a coveted role co-hosting the channel’s Today show alongside indie podcast enthusiast Karl Stefanovic – and they’re not the only ones fighting over the plum position.
Network sources said the station’s top brass were already at war over which one of the highly successful newswomen would replace Stefanovic’s current co-host, Sarah Abo, when she heads off on maternity leave in the coming months.
Diary can reveal that Nine’s director of morning television, Steve ‘Ruprechet’ Burling, and Stefanovic have both been pushing for Adams to take on the role for years – and that they even secretly promised her the position back in 2022 when former co-host Allison Langdon left the show to replace the retiring Tracy Grimshaw as host of A Current Affair.
Unfortunately, for Adams – and somewhat embarrassingly for Burling and Stefanovic – the job wasn’t actually theirs to give and, after giving the duo something of a stern dressing down for making the unauthorised offer, Nine’s long-reigning director of television and resident talent whisperer Michael Healy revealed he had instead hand-picked Abo to succeed Landgon while Adams would complete the network-wide game of musical chairs and replace Abo at 60 Minutes (rough consolation prize, we know).
Three years on, it’s understood that Adams still doesn’t factor into Healy’s lofty ambitions for the network’s perennially second-placed breakfast show. Instead, he has long-harboured not-so-secret fantasies about pairing Stefanovic with Armytage in the lucrative timeslot in the belief the headline-grabbing double-act would help Today finally mount a serious challenge against Seven’s top-rating rival Sunrise, after more than two decades of enduring defeats.
Indeed, Nine’s top brass had been plotting to parachute Armytage into the Today show late last year when Abo’s contract was about to expire, only for Diary to get wind of the plan and spoil everything by blabbing about it.
The revelation gave Stefanovic time to mount a rearguard action and convince Nine’s bosses to give him one last shot at the title alongside Abo on Today … with both hosts then granted alarmingly short one-year contract extensions at a vastly reduced rate.
Although the network hasn’t formally discussed the idea on taking on Today with Armytage (at least as yet), it’s understood the human headline – who maintained an eight-year unbeaten run in the ratings while fronting Sunrise alongside David Koch at Seven – is at least open to the idea of keeping the seat warm for her friend Abo while she’s away … and that she remains the station’s top pick.
Still, having been overruled once, sources claimed Burling and Stefanovic were still pushing to bring Adams – a one-time Today show newsreader – back into the fold on the program.
Not only has the former correspondent proved herself as one of the network’s most versatile – and popular – presenters while at 60 Minutes, she’s also made no secret of the fact she is ready to come off the road in favour of a more family-friendly full-time role.
In a move that almost no one saw coming and few still understand, Diary has previously revealed Adams even tried to trade in the globetrotting business-class travel lifestyle that comes with her current gig for a rather more mundane world of newslist run-downs and staff rosters after unsuccessfully putting her hand up to succeed the outgoing Simon Hobbs as Sydney news director just over a year ago.
Regular work hours aside, replacing Abo on Today – even as a fill-in – would also allow Adams to stake a claim on a more permanent move, and the riches that come along with it.
Even though Nine’s free-to-air financials are in free fall, Abo and Langdon both commanded the better part of a million dollars a year while in the role … and although that is less than half of what Stefanovic pulls in for the same job (so much for pay parity at Nine), it would still treble Adams’ current $300,000-a-year deal as 60 Minutes’ second-highest paid presenter behind the long-serving Tara Brown.
It would also ease the pressure on Healy as he tries to account for the vast ongoing cost of keeping Grimshaw on the books at Nine by asking her to help fill the void at Sixty.
Despite repeated assurances the broadcaster had more than enough “projects in the pipeline” to justify the former ACA host’s $500,000 salary, Grimshaw made just three appearance for Nine last year, while interviewing former adman John Singleton, singer Vanessa Amorosi and Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett.
That was enough to make her the highest-paid presenter in the country – at least on a pro-rata basis while raking in about $166,000 per appearance – and earn her the ire of the network’s frontline troops amid ongoing cutbacks to its already understaffed reporting and producing ranks.
Grimshaw’s deal was only rivalled that of Georgie Gardner, who had been on an eye-watering $600,000-a-year deal to host the broadcaster’s Sydney news two nights a week, before announcing she was heading for the exit last Friday.
Whatever happens, one thing is almost certain, there’s next to no chance the Today show gig will go to Today Extra co-host Sylvia Jeffreys – at least while Stefanovic is on board – with top-secret internal research repeatedly revealing audiences are not fans of the brother-and-sister-in-law combination at breakfast.
Spine-tingling coverage
There is nothing as dramatic nor ferocious as the theatre of war … though that certainly didn’t stop “your ABC” from trying to spice things up a bit while covering the conflict in Iran.
As the first air strikes rained down on Tehran, the public broadcaster’s outspoken global affairs editor, Laura Tingle, was among the Australian journalists who bravely boarded a flight for the Middle East to report first-hand on the rapidly escalating carnage.
She made it as far as Dubai before flights were grounded and she started covering the war with daily crosses and stories from the United Arab Emirates as Iran launched retaliatory missile strikes on its neighbouring Gulf States.
And more power to her – and all the correspondents covering the conflict on the ground – there is no question that takes courage and commitment.
Still, the ABC and Tingle couldn’t resist adding a little drama of their own.
Despite initially telling viewers Tingle was simply reporting from Dubai, the broadcaster was soon playing up her supposedly perilous situation, with ABC Radio host Samantha Donovan solemnly informing listeners that “a lot of Australians are stuck in Dubai” and “the ABC’s global affairs editor, Laura Tingle, is one of them”.
Stuck? She’d only just arrived.
As if that wasn’t enough, someone at Aunty clearly stumbled across a thesaurus because within days, Tingle and the ABC were both claiming she was no longer just “stuck” but “stranded”, with various rival media outlets even rushing to regurgitate the narrative.
Gees, that certainly escalated quickly.
Fear not though, emergency flights were soon ferrying people out of the country.
Though, while Tingle told ABC Sydney radio host Philip Clark that she had made a mad dash for the international airport after it reopened, she revealed she wasn’t actually going anywhere … instead she was simply “retrieving luggage I hadn’t seen for five days – but that’s another story; it’s not about me”.
You could have fooled us.
Incredibly, the suddenly not-so-stranded Tingle stayed on in Dubai for another week and a half while reporting on the war – much to the chagrin of her colleagues back in Australia.
“People are really pissed off Laura Tingle has been in Dubai for weeks, staying in nice hotels and literally writing blogs with no material collected in Dubai,” one ABC insider told us.
“This is while other corros can’t do trips because of budget. You can write any of that stuff (she was doing in Dubai) from Sydney.
“It’s a complete waste of money. People are working like dogs filling shows and filing news and this stuff really is gutting. But Tingle’s one of the people (ABC News boss) Justin Stevens is scared of and she gets top cover.”
We asked the ABC if it had misled viewers by claiming Tingle was “stranded” in Dubai when she was clearly settling in for the long haul … but never heard back. Perhaps they’ve been stranded, too.
Seven goes radioactive
Southern Cross Austereo’s execs could have be forgiven for thinking they had been sold a bit of a lame duck after taking over Seven West Media and its flagging free-to-air fortunes at the start of the year … but surely not for their ensuing determination to go ahead and pluck it entirely.
After ignoring their own shareholders’ warnings against merging with Seven, SCA bosses have spent the past three weeks embarking on a brutal cost-cutting purge largely targeting the former television business’s executive ranks.
The merged media business’s inaugural chief executive, Jeff Howard, who previously headed up Seven, was the first head to roll, ousted after just six weeks in the job, and within hours of former SWM chair Kerry Stokes stepping down from the board of the newly united company.
The network’s former “chief people officer”, Lucinda Gemmell, was the next to go before Seven’s long-reigning “king of television” and popular group managing director, Angus Ross, who was loved by everyone from Stokes down to the junior reporters, and chief operating officer, Trent Dickeson, joined the conga-line of TV types heading for the door last Friday.
They have all been replaced with a string of former SCA radio executives … proving that if video killed the radio star back in the 80s, four decades on, the radio stars’ bosses are now ready to wreak their revenge.
“Angus is the brains behind all of Seven’s national ratings success – and they’re just letting him leave … it’s absolute madness,” one Seven source said. “Everyone’s happy for him … but it’s terrible news for everyone left behind – it shows the SCA bosses have no idea what they’re doing.”
That certainly seems an understatement, given SCA’s new radio-centric regime have also removed Seven’s content chief, Brook Hall, national news director, Ray Kuka, and talented director of morning television, Sarah Stinson, from their traditional roles on the company’s executive.
Instead, a “content leadership team” – comprising Hall, Stinson, Kuka, sports director Chris Jones and The West Australian and The Nightly.pdf editor-in-chief Chris Dore – will now report to former SCA radio chief executive John Kelly, who in turn answers to former SCA radio executive chair Heith Mackay-Cruise, and will be responsible for presenting their combined, abridged views to the board.
Now, we know that you’re all thinking, because we’re thinking it too: Should we all just save ourselves the coming heartache and pry the “seven” buttons off our TV remote controls now?
Well, yes, probably … because once again, Seven’s hardworking television newsrooms are now answering to people with absolutely no television content experience.
Instead, judging by their SCA radio networks, their idea of quality content consists largely of fart jokes, tired prank calls, footy ticket giveaways, and a few more fart jokes for good measure – and even that stuff only rates in Brisbane and Radelaide.
Let’s hope the SCA execs at least keep a few of the cleaners on board, because someone is going to have to fish the company’s share price out of the toilet now that the radio giant’s stock has fallen more than a third since it announced it was taking over SWM without shareholder approval.
Can anyone say “vote of no confidence”?
Own goal by Ten
When Ten first launched its overhyped and underperforming replacement for axed woke nightly gibberfest The Project, it was hard to describe it as anything other than “amateur hour”.
Nine months on, the network has gone and fixed that … by chopping the ironically named 10 News+ in half and pairing its nightly runtime back to just 30 minutes.
Now, it seems we’ll have to settle for describing it as an “amateur half-hour” show, because it’s certainly that.
Just last week, the program’s wooden hosts, Amelia Brace and Denham ‘I Want To Be A Real Boy’ Hitchcock, introduced an explosive story about an “prominent Iranian Australian business leader” who “feared she was going to be killed” after allegedly receiving “death threats” from one of the handlers looking after the visiting Iranian football team.
The yarn was so intense, the woman’s face was blurred for her own safety and she went by the pseudonym of “Sandra” as she told reporter Carrie Greenbank how one of the Iranian team’s minders made “a throat-slitting gesture” at her while warning her against attending the match or trying to help the team’s players escape and seek asylum.
Seriously, top-shelf stuff. Except for one critical cock-up.
Although the woman’s identity was hidden during the report itself, her face was repeatedly shown at the start of the program as Hitchcock enthusiastically promoted the “exclusive”.
Amateur half-hour, indeed.
On the 10News+ side, though, the program is fortunately watched by so few people there’s a very real chance no one else actually spotted the slip up.
Swear and tear
It’s the foul-mouth blow-up that was heard in newsrooms around the nation as Seven crime reporter Inga Neilsen was caught on film berating cameraman Finn Hawkins – and calling him an “arsehole” and a “c..t” – before throwing her water bottle to the ground and storming off … pausing only to shout “f..k you”.
A month on, it turns out she’s not the only one letting fly with a few choice expletives amid the fallout from the dramatic dust-up.
Word is the duo’s colleagues are less than impressed with the way the matter has been handled by Seven and aren’t backwards about coming forwards with their gripes (at least to Diary and each other).
While Hawkins has returned to full-time duties, numerous staff told us they were frustrated Neilsen has seemingly been allowed to enjoy a reduced workload after having her shifts pegged back to just three days a week – with strictly no overtime – in the wake of the saga.
The arrangement hasn’t gone down all too well with some of Neilsen’s fellow reporters, who feel they are being left to pick up the slack, while a number of Seven camera crew have privately expressed reservations about working with her following the brutal barney.
Adding further fuel to the fire, there have been more than a few colourful words flying about the Seven Sydney newsroom by reporters, producers and crew about the stream of happy snaps Neilsen has been posting on Instagram on her additional days off. Not a exceedingly wise move.
Perhaps Seven’s Sydney news boss, Geoff Dunn, would be wise to invest in an office swear jar.
More Sixty seconds
It’s getting increasingly hard to tell if Nine’s self-proclaimed “flagship” current affairs program should be called “60 Minutes” or “Sixty seconds” given the show’s propensity for serving up recycled stories.
The weekly staple kicked off its season last month with a blockbuster, “exclusive” interview with Bondi massacre hero Ahmed al-Ahmed, who was speaking for the first time since, well, he last spoke for the first time.
Indeed, the chat came more than a month after Ahmed “broke his silence” while sitting down with former Today Tonight host Anna Coren for US cable news network CBS in December (and, yet, it somehow it still cost Sixty more than $25,000 to secure. Go team.)
Unsurprisingly, 60 Minutes was back at it again on Sunday, this time reheating another old CBS interview while leading off the show with a story about the colourful 33-year-old billionaire founder of US defence contractor Anduril Industries, Palmer Luckey.
This time they were more than 10 months late to the party, with 60 Minutes’ US namesake broadcasting the exact same sit-down on the exact same topic last May.
At least, Palmer was wearing a different Hawaiian shirt and was filmed on the opposite eyeline in Nine’s version … so, yeah, same, same but different and well worth the expense of flying their sole male reporter, Whatshismajig Hegarty, and a crew all the way to California.
But, hey, who knows?
Everyone else is doing news and current affairs … maybe an old and not-so-current affairs program will catch on.
Ring-a-ding-ding
Don’t call us, we won’t call you … ever. That’s the message from the ABC to self-confessed “media cowboy” Ryan Naumenko after he levelled a series of extremely serious accusations against one of public broadcaster’s “star” journalists.
Diary last week revealed Four Corners reporter Mahmood Fazal has been off work for more than five months now as the ABC review conducts a drawn-out internal investigation into claims he insisted on being paid in cash for a true crime podcast he produced with Naumenko in a bid to hide his fees from the taxpayer-funded media organisation (along with a bunch of other allegations).
While Fazal has vehemently denied any wrongdoing, we noted the ABC seemed to have attacked the probe with all the vim and vigour of an elderly sloth, and hadn’t even bothered to pick up the blower and call Naumenko to get his side of the story.
So we decided to do a little investigating ourselves and find out what gives … and, it turns out the true crime podcaster shouldn’t bother waiting by the phone because no one from the ABC will be calling him any time soon.
“We have processes that we have to comply with under the enterprise agreement when it comes to disciplinary matters, those processes are being followed,” the ABC’s top boss, Hugh Marks, told us when he hit him up about Fazal’s future at the broadcaster last Friday.
“We’ll come to a conclusion at some stage we’ll all be able to share with everybody.
“I understand Ryan’s perspective that we should give him a call but I don’t think we’re in any lack of clarity as to either his views or the information that he has to share because that has become widely available through various sources.
“So I know he feels frustrated that we haven’t called him but I think we are well and truly up to speed with what he has to say.”
Looks like someone has been reading the Diary and taking notes after all.
Naked ambition
Although we like to think we perform a critical community service in here on the Diary, we received so many frantic calls after we last week revealed self-styled celebrity reporter Phil Somerset was banged up on remand after being charged with spying on a 13-year-old boy in a public park toilet, we did briefly toy with the idea of changing our mobile to a 0055 number.
That or, you know, at the very least billing the NDIS for all the impromptu counselling sessions we suddenly found ourselves performing.
Nonetheless, we did have to chuckle after we heard about one particularly shocking encounter a widely regarded publicist had with Somerset back in 2020 after he apparently blagged his way into interviewing with Paul Hogan about the release of the comedian’s latest comedy flick, The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee.
“The producer’s agreed to let this guy have some time with Paul as he had been harassing them for ages,” the publicist explained. “I had never heard of him and when I asked for more info he said he did interviews for Triple M, which I knew wasn’t correct.”
Despite their reservations, the ever amenable publicist arranged a Zoom call between the Sydney-based Somerset and Hogan at his home base in LA to help promote the film … only for the call to quickly devolve into a massive balls up.
“Imagine my surprise when I looked up at my screen and saw (a naked man walking around behind Somerset) before I let Paul Hogan in (on the call),” they exclaimed – and we don’t blame them. What the heck was he doing there?
“I believe the young man is positioning a Logie on the mantelpiece for effect,” the publicist suggested helpfully when we asked.
Yes, okay, sure, but if we’re being totally honest (and we alway try to be), that’s only made us all the more confused: first, there’s unexpected full-frontal nudity … and now, there’s the fact Somerset was trying to display a Logie on his background bookshelf even though he certainly never won one of the prestigious TV Week industry awards.
We’re actually not sure which one was more out of place. Alas, it seems Somerset was none too keen on explaining either of the statuesque props at the time.
“I called him afterwards with something along the lines of WTF was that, and he told me to ‘get over it’,” the publicist said. Indeed.
And, while we’re usually up for suggesting people turn the other cheek, we can see why the publicist wasn’t particularly keen on following that sort of sage advice on this occasion.
As for Somerset, he remains in custody for now after his scheduled court mention for last Thursday was pushed back a week. In the meantime, our industry help hotline remains open … please let us know what we can, umm, uncover next.
