BotW: Ita's version; TV's Weekend at Bernie's; and News Corp's expiry date
Welcome to Best of Week, written on Saturday morning in Evandale as penny farthing racing fans descend upon the township for today’s national championship. Think the Melbourne F1, but with higher seats and more middle class crowds.
Today: ThinkTV has been dead for months but they tried to pull a Weekend At Bernie’s; what the judge will need to decide about Ita Buttrose’s testimony; the Murdoch family dramas that will change News Corp sooner than we realised
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The televised rollercoaster
What a week for TV.
On Tuesday morning, Seven West Media delivered its worst half-year results of all time. Yet media stocks soared because Seven called the bottom of the market.
On Wednesday night Mumbrella broke the news that ThinkTV’s founding CEO Kim Portrate was out.
On Thursday morning, Bruce Gordon’s WIN Corporation sold its NSW licences to Ten’s owner Paramount, clearing the way for him to become Nine’s de facto proprietor
And on Friday morning we learned that Ten was out of ThinkTV.
Seven at the bottom
We’ll start with Seven.
The market already pretty much knew what was coming. Group EBITDA profits were $92m for the half, down by 25.6% on the year before.
The falling red line on the graph is profit. From $341m in 2012 to $92m in 2025. That’s the story of the decline of linear TV as a business; and of a business that didn’t evolve.
There were some positives though.
The company successfully paid down some of its debt, reducing the pile by $41.7m to $259.7m.
Seven also took a 41.5% share of the free TV advertising market. Under old orthodoxies, anything approaching 40% would have been considered stellar. It’s likely Nine might even have beaten that number given that it had the Olympics. That suggests Ten’s share was squeezed to below 17%.
But the part that really cheered the market was to be found in the accompanying trading update.
The market soared based on 17 words: “Based on current expectations and market conditions, H2 earnings expected to see modest growth on H2 FY24”.
In other words, the second half of the year will be more profitable than the same time a year ago. Even though Goldman Sachs recommended to its clients that they should sell, Seven’s market capitalisation rose 6% to $269m.
For a sector that has been in advertising decline for years, it was enough to lift the rest of the market too. The Unmade Index - which tracks all the locally listed media and marketing companies - saw the biggest one-day jump since we started it three years ago, rising by 7.04% on Tuesday.
Nine, which reports its half year numbers in ten days’ time, jumped by 14% on the expectation that it will make a similar commitment to Seven.
Portrate of a sector
The next day, we broke the news that Kim Portrate, the first CEO of industry marketing body ThinkTV, was out. The clue had come in the previous day’s analysts’ briefing from SWM boss Jeff Howard who told the market he was looking for efficiencies in the TV industry bodies.
Portrate has actually been gone for a while, but ThinkTV only confirmed this with a statement from “the board” after we told them we were about to report on it.
It wasn’t the most respectful way to handle the exit of somebody who had done the industry a great service over more than eight years.
Next on Nine
Then the attention shifted to Nine. Paramount announced it had agreed to acquire WIN Network’s Ten-affiliated Northern NSW TV licence.
This relatively minor transaction leaves WIN with all its eggs in the Nine basket. Previously the media ownership laws limited Gordon to only controlling a 15% voting stake in Nine. He will now be able to move up the share register, gradually converting an additional 10% economic interest into voting shares.
With WIN CEO Andrew Lancaster already on the Nine board, it will be interesting to see whether he ends up as the next chair or if that slot will go to the newly arrived Peter Tonagh.
Param-out
And then it was back to ThinkTV.
It turns out that way back last June, Paramount told ThinkTV that it was pulling the pin as a one-third owner of the marketing body. That was 12 months after Foxtel Media also pulled out.
Paramount’s financial contribution ended in December.
It was a rational move. Pragmatically, Ten’s tough financial circumstances must have made the ThinkTV investment look expensive, particularly when sniping between Seven and Nine was damaging the united front. And strategically, Paramount is on a different path, with Ten sitting alongside the subscription streaming of Paramount+ as the first priority and FAST and AVOD beside that.
The exit explained the vague reference to “the board” in the previous statement. Bizarrely, the remaining shareholders in ThinkTV - Seven West Media and Nine - didn’t tell the market about Paramount’s exit until the news leaked.
I wonder how long they’d have tried to continue the Weekend At Bernie’s level pretence that Portrate was still driving the car and Ten remained a passenger.
It was, I would suggest, not the Australian TV industry’s finest week.
Ita’s story
It was also not the ABC’s finest week.
By the time Justice Darryl Rangiah rules on whether Antoinette Lattouf was illegally dismissed from her five-day fill-in on ABC Sydney, most of those involved will be long gone.
Chair Ita Buttrose has already completed her term. ABC Radio Sydney manager Steve Ahern is now running RadioInfo and Radio Today. Chief content officer Chris Oliver-Taylor finishes in a fortnight. Managing director David Anderson hands over to Hugh Marks in three weeks’ time.
That is perhaps fortunate. What became clear in this week’s evidence was that MD Anderson and chair Buttrose have contradictory recollections of what happened. The judge will need to choose between those versions. If they had still been in their posts, it’s possible one of them would have come under pressure to resign.
What’s not at issue is that the ABC had done insufficient research into Antoinette Lattouf’s social media activities when they gave her the gig. They were unprepared for the campaign against her based on her advocacy for the civilians of Gaza which critics claimed was therefore anti-semitic.
As this became a crisis and Buttrose began to receive protest emails, she debated the issue with Anderson. This week she asked the judge to accept that sending an email to Anderson reading “Has Antoinette been replaced. I am over getting emails about her,” was merely a neutral request for an update.
Buttrose also asked the judge to believe that Anderson had asked her to pass emails down the chain to the under pressure Oliver-Taylor because he wanted him “to learn the folly of not checking the references of someone he hired”.
Anderson previously gave contradictory evidence that he had told Buttrose he would prefer her not to pass the emails along.
I do not think Anderson was a particularly good MD; but one of his strengths was support for his staff. The judge will have to decide whether Buttrose is correct in suggesting that Anderson made the out-of-character decision to urge her to pile the pressure onto Oliver-Taylor just to teach him a lesson.
And what we will never know is whether matters could have unfolded differently if Oliver-Taylor had been under less pressure from above when he made the sudden decision - while Buttrose and Anderson were uncontactable at a Christmas lunch together - to take Lattouf off air.
The News Corp time bomb and Operation Bridge
The New York Times did it again yesterday, with more explosive revelations about how Murdoch family disfunction will change the News Corp empire.
The newspaper was leaked the documents relating to last year’s court case in which Rupert Murdoch failed in his attempt to change the family trust so that son Lachlan could not be outvoted by his three siblings after his death.
The family plans for Murdoch’s death are known, incidentally, as Operation Bridge, a reference to the preparations for the death of Queen Elizabeth, Operation London Bridge.
Along with fascinating, gossipy detail, comes one key fact. Even if Rupert Murdoch is still alive, the trust expires in five years time. When 2030 comes along, all of the Murdoch siblings will be free to sell their stakes in News Corp and Fox Corp to outsiders. The trust holds 40% of the voting stock in the companies, effectively sufficient to keep control while it is all in family hands.
What we learned yesterday is that the News Corp as we know it has an expiry date of five years.
Vinyl Group hits record market cap
Publishing and music platforms business Vinyl Group rose to its highest market capitalisation yet on Friday, with a 16% rise in share price taking it up to a remarkable $177m valuation.
This week has seen Vinyl’s valuation rise by 38%, with the market positivity coinciding with its announcement that it will place all of its publishing assets in a separate Vinyl Media division.
The valuation once again takes Vinyl Group ahead of Southern Cross Austereo which is currently worth $157m.
Most shares in Vinyl are controlled by WiseTech founder Richard White and music entrepreneur Paul Wiltshire.
In the 2024 financial year Vinyl Group reported revenue of $4.9m and a loss of $16.9m.
Elsewhere on the Unmade Index, Ooh Media’s price rose by 4.9%.
The only stocks on the index to decline were ARN Media which lost 0.8% and Nine which lost 0.3%.
The Unmade Index rose by 1.19% to land at 494.1 points.
Time to leave you to your weekend.
If you’d like to hear more about the week, last night’s edition of MediaLand is now available in all the usual podcasting places. Vivienne Kelly and I were joined by Claire Stuchbery, boss of the Local & Independent News Association , to discuss local news deserts. We also examined the hard-to-justify jump in government ad spend, and the Antoinette Lattouf court case.
And on the Mumbrellacast earlier in the week we discussed the Seven West Media half-year results, ESPN’s Disney+ arrival and the Heard radio event.
And if you’re going to be in Auckland, don’t forget we’re bringing Compass to town on Tuesday night. I’ll be moderating the discussion between Colenso CEO Angela Watson, NZ Herald managing editor Mat Martel, The Warehouse Group CMO Jo Mitchell and Overdose CEO Paul Pritchard. Please do drop me a line if you’d like to grab a coffee during the day on Tuesday.
I’ll then be speaking at the IMAA’s Indie-Pendence Day conference in Sydney on Wednesday. Which means a 4am alarm call for the early flight. What could possibly go wrong?
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade and Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
I’m imagining more tweed and early 20th century facial hair at the penny farthing races too.