BotW: SCA kicked out of the All Ords; Poppy Reid's social follower shenanigans; Hugh Marks' first day
Welcome to Best of the Week, written at beautiful Sisters Beach, Tasmania.
Today: Facebook’s cyclonic rotation; Poppy Reid’s stratospheric startup following; ABC Day One for Hugh Marks; and Southern Cross Austereo gets booted off the ASX All Ordinaries.
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Tall Poppy?
One of the fascinating things about Unmade now being part of the Mumbrella Media stable is being privy to weeks like this.
For an on-the record communication from a PR, the tone in the email to my colleagues was particularly strident: “It’s clear to us who is behind this story, and I’d hazard a guess that you, nor anyone from Mumbrella, has listened to a single minute of any of the incredible podcasts in the Curious stable.”
The story in question had not yet been published, and actually it wasn’t clear to us who was behind it. It was the matter of the unusually large social media following for music journalist Poppy Reid’s new venture, podcast network Curious Media, even before it launched.
Three days earlier, Mumbrella had written positively about the venture’s launch. That was based on a press release sent by that same PR on behalf of Curious Media. At that point, the fact that nobody from Mumbrella had listened to any of the podcasts was not a source of complaint from Team Curious. Indeed, it would have been difficult to do so. All eight of the podcasts listed on Curious Media’s home page are labelled as “coming soon”.
Perhaps that’s what inspired the reader comment on the original story: “Seems pretty dodgy that a brand-new page already has 118K followers and a post from just six hours ago with over 3,000 likes but literally ZERO genuine comments.”
That was who was behind the story. It seemed a fair question, so we asked it. The PR response seemed a little strong.
As Mumbrella’s follow up piece explained, Curious Media had in fact rebranded the social following of another business page, “work-life” publication Balance The Grind. No, I hadn’t heard of it either, and the question of how Balance The Grind got to that giant number may be best left for another day.
It’s too early for Curious Media to yet monetise its business. But the usual route - indeed almost the only route - for podcasts, is through advertising and sponsorship. That comes through demonstrating to advertisers that a podcast has a large audience.
Sometimes I see an email from a PR and wonder whether their client told them exactly what to write.
The PR concluded: “Ultimately, we’re extremely disappointed that Mumbrella would come after Poppy like this. It’s a real kick in the guts to a woman in media who is launching a startup and has done the hard yards to pull together a group of incredible people telling incredible stories.”
Is it?
A new day at the ABC
Do people in big roles get first day nerves too, I wonder?
If so, then spare a thought for Hugh Marks, who starts as managing director of the ABC on Monday.
Still, he has a low bar. The last time somebody walked into that job and the building wasn’t already on fire was nine years ago when Michelle Guthrie inherited the job from Mark Scott. She soon changed that, getting fired by the board, then taking chair Justin Milne down with her.
The term of Guthrie’s successor David Anderson ended yesterday. Anderson decided to leave early in his second term after the arrival of Kim Williams as chair.
The Antoinette Lattouf court case means that Anderson didn’t get to leave neatly either, with previous chair Ita Buttrose accusing him of misleading the court (we don’t endorse that allegation). With the verdict of Justice Darryl Rangiah pending, that particular time bomb is yet to explode.
The governance of the ABC has become so troubled that if Williams and Marks merely get to the end of their time working together without being actively at war with each other, then they’ll have beaten the jinx.
That’s a low bar.
When Facebook does news after all
Facebook started the week by downgrading searches on Cyclone Alfred, apparently because of some sort of technical error.
After media inquiries, the searches were unblocked, and on searching the word cyclone, the first five links were all to Australian news sources - Nine News, Ten News, Seven News, the ABC and news.com.au.
I’d be fascinated to know if this was a search curated by a human or via the usual Facebook algorithm.
When the News Media Bargaining Code conversation resumes after the election, it will be interesting whether Meta still tries to argue that its users don’t want mainstream news sources.
Unmade Index sinks as SCA is banished from the All Ords
Southern Cross Austereo suffered a new indignity last night, being kicked out of the ASX All Ords Index. The All Ordinaries, run by S&O Dow Jones Indices, is the index of the biggest 500 companies on the ASX, and is reassessed every quarter. SCA is no longer big enough to qualify.
Yesterday, SCA’s market capitalisation slipped by 2.1% to $164m.
Meanwhile, it was another rough day for Vinyl Group which lost 12.7% to land on $117m. The company’s market cap has slipped by 23.2% this week.
And Enero shares lost 2.2%. Yesterday Enero said that the CEO of Enero’s unwanted digital arbitrage business OBMedia, Raja Gupta, has been moved aside. Enero has been trying to sell its 51% stake in OBMedia since 2023.
The two TV players, Nine and Seven West Media were both down too, by 1.5% and 3% respectively.
The Unmade Index closed down 1.05% at 551.3 points.
Time to leave you to your weekend.
If you’d like to hear more from me, please do catch up with last night’s edition of MediaLand in the usual podcast places. We talked MAFS controversies, cyclone misinformation, today’s inevitable blow-up when footy fans discover AFL is no longer on free to air TV on Saturdays, and the publishing phenomenon that is Daily Mail headlines.
We’ll be back with more next week.
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
