Nine’s Chessell on publisher’s digital transformation, AAP deal, ‘constructive negotiations’ with journos
“We pay our journos better than anyone else in Australia,” said Nine’s managing director of publishing, James Chessell at yesterday’s Mumbrella Publish Conference, adding that the tone of the negotiations so far have been “pretty constructive”.
“We’re currently at 3.5% plus a bonus, which would take someone who’s on a hundred grand up to 5% for FY23, probably a little over 5%. The union is at 5.5% and the union wants a three-year deal, whereas we want a one or two-year deal,” he continued.
Nine’s Chessell: ‘Clicks are like a drug’
“I’m pretty confident that we will close that gap and the tone of the negotiation so far has been pretty constructive.
“We’ve made a lot of progress on that front and there’s been a whole bunch of stuff which won’t get publicized on diversity clauses and whether or not you can get an allowance for buying a dinner suit or your glasses or whatever, which is sort of a historical relic of the EBA that we sort of work through, and we’re basically down to pay. As I said, the gap’s closed and I think the momentum has been okay, and hopefully, we’ll be in a position to come to an agreement in the next few weeks.
It is understood that so far, the company and employees have agreed to conditions regarding remote working, increases to parental leave entitlement, paid internships, diversity and inclusion reporting, minimum annual leave entitlements when directed to take leave, and more.
Chessell added that journalists taking to Twitter yesterday to voice frustration over the negotiations is “not unusual”, and that the company would never get in the way of people wanting to campaign. “That’s kind of how the industrial relation system works”, he added.
Nine and AAP signed a deal earlier this year
Earlier this year, Nine inked a deal with the AAP for a six-month trial – a sign of strength for the Australian news and media industry and the newswire service, which was previously co-owned by Nine.
“The history of AAP was that you had a business that was funded by News Corp and Fairfax, then Nine, and it cost a lot of money to run AAP, and then you would have media organizations like The Guardian and the ABC paying for the new service at a fraction of what the two shareholders were paying for. So there was this kind of complete imbalance in the way that it worked.
Chessell added that in some ways “it wasn’t a sustainable situation”, but under the new model, “where AAP is basically a government-funded organization with a bit of commercial assistance on the sides, I think that’s probably a more realistic way that business to survive.”
“I’m not gonna lie, it gives us cover if there is industrial action,” he did add when asked what Nine gets in its new trial deal.
“It allows us to use AAP where we found it useful when the Commonwealth Games were on recently. We obviously don’t hire someone to cover diving or walking or whatever, so it gives you a bit more scope on some of that stuff where there’s not a return on investment with having a full-time journalist.”
“It can only be a good thing,” he said on the AAP’s return for the Australian industry, “A lot of our journos come from AAP originally. It tends to be a good breeding ground for talent, and the more kind of places younger journos can go to get their start, the better.”
‘I’m not gonna lie, it gives us cover if there is industrial action’
Asked if Nine will be looking to extend its deal, Chessell said “we’ll see, we signed a deal with them that goes for some period of time […] You’re always, you’re always evaluating it. But look, to my original point, we’ve now signed on as a customer, rather than a shareholder, so it’s a much better deal for us now.”
In the wider discussion, the session focused on the digitally-led subscriber transformation the company has gone on in recent years.
It was pretty easy to move away from the “Kardashian stuff” you might have found on the homepage of the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age several years ago, he said, “because no one liked it”.
“So it was like, we’re gonna do less of that and we’re gonna focus more on what we do,” said Chessell. “Look, I say that flippantly, but it’s mostly true. Clicks are a drug to a newsroom and changing the conversation about what your North Star should be, and what the metrics are that feed up to that North Star is, is a complicated process.”
“I think now if you spoke to people in any of the newsrooms, they’ve got a very clear idea that the key goal is subscriptions, and we’ve been able to do that in a way that hasn’t completely ruined the traffic that we generate and as you can see from the results that we published last year, the commercial outcomes are actually stellar.”
“At the same time, the newsroom has to coalesce around a kind of quality differentiated journalism. That’s kind of the beating heart of what the mastheads have been for literally decades and decades and decades. The ABC is free, The Guardian is free, news.com.au is free, we have to be at a higher level because at the end of the day we’re asking people to pay for our journalism.”
The full session digs into the digital transformation Nine’s publishing division has taken in recent years, which now sees digital revenue account for 60% of publishing revenue, with digital subscription and licensing revenue increasing 66% across the year.
Chessell speaks about the switch to producing news and content that can’t be found elsewhere, the challenge in shifting things editorially, where the next digital transformation may come from next, and more.
Listen to the full session with James Chessell on this week’s Mumbrellacast.
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Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
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