Up to 200 jobs to be axed at Nine
Up to 200 jobs are set to be made redundant at Nine as soon as Friday.
Nine Entertainment CEO Mike Sneesby notified staff of the move, with the first axings to come from the publishing division.
Similarly to Seven’s shake-up earlier this week, Nine attributed the cuts of up to 200 roles from almost 5,000 staff members to “the loss of revenue from the Meta deal and challenges in the advertising market”.
“In order for us to be able to keep investing in digital growth opportunities across Nine, we must continue to responsibly manage costs through the cycle,” Sneesby’s note reads.
Channel Nine shouldn’t be living off some Meta handout.
They should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and earn a living.
Nine squandered the Meta windfall. And now want publishing to make up for the “shortfall”. Plenty of pointless executives on huge salaries should be the ones to go. Not those that actually deliver content to the mastheads.
What amazes me is the lack of leadership. They knew the Meta money was not guaranteed where was the planning a year ago? Money spent on ostentatious Christmas party at Luna Park that could have saved jobs. Huge money spent on necessary reviews into culture that happened on CEO watch. Leadership knew they were making the redundancy decision for a month minimally, yet send an email, don’t front up on Friday and leave people to sit cold all weekend over it. Awful stuff.
Bet they wish they saved their bonuses instead of buying Louis Vuitton laptop bags …
Email sent by CEO on Friday, no meeting until Monday from anyone making decisions, had to go home and tell kids not sure whether we can avoid camp and sit all weekend.
Does this mean that the upcoming trip to Paris is off for the board and the leadership team (and their partners)?
I expected this indiscriminate axe swinging of the spuds at NewsCorp… not at Nine.
First Seven, now Nine (…and with the prevalence of house ads on Ten BVOD, I’m sure there are imminent Paramount/Ten changes given the state of “the current cyclical challenges facing media companies” that Sneesby mentions).
It’s important to consider not only the bottom-line health of media businesses but also the cultural capital they create. Media businesses may be moving to free-to-play digital and socially-powered entertainment, but if these new digital businesses have slimmer margins, will media leaders see Australian stories (fictional, dramatic, comedic or doco-style) as worthy of investment? If Masked Singer and the Bachelor are getting trashed now, where will the next Love my Way, Secret Life or All Saints come from? Or will Australian identity and culture be left to YouTubers and creators to capture (heaven help us)? If Netflix takes Aussie series’ like Secret Life off service, how do folks discover these shows if our only media consumption is digital?
Today, Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Google are appearing before a parliamentary inquiry on their operations in AU and the impact they have. Nine’s statement cites a “loss of revenue from the Meta deal and challenges in the advertising market”, so will Meta’s stepping back of its contributions through the News Media Bargaining Code be a point of debate in this discussion? Seven lost 150 people earlier this week, Nine lost 200 today. How will Meta be made accountable for this?
What can (or should) we do as a marketing community to keep traditional media businesses afloat for their cultural and democratic contributions? Split spend across performance and values-led investments in media brands we believe in to keep them afloat?
Appreciate commercial realities, but our industry is beyond suffering….how can we think differently to make for a more positive next chapter?
This is actually management 101 in how not to do redundancies. CEO sends email on Friday, doesn’t front up, goes off to Greece for holiday with zero in person comms. Head of publishing then meets staff on Monday, having left them sitting all weekend, to tell them, decisions will be made in coming weeks, and by the way she’s off to Fiji next week.
This all would have been locked away weeks ago in terms of financial planning.
For a communications company it’s quite something in terms of how messages have been delivered. They absolutely don’t care, but they could least pretend to show some empathy.
JANZ