Sharri Markson was in her element this week, appearing on TV to talk about her Daily Telegraph scoop on Barnaby Joyce’s infidelity and the baby he is expecting with a former staffer. Markson did call the deputy prime minister the “deputy premier” but we’ll let that pass.

It was what the Tele’s national political editor said about some journalists who argued the story was not in the public interest that left us scratching our heads: “It’s journos who missed the story, who didn’t have the story, who didn’t publish, who are the ones now using it as an excuse, saying it’s not in the public interest,” she said. Well yes, Sharri. That’s, you know, their point.



News Corp’s @SharriMarkson defends reporting on Barnaby Joyce leaving his wife for a former staff member as being in the public interest. pic.twitter.com/srOYnh75WH — Sunrise (@sunriseon7) February 6, 2018

It turns out there was at least one journalist in the mainstream media who reported the infidelity of the leader of the Nationals last year after all. While Markson in October alluded to a “deeply personal crisis” in Joyce’s life and issues that “affected his marriage of 24 years”, it was a Fairfax journo who nailed the word “infidelity” to Joyce.



In an online report on 19 December the Australian Financial Review’s chief political correspondent, Phillip Coorey, said a cabinet reshuffle by Malcolm Turnbull had left the Nationals in turmoil after Joyce dumped two of his ministers.



“Queenslander Keith Pitt, who Mr Joyce does not like, was not only overlooked but dumped from his job as parliamentary secretary for trade,” Coorey wrote.



“The two recently had a bitter argument about Mr Joyce’s infidelity and marriage breakup. Mr Joyce blamed Mr Pitt for spreading the rumours, a claim Mr Pitt denies.”



Well it didn’t take long before both Pitt and Joyce contacted the AFR and denied a “bitter argument” had taken place, but interestingly not the infidelity. The offending sentence was taken down, but not before some eagle-eyed readers noticed it and posted it on Twitter, where it remains.

Interesting removal of key facts from the original article in order to appease the LNP: pic.twitter.com/bKDtuy8tXM — Psyberus (@Psyberus) December 19, 2017

No to metro

Fairfax Media appears to be taking some drastic measures to stop readers getting around the paywall at the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age.



Editors at Australian Community Media – a division of Fairfax which runs the Newcastle Herald, Border Mail and the Illawarra Mercury – say they are no longer allowed to syndicate copy from the metropolitan mastheads. This is a huge blow to these regional papers, which have been cut to the bone since 2014 and have tiny newsrooms. They can either rewrite Sydney or Melbourne stories or use Australian Associated Press copy.



A memo from ACM’s digital boss Kim Treasure said staff will notice that “AAP has replaced the metro feed” on some pages and then attempts to dress it up as an improvement in journalistic standards.



“This is a really good opportunity to have a newsroom conversation about how important compelling, local content is to our audience,” Treasure said. “Cutting and pasting metro content is not journalism. If it’s of interest to our readers, we should be able to localise and develop stories.”



A Fairfax spokesman told Beast: “Copy sharing between our community and metro mastheads continues – along with collaboration between the newsrooms on stories where it makes sense. Our community and metro mastheads are focused on serving the needs of their respective audiences.”



But sources say the copy sharing is extremely limited – a total of 10 stories a week across all the regional papers. Does anyone outside of Newcastle bother going to the Newcastle Herald to get a story from the Age anyway?

News Corp pools resources

News Corp papers ran a collective front page calling for the Queensland government to fund school swimming lessons

News Corp Australia loves a campaign to drum up interest in its newspapers. In the last week or so it’s had two: a national campaign to revive the movie Crocodile Dundee and another one aimed at forcing the Queensland government to fund swimming lesson for primary school children. Forty-six News Corp mastheads ran the same front page to launch the SOS (Save Our Schoolkids) campaign.

The Courier-Mail editor, Sam Weir, said: “This is a unique stance we’ve taken to shine a light on the outrageous fact that Queensland does not include compulsory swimming lessons in primary schools.” The stories rolled out for days and featured politicians, Olympians and the parents of kids who had drowned.

But online and in the paper readers were swamped by ads for Rackley Swimming (a company which runs 20 swimming schools across Queensland), the Swimming Pool and Spa Association of Australia, and Optus, which supports Swimming Australia. Was it a paid content campaign without being labelled as such? The companies were referred to as “partners” in the small print. According to corporate affairs the campaign was conceptualised by the Courier-Mail editorial team led by the head of news, Melanie Pilling. News Corp told Beast: “It’s an editorial initiative that received commercial support.”

Big Aunty is watching you?

ABC staff were extremely concerned by a memo sent by the ABC chief operating officer, Louise Higgins, which revealed security had been upgraded in the foyer of its Ultimo HQ in Sydney – “including new tracking of staff and facial recognition capabilities amongst others”.

The foyer has recently had a makeover with colourful couches and giant toys which make it look not unlike a giant Lego set. Was management using Big Brother-style technology to track their movements? The ABC section secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union, Sinddy Ealy, asked Higgins about her memo. The ABC has assured staff there has been no change to the “surveillance that the ABC conducts in relation to ABC employees entering or leaving the building”.

“While the upgraded security systems have some additional capabilities (such as, for example, facial recognition), these functionalities have neither been installed nor implemented. The ABC does not intend to monitor staff movements via facial recognition.”

Bloody Oath

When Yahoo7 announced it was making some “changes” to its business this week, corporate spin doctors tried so hard to paint a rosy picture they failed to give even hint of what those changes might be. The media release titled “Yahoo7 restructures to harness the power of world-leading Oath technology” was a study in modern public relations techniques: write copious amounts of meaningless words.



“Today Yahoo7 announces a decision to introduce changes to its operations. Following a strategic review with its shareholders Oath and Seven West Media (SWM), Yahoo7 needs to make changes to its structure that will carry the company into the future. Most significantly, Yahoo7 is planning on making greater use of the Oath technology capabilities.” No clue so far. “Yahoo7 will continue to be a market-leading destination for over 9 million Australians across its premium consumer brands like Yahoo7 Be, 7News, Yahoo7 Finance, Mail and 7Sport. The local brands will remain unaffected by this shift in the back-end tech platforms.”



But then the word reduction and teams came up and we figured it must be about staff cuts. “This change would lead to a planned reduction in locally-produced bespoke platforms, and potentially across the associated teams. Smaller changes are also planned across the rest of the organisation.”

A staff member told us what was really going down. About two-thirds of the 180 to 200 Yahoo7 staff will be made redundant over coming months, as the backend and tech jobs are taken over by joint venture partners Oath in the US. The majority of the editorial team, however, who manage digital content for TV shows including Home and Away and My Kitchen Rules as well as news and Sunrise will transfer to the news division or the television division, but most should keep their jobs. Oath is the media company that bought the Huffington Post and then pulled the plug on the Australian arm late last year, leaving just two people to run a scaled-down bureau. When Oath closed down the Australian operation Yahoo7 staff thought their time was up too.

