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Analysis

News Corp creates ‘innovation’ centre – but staff fear more cuts

It will ‘utilise AI technology to enhance our journalism capabilities’, the local publisher’s boss, Michael Miller, wrote in a note to employees last week.

Sam Buckingham-Jones and Mark Di Stefano

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Plenty of changes at News Corp Australia, with the local publisher’s various mastheads increasingly pooling digital resources for newsletters, social media content, video and even interactive graphics.

The company’s executive chairman, Michael Miller, told staff last week that News Corp would form something called the Editorial Innovation Centre – or EIC – which will “be the home of News’ multimedia content creation led by our most innovative story producers with the goal of publishing excellent journalism where new audiences are”. The EIC will “utilise AI technology to enhance our journalism capabilities, as well as identify and adopt new channels and story formats, as they emerge”, he wrote.

News Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller.  

“Innovation is the EIC’s middle name,” he added.

Audience growth editors will be embedded at the company’s mastheads, from The Daily Telegraph to The Australian, and there will also be a head of content innovation and programming under the change.

Staff at News Corp’s Holt Street headquarters, however, are sceptical. The company has just gone through another redundancy process – it appears now to be an annual fixture – and few expect the new team to mean an expansion in headcount. Likely the opposite, given it will be run by John McGourty, the former national community masthead network editor. McGourty, as The Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier this year, was running News Corp’s Audience 25 program, widely viewed as a cost-cutting strategy which would lead to more company-wide editorial teams. Already, News Corp mastheads share sports content, business reporting and print production teams.

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An internal advertisement for the national lifestyle editor position lists at the very top of attributes desired in candidates “excellent stakeholder management skills – both internal and external”.

Second is “a strong editorial ‘news sense’ ” .

In other news:

There have been some disappearances from The Australian’s website over the last week, including a lengthy piece written by long-time business columnist Robert Gottliebsen. The column, which disappeared amid a barrage of criticism from the Australian Taxation Office, was a unique take on the PwC tax leak scandal extensively reported by The Australian Financial Review. As well reported, PwC has suspended nine partners and seen the departure of its chief executive, Tom Seymour, after it was revealed the firm shared confidential government plans with clients. Gottliebsen, however, had an alternative version of events – he claimed the information was publicly available ATO information and PwC had fallen awry of rules that prevented it from simply passing it on.

Another piece that quietly disappeared was a write-up in The Australian’s Margin Call business and politics column which poked fun at Ellie Aitken, the Sydney businesswoman best known for her tumultuous relationship with fund management figure Charlie Aitken. Ellie is now in a relationship with Bahamas-based fundie Mark Holowesko and was apparently horrified with the Margin Call report. Legal letters likely preceded the deletion.

Meanwhile, some good news at last for Lachlan Murdoch. It has been a difficult few months for the media mogul, given his Fox Corporation agreed to a $US787.5 million ($1.2 billion) settlement with Dominion in the United States after accusing the voting machine company of being partly to blame for the misconduct during the last presidential election. Then there was the withdrawal from a defamation case against Crikey days later, again over claims that Fox had called into question the election’s validity.

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But now there’s $35 million extra in the bank account – in his personal Illyria Nominees vehicle – thanks to a mega dividend from Nova Entertainment, the operator of a string of commercial radio stations.

Lachlan Murdoch.  

According to accounts lodged last week, NOVA recorded $194.3 million in revenue for the year to December 31, up from $184.2 million the previous year. The company, run by Murdoch lieutenant Siobhan McKenna and chief executive Peter Charlton, posted a $45.7 million profit, up from a $561,000 loss in the prior year. It had not paid a dividend in 2021 or 2020.

Sam Buckingham-Jones is the media and marketing reporter at The Australian Financial Review. Connect with Sam on Twitter.
Mark Di Stefano is Rear Window columnist, based in the Sydney newsroom. He previously worked at BuzzFeed, the Financial Times and The Information before joining the Financial Review as a media and tech correspondent. Connect with Mark on Twitter. Email Mark at mark.distefano@afr.com

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