Mumbrellacast

Welcome to the latest episode of the Mumbrellacast. Today, we're joined by Tommy Robinson to discuss whether or not those bloody—oh wait, our lawyers have advised us to drop that segment, so we will instead start by discussing Karl Stefanovic's perfectly played-out cancellation from Nine. Today, after 20 years behind the Today desk, Karl Stefanovic has finally been axed by Nine, after months of ramping up the right-wing content on his independent video podcast The Karl Stefanovic Show until he hit breaking point with right-wing racist Tommy Robinson, who Karl openly declared his love for. What's next for Karl's career? Can he make his millions without falling into bed with a major media company? Who will replace Karl on Today? Will Karl's new ARN radio show with controversy-free pundit Eddie McGuire go live at 1pm tomorrow afternoon, as scheduled? Will it still be uploaded to 9now if it does? Has Karl pushed his public persona too far to be a safe bet for a Nine competitor looking to snap up a heavyweight free agent? Will advertisers go near him after this? Will the witches stop waving their wands at Nine? Will Karl have to pay for his own table at the Logies? These aren't rhetorical questions. We ask and answer them all. A decent portion of our listeners may be tuning in from Cannes Lions in France, as they take a break from the relentless champagne, sunshine, and trophies to check back in with what's happening back home. Matt Jones, founder of Four Pillars Gin, Mumbrella columnist, and intrepid traveller, reports back from his very first Cannes Lions and tries to make sense of it all. And finally, we look at the current race for the NRL broadcast rights, the most drawn out negotiations since Waco. It seems to be down to Foxtel and Nine, who are both trying to take the entire rights package, and box the other out, after 28 years of peacefully co-hosting the NRL. During the week, we asked whether Foxtel's bid for the prize is even legal, with the anti-siphoning laws dictating that free-to-air broadcasters need to have the first bite of the cherry when it comes to major sporting competitions. Today, we take this discussion even further, and debate whether the anti-siphoning laws should just be abandoned altogether. We flip a coin, take opposing sides of that coin, and fight it out, primary-school debate-style. No fourth speakers or rebuttals allowed! As with most debates, free speech is the real winner. Karl and Tommy will be very proud of us... Happy listening! Get the latest episodes here. Podcast edit by Abe’s Audio.

Welcome to a very radio-heavy Mumbrellacast, where we discuss Kyle Sandilands' big settlement with ARN, SCA's sacking of three regional breakfast show, and even attempt to take Pauline Hanson's side on an issue or two (actually, just one). Best of all, we are joined by Lauren Joyce, who spent some time inside ARN, dealing with some of Kyle's mad fucking detractors. We begin with Kyle Sandilands' settlement with ARN, which will see him take home $12m plus change, millions in advertising, and Smallzy's collection of Reeboks. It's hard to see who won, ultimately, aside from activist group Mad Fucking Witches. But, with Sandilands and ARN still in business through a revenue share agreement, will this public separation be enough to see the MFW back off ARN? Southern Cross Austereo is the latest media company forced into "rightsizing" as business-types call the sacking of humans. The newly merged media company has cancelled three of its regional radio shows as it looks to cut 250-300 jobs across the entire company, and save $150m. It's a big mission, but isn't regional breakfast radio the wrong area to look for savings, especially as the gulf between the monolithic tech giants, and local DJs discussing the weather between No Doubt tunes continues to grow wider? What has SCA lost by getting rid of its local talent? This week Google flew marketing legend Les Binet to Sydney where he revealed the secret to marketing. His take? The more you spend, the better your results. Not surprisingly, such a simplistic take received a little push back from the Mumbrella team. And finally, following Pauline Hanson's declaration that she would axe the SBS and use that money to invade Greenland or something, Hal Crawford and Tim Burrowes take opposing sides and debate whether the multicultural broadcaster should exist at all. Oh, and did we mentioned -- we've got an exclusive snippet of Kyle Sandilands talking about-- well, you'll just have to listen in. Happy listening! Get the latest episode every Thursday. Podcast edit by Abe’s Audio.

Four years ago, Tim Burrowes came up with the idea of the Unmade Index, which tracks daily the fortunes of 14 Australian publicly listed companies, ranging from once-mighty media companies like Seven through to tiny (read: $40m) businesses like Gumtree. Unfortunately, since its January 6, 2022 inception, the index has tracked the massive decline of the local media industry, with the total value dropping by more than 60%. If maths isn't your strong suit, that's a big fall for stocks -- which investors generally prefer to increase in value. As discussed in the podcast, the past four years have been absolutely transformative, just not in a good way.

Welcome to this week's Mumbrellacast, featuring zero serious misconduct breaches -- aside from references to both Alan Bond and Donald Rumsfeld, of course. It's been quite the week in radio-land, with ARN using the dump button on Kyle Sandilands for "serious misconduct" which is, of course, legalese for "teasing his co-host for believing in star charts". We smashed the glass and issued an emergency podcast on Tuesday evening shortly after ARN dropped the bombshell that the Kyle and Jackie O show is no more -- you can listen to that here -- but today we investigate what is likely to be a long and drawn out legal battle between Sandilands and his former station. Victoria-Jane Otavski from Blackbay Lawyers unpacks all the legal elements for us, and looks at whether or not the network actually has a case for alleging serious misconduct in breach of his contract. As she asks, how can someone remedy a behavioural breach that's already happened -- without using some serious time-space misconduct. This week Mumbrella broke the story that Australian content platform Envato was sacking up to a third of its workers. Envato has flown under the radar for many, but for certain creatives it provides songs, sounds, stock imagery, and photography -- paying billions out to the creatives who made the original pieces, while providing a rich content library to those who need it. It was bought by Shutterstock last year for a whopping US$245m, so this is a major Australian start-up success story gone slightly pear-shaped. We look at why it needed to make such a drastic downsizing, and whether or not AI has reared its mechanical head (spoiler: it has). Finally, we look at Vinyl Group's acquisition of Val Morgan Digital, which will see the media company add Buzzfeed, Ladbible, Popsugar, Vox Media, and Choctop Monthly to its growing stable of brands (fair enough, I made up Choctop Monthly). We wonder aloud whether the $7m (plus $3.5m in Vinyl stock) was too much to pay, or if this is all part of the masterplan to build a media stable to fuel the company's music tech dreams? Happy listening! Get the latest episode every Wednesday. Podcast edit by Abe’s Audio.