As Nine Entertainment lays off employees and a third-party investigation into misconduct at the network rolls on, another senior executive will soon be jetting out of the country.
Last week, Nine CEO Mike Sneesby left Australia for a family holiday to Greece in the same calendar day he grimly informed 5,000 staffers their jobs might soon be culled.
“It is not something we want to do but it is something we need to do to continue to build on a successful platform of high-quality journalism and digital journalism and digital subscription growth,” Sneesby wrote, shortly before being spotted in the First Class Lounge at Sydney Airport.
Now, according to The Australian, managing director of Nine Publishing, Tory Maguire has informed her staff that she will be heading to Fiji for a holiday next week, after first flying to Canberra for the Midwinter Ball, which took place on Wednesday night.
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The Australian has also reported that a document on Nine’s internal Slack channel outlining the more granular aspects of the job cuts was met with a smattering of Greek and Fijian flag emojis.
After being told last week that they would make up between 70 and 90 of the 200 job cuts, the publishing division — Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Australian Financial Review, Brisbane Times and WAtoday — were informed by Maguire that “this is the first time we have had to take headcount out of editorial since 2017, which is an extraordinary anomaly when you look at other news publishers around the country and the rest of the world”.
Maguire followed up at a Town Hall this past Monday by confirming that millions of dollars in Meta payments coming to Nine had officially stopped.
“The only thing we know for certain is that a very large chunk of revenue is coming out of our P&L. And the tap turned off last week,” she told staff, adding that further clarity on any job cuts will be shared in the coming months.
Mumbrella reached out to Nine, who declined to comment.
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