Talking Point

Gyngell return must haunt Alexander

The most interesting personality in the return of former Channel Nine CEO David Gyngell to the network is not Gyngell himself. That honour must surely go to John Alexander, the PBL CEO and the current Chairman of Nine’s parent company PBL Media.

Alexander was largely seen as the major reason Gyngell left the network two years ago, citing irreconncible differences with PBL management. Now with private equity players, CVC Asia Pacific, holding the majority stake in Nine, Gyngell is back.

The most galling aspect of Gyngell's return for Alexander must surely be the reports that his boss, James Packer, personally wooed his best mate back to the network and promised an interference free tenure as CEO - a clear repudiation of the way Alexander and others handled the network in the past if the reports are accurate.

It hasn’t been a good few months for Alexander’s ego with his good friend and former Sunday Executive Producer John Lyons returning to the print media. Lyons was a key figure in Gerald Stone’s recent book, Who Killed Channel 9, and was reportedly sacked by Gyngell’s replacement, Sam Chisholm, who was forced to re-instate him after Alexander intervened.

The Gyngell appointment clearly shows James Packer continues to hold sway at Nine (he's a PBL Media board member) but one has to question what influence, if any, Alexander has as PBL Media Chairman.

Fairfax rethinks AFR web strategy

Finally, the Fairfax chiefs might be seeing the light with reports in today's media that the Australian Financial Review's paid subscriber only policy for sections of its website might soon be confined to the waste paper bin.

According to The Australian:

FAIRFAX Media's main financial news website, afr.com, will be relaunched for the second time this year in "a matter of weeks" with more content likely to be made freely available after months of criticism.

It's unlikely everything on the site will be free however with Fairfax Business media chief Michael Gill telling The Age on Saturday that "news and simple stuff" would be available for free but the business model will remain subscription based.

Trevor Cook had a good post last week, describing the paper as a shell. The amount wire copy sourced from overseas sometimes makes up the majority of content in some sections. Experienced journalists like John Durie and Jennifer Hewett are now working for The Australian. As Trevor points out, much of the content can be sourced  from elsewhere as there's no shortage of business related media adorning our new stands airwaves and the Internet. The question, therefore, is why would people pay good money to get the content you can get somewhere else for free?

Give research a human touch

PR people love a good piece of research to support their communication campaigns. It’s probably one of the most overused tactics in the PR toolkit but still has its place when the statistics are given a human face.

This week our team faced the dilemma of having some great research on video late fees but nothing more than a few interesting statistics. A decade or so ago, a well resourced newsroom would have received these statistics and sent a cadet journalist down to their local shopping centre to find the human face to the statistics. I was one of them many years ago.

Not anymore. PR people are now expected to do some of the work journalists have performed in the past in finding what many in the business call “talent” to tell the story. People like hearing stories from other people with similar experiences. The research is simply there to back up what the person in saying and should never be seen as the sum total of the story.

Fortunately, we now have the tools available to us to easily find people with good stories to tell. By posting a simple question that asked people whether they knew of any late fees horror stories we were able to find enough talent to back up our research and get the media interested in our story.

Google election site launched in Australia

Google Australia has launched a few ways to help you stay up to date with the Federal election.

In what the company describes as a world first, political junkies will be able to find out what their local MPs are up to, search for political news seat by seat and locate their electorate via Google Earth.

If that wasn't enough information, a dedicated Google/You Tube channel - "Australia Talks" - will feature election content and be a forum for discussing Australian politics and the election.