Media Unmade: Australian Media's Most Disruptive Decade by Tim Burrowes

Author:Tim Burrowes [Burrowes, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Industries, Media & Communications, Language Arts & Disciplines, journalism, Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781743587515
Google: _KctEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Hardie Grant Publishing
Published: 2021-07-07T23:32:55.486989+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BLOOD, SWEAT AND TEARS

In which Rupert Murdoch splits the company in two, boss Kim Williams loses the civil war, Lachlan Murdoch returns to the fold – and the company’s dire finances are laid bare

In Kim Williams’s office, the mood of his management team is shocked, angry and sad. Most of those in the room already know what he is about to tell them. They picked it up in the corridors of the fifth floor a few moments ago. The boss of News Corp Australia has lost his civil war with the old guard. It will be presented to the outside world as a resignation but, in truth, he’s been nudged, if not pushed.

It’s August 2013, less than two years since Williams took charge, and his agenda to take the company through a digital transformation is nowhere near complete. But advertising revenues have collapsed and senior editors have turned against Williams. He’s lost the support of the one person who matters – Rupert Murdoch.

Williams has had little sleep. He was up late writing a goodbye email to the company’s staff along with making all the other arrangements for his last day in charge. The email will go out shortly, soon after the stock exchange announcement of his unexpected departure. ‘Whilst the leadership roles and the issues encountered have at times been frankly really confronting, it has been a source of perpetual renewal and reinforcement to have worked with so many terrific colleagues both here and internationally,’ his email reads. ‘It is the people that one remembers the most. I will be forever grateful to those who have been so helpful and constructively supportive in the many matters we have mutually confronted. There have been many good wins matched with some memorable awful problems and opponents!’ Plenty of those opponents were in the newsrooms below his fifth-floor office.

The announcement includes a quote from Rupert Murdoch acknowledging that he was the one who dropped Williams into this nest of vipers. ‘From the early days when we opened Fox Studios Australia, to his tenacious work building Foxtel and Fox Sports into the powerhouse it is today, Kim has always operated with great integrity and skill. It was with that in mind that I turned to him and asked him to leave the security of the pay TV business and take over the whole of our Australian operations as chief executive of News Corp Australia.

‘I want to thank him for his unwavering commitment, and the blood, sweat and tears he has put into News Corp Australia.’ Tears indeed. Not realising that most of those people in the room already know, Williams gives them the news. He tries not to but, combined with the lost night of sleep, it’s too much, and he breaks down in tears.

Fourteen months earlier …

THE SPLIT

The thing about Rupert Murdoch was that his genius went beyond publishing and broadcasting. A company as big and complex as News Corp required clever financial engineering to keep growing. It took acumen to tap

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