Anthony De Ceglie gave his first speech to the Melbourne Press Club yesterday in his role as Seven News boss, canvassing a range of issues and taking questions from journalists.
This year some changes introduced to Seven News under his watch have not gone without comment or even derision.
But De Ceglie impressed upon the need for media companies to take risks and compete with new platforms like TikTok and Instagram in order to grow audiences.
“Put as plainly and as simply as I can, we cannot rest on our laurels,” he said.
“We need to turn it up to 1000. We need to do it every single day. The crazier the idea, the better, I joke. But that’s why I encourage taking chances, like introducing Star Signs into the 6pm bulletin to widen our demographic. We’re adding satire at the end of the week with Mark Humphries and his 6:57pm news. We actually need more risk taking in our industry, not less, if we want to compete.
“And for those keeping count, since we introduced our Star Signs and our satire, our ratings have gone up, not gone down. I’m not saying that’s just because of these innovations, although it’s worth highlighting that in Melbourne, under the new News Director Chris Salter, who’s in the audience, we’ve also introduceda very popular Good News segment at the end of our bulletins. And in Sydney, the dynamic new News Director Shaun Power is at the cutting edge of thinking about our craft.
“My point is simply that Seven is trying new things and the world isn’t coming to an end.”
He also addressed significant changes in Seven’s leadership team and a swathe of new faces in key news positions.
“I am a strong believer that as a leader, you also need to enforce a no d***heads policy, it only ever takes one person to disrupt an entire team, and if they’re not dealt with, then they can become a cancer that infects the whole staff. Ryan Stokes has a leadership philosophy that he calls ‘The Owners mindset.’ It’s 10 guiding principles are also on my whiteboard. Among them are points like Doers over Delegators, Value Pace over Analysis / Paralysis and Be Crystal Clear on the Drivers.
“The final point in Ryan’s guiding philosophy is my favourite, that everything in leadership is personal. Some industry insiders have commented on the relative youth of my team with one columnist, even dubbing us the Romper Room after the classic children’s TV show. Of course, the irony was that most of us were so young, we had no idea what they were talking about. And as I told them, ‘If the biggest criticism we face is our age, then I’ll take that any day of the week.’”
De Ceglie also took aim at the Commercial Broadcasting (Tax) Act 2017, in which broadcasters pay for the FTA spectrum they use, when they are competing with global social media giants.
“Channel Seven proudly produces about 26 hours of journalism, but just like those regional newspapers that I started my career at, we can’t promise that we’ll keep doing that forever. The government acts like newsrooms are still bathing in the rivers of profits. It does this at a high cost and a high risk journalism and the Australian democracy. Free to air networks like Channel Seven still pay an archaic broadcast tax that was designed 60 years ago during an era of super profits that simply no longer exist. At a time when a viewer can access 10 hours of news on Seven’s Free to Air channel on any given day, the so called commercial broadcast tax is actually just a tax on journalism,” he said.
Seven, Nine and 10 pay a combined estimated $45m to the government for broadcast spectrum.
“I ask the Albanese government, how many jobs do they think that is? How many TV newsroom shifts will disappear so that we can pay it? How many regional reporters will have to be let go? How many more redundancy call outs will be made because of a meaningless tax from a bygone error that is nothing more than a rounding error for the budget coffers? No other compatible jurisdiction in the world places tax burdens of this kind on broadcasters. License fees paid by Australian broadcasters now are the highest in the world at 52 times more than the equivalent per capita charge of our US peers,” he continued.
“Make no mistake, I am using today’s speech to call on the Albanese government and the Dutton opposition to vow to scrap the commercial broadcast tax immediately, in the name of journalism. The future of the news and the future of the truth in our democracy depends on it.”
Photo: Emily Kulich
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