The past year has been a brutal one for the Australian media industry. Job cuts have been made all over the country (Crikey has been tracking them here), with more than 400 roles slashed in the past few months at Seven West, Nine Entertainment and News Corp alone. And the industry is set for even more pain as the money from publishing deals with tech giants Meta and Google dries up.
Despite the cuts, however, some of us are eating well. And by us, we mean those in the C-suites. Today Crikey rounds up the profits and executive pay at the biggest media companies in the country so you can see how much corporate executives are making relative to the performance of their companies (or the job cuts they’ve made).
Nine
When Nine Entertainment released its most recent fiscal results, the headline was that CEO Mike Sneesby lost almost 80% of his bonus as the company’s profits fell amid a challenging advertising market. Sneesby was recently under fire over a lavish trip to the Paris Olympics while his staff back home endured the wrath of redundancies and battled for a new pay deal.
Group profits at Nine were down 22% after tax in the 2023-24 financial year, while Sneesby took home $2.1 million. That’s down on the $2.7 million he took home in 2022-23 — a year the company saw a loss of 25% after tax. His latest pay package represents an additional $600,000 on top of his $1.5 million base salary.
It comes after 85 redundancies, mostly voluntary, in Nine’s publishing division last week. The division reported a drop in earnings, although the company’s fiscal report noted it had “outperformed, primarily due to strong subscription performance”.
News Corp
News Corp saw a number of jobs go as revenues in Australia fell 7% compared to FY23. More than 100 people lost their jobs in the most recent round of redundancies, including high-profile editors such as news.com.au’s Lisa Muxworthy, as the company undertook a $65 million restructure.
The company has been hit by the soft advertising market, but is relatively well protected thanks to its subscription assets such as Kayo and its newspapers.
Despite the difficulties at News, global CEO Robert Thomson has been eating very well, taking home $41.53 million last year. That makes him the second-highest-paid CEO on the ASX200 on a realised-pay basis in FY23, per ASCI’s ASX200 CEO pay report. As is relatively common in the United States, a large majority of this consisted of performance-tied pay, with Thomson’s fixed pay sitting at $5.17 million.
Seven
Seven West is also staring down redundancies, with up to 150 jobs set to go. CEO Jeff Howard told a parliamentary inquiry earlier this year that the loss of funding from Meta and Google in publishing deals would force Seven to cut jobs.
Howard has only been in his position for a few months, taking over from James Warburton. Warburton took home $2.77 million in 2022-23, which consisted of $1.47 million in additional compensation on top of his $1.3 million base salary. His total compensation was down almost 40% from the previous year.
This year, Seven West Media saw group earnings before tax down 33% on last year, but Howard still took home $1.25 million, with no short-term cash incentives paid out. His base salary this financial year was $747,918.
