And another thing...

Welcome to Best of the Week, written on a wintry Friday afternoon in Evandale. Summer starts on Monday? Not in Tasmania.

Today: What Lauren Joyce’s exit says about ARN; ABC’s big cheque; the consultancies’ PR problem; and Vinyl Group’s reverse ferret.

Happy Customer is Wrong Day. Perhaps Virgin Airlines should sponsor that one.

Calling in an expert

The week ended with news of the exit of one of Australia’s most senior - and inexperienced - radio programmers.

Lauren Joyce, chief audience and content officer at ARN Media, has been made redundant.

Joyce, who made her reputation as a smart strategist, came up through media agencies including Total Advertising (since rebadged as PHD), UM and Ensemble, before moving media side with Mamamia and then, six years ago, to ARN Media.

Having joined ARN as national strategy director and quickly stepping up to chief strategy and connections officer, Joyce received a curious promotion earlier this year. She was named chief audience and content officer ahead of the departure of chief content officer Duncan Campbell.

It coincided with the redundancy of David Cameron as chief programming officer at rival Southern Cross Austereo. Suddenly, Joyce, working in her first radio job, was also the industry’s most senior programmer. 

My initial assumption was that the content half of her role was temporary, until a new chief content officer could be hired. Domain expertise matters.

I put that argument to Joyce and her new boss Michael Stephenson when I interviewed them around the ARN upfronts. At the time, she argued: “I may not have the hard programming skills of a radio programmer, but what I do know is how to motivate people and how to engage people, and I also understand audiences.”

Admittedly, it’s also relevant that what a financially challenged organisation like ARN does not need is to carry on doing the same things it’s always done.

Later that week, Joyce and Stephenson also gave an interview to the Game Changers Radio podcast. In conversation with domain experts, Joyce came across poorly. Co-host Craig Bruce, a former SCA head of content with two decades of experience, challenged Joyce and Stephenson about their programming strategy - particularly the decision to put Craig Low into Brisbane.

It became an interview notorious within the audio industry for exposing an expertise vacuum at the top of the organisation. Internally, on-air talent saw that their bosses knew far less than they do about radio.

There are some parallels with last weekend’s disastrous Hard Fork podcast interview with Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki. Anyone listening came away with a far worse impression of Roblox, not because of the actions of the interviewers, but because of how Baszucki conducted himself.

The poor Game Changers interview might have hastened Stephenson’s decision to make Joyce redundant but the key fact is that the structure was wrong. The current ARN Media executive team does not contain anyone with a radio programming background.

Stephenson and chief sales officer Richard Hunwick are both from TV, chief regional officer Michael Harvey and chief financial officer Alexis Poole are both from finance; and chief digital and technology officer Ben Campbell is from TV and publishing.

The programming is crucially important, and needs a programmer. ARN will now hire a chief programming officer.

A while back I had the madcap theory that they should consider Dave Cameron. I still make that case.

Another name doing the rounds is Gemma O’Neill (previously Fordham), former content boss of SCA’s Hit Network. Just as relevant, Fordham is famously Jackie Henderson’s best friend, including co-presenting a podcast together. Navigating the dangerous waters of The Kyle and Jackie O Show - with the Australian Communications and Media Authority finally watching - will be the single hardest part of the chief programming officer role.

I’m not so sure about that - I think Stephenson will need his own person, not somebody from the K+J camp.

Stephenson may be tempted to go for yet another former Nine colleague. The industry rumour mill suggests Stepho has been talking to his old Nine colleague Kerri Elstub. While Elstub has some radio on her resume, including as a talkback producer at the start of her career, most of her background is digital publishing and TV. Hiring her would be a huge signal that audio is not the main part of Stephenson’s future plans.

But surely ARN needs at least one radio maker at the top.

ABC’s bad and good week

The ABC finished the week better than it started. After more weak radio ratings almost across the ABC’s networks, came the news that The Greens had parlayed support for the streaming quotas legislation into a $50m funding boost.

The ABC is currently making a lot of content that doesn’t find audiences. Instead of spending the money on doing more of the same, it should spend the windfall on marketing. What’s the point of making the stuff if audiences don’t know it exists?

One-eyed Walkleys watchers

Thursday night saw The Walkleys journalism awards. As usual, journalists appear to lose their objectivity when they write about the media.

The ABC article angled on the ABC’s wins, (but at least mentioned Nine’s success).

The Australian Financial Review dedicated most of its article to its three wins, leaving it until the final paragraph to refer to the ABC’s Gold Walkey (the top award), without telling readers the details.

Also within the Nine stable, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald readers could be forgiven for assuming that each masthead respectively was the big winner.

The only other time that Australia’s hard hitting and independent thinking media journalists appear to lose their critical thinking is when the monthly readership numbers are published.

Vinyl’s new move

Vinyl Group - owner of titles like Rolling Stone Australia, Variety Australia and Mediaweek - held its annual general meeting on Friday, and shifted the goal posts.

Having talked regularly about an “EBITDA positive quarter in December 2025”, the language changed in Friday’s update from CEO Josh Simons. Instead, Simons is now promising a “cashflow positive quarter”.

Being EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation) positive would be a meaningful sign that the company is starting to be run profitably. Being cashflow positive merely means there’s more money in the bank at the end of the quarter than the start. That can be achieved in all sorts of meaningless ways.

Maybe Vinyl will still be EBITDA positive too. We’ll find out in a few weeks.

So far, Vinyl Group has managed to avoid too many embarrassing year-on-year comparisons by continuing to make acquisitions which inevitably means more revenue than the year before. That in turn creates an opportunity for rounds of capital raising promoted as being about growth rather than a bail out.

Yesterday, Vinyl signalled more acquisitions are on the way. It looks like the wheel is going to turn again.

Consultancies concerns

For people who purport to help marketers build their brands, Australia’s consultancies sure have an image problem.

Notoriously, PWC used confidential government briefings to help the digital platforms evade a crackdown on the offshoring of profits.

Deloitte was busted using AI to write a report full of hallucinations, and charging Australian taxpayers $440,000 for the privilege.

Accenture rinsed the BOM for at least $78m for its shitty website reboot.

And yesterday came new details of the exit from EY of a partner after he hit on a colleague at a Christmas party and was then accused of assaulting a bar manager while out with colleagues.

As my colleague Eleanor Dickinson explored this week, Australia’s agencies face uphill battles when it comes to handling client conflict.

The justification for why consultancies get away with having conflict clients is that it’s because they’re more professional. Really?

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