When Cam Wallace walked into MediaWorks, he walked into a culture that oozed so much toxicity it could have been mistaken for a men’s changing room.
A report conducted by Maria Dew QC would in 2021 describe the media company as a boys’ club that made it difficult for women to progress in their careers. Harassment, bullying and racism were part of the experience of many of those who had worked at the firm.
This information wasn’t derived from hearsay or rumour - but from the first-hand accounts of more than 126 former and 483 then-current staff at the organisation.
You cannot look at the legacy of Wallace without setting this as the scene.
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Until Wallace made the decision to publicly acknowledge this problem at his own media company, stories about this kind of behaviour were simply whispered at lunches and washed down with a cheap tap beer. The toxicity was largely accepted as a tax paid for working in a creative industry.
Cam Wallace will leave a mixed legacy at MediaWorks and is joining Qantas. Photo / Supplied
Wallace’s willingness to commission an investigation, and make the findings public, went a long way to starting the process of mending a culture that was at best awful and at worst dangerous to the women who worked there.
The line that Wallace drew in terms of what constitutes appropriate behaviour within that organisation will linger long after he starts managing air travel routes for Qantas as the airline’s group chief executive of international and freight.
The work of building a company culture is, of course, never complete and will continue with or without Wallace in the building.
Making the task for his successor, Wendy Palmer, tricky is the fact that the company only recently announced its intention to lay off up to 90 staff members in an effort to cut costs. It’s unclear how far along this process is, but the morale within the organisation would have taken a hit from the realisation that they’d have to bid farewell to a decent proportion of their co-workers.
What next for Today FM as Wallace departs?
When there are job cuts in any media organisation, the internal frustration is generally directed at the company’s star talent (both on-air and executive), who are paid handsomely for their services. This is particularly pronounced when this star talent isn’t delivering the results you’d expect to see from those high salaries.
No brand in the MediaWorks radio portfolio captures this tension better than Today FM, which has struggled enormously to live up to its launch promise of taking on Newstalk ZB – and in particular, breakfast stalwart Mike Hosking.
Today FM has struggled to get the cut-through it was hoping to achieve, with the station attracting only 100,000 weekly listeners in radio ratings tracking listenership between June and November. This was down 14,700 from the previous survey - and leaves the station desperately clinging to its six-digit audience. Newstalk ZB meanwhile attracted 692,000 weekly listeners, sliding 8300 from its previous high.
Wallace has spent a lot of money hiring presenters Tova O’Brien, Duncan Garner, Mark Richardson, Polly Gillespie and others for Today FM – but the strategy simply hasn’t paid off.
The great irony in this is that at least some of the changes made to MagicTalk (the precursor to Today FM), were informed by the cultural shift happening across the business. If the organisation was going to be more inclusive and offer a safer environment, then hosts who didn’t reflect that sentiment would have to leave. This meant fresh voices, capable of offering different perspectives to the audience.
The struggles of Today FM have been described by some media commentators as a case of “go woke, go broke” – a common online aspersion which suggests that adopting a progressive approach can be commercially damaging.
But this is a gross over-simplification of what has always been a complex media challenge that comes when trying to launch a new brand.
Today FM hasn’t struggled because it went woke. It struggled because it forgot about its existing fan base and didn’t take them along for the journey.
The problem is that the Newstalk ZB fan base it was targeting aligned quite closely with the older listenership of what was previously known as MagicTalk. So in being willing to jettison its own fans, it had also inadvertently jettisoned hopes of attracting those coveted ZB listeners.
The holy grail of attracting younger, more progressive listeners was also out of reach because talkback audiences generally lean in the older direction, giving MediaWorks the additional challenge of dragging younger people back into a media channel that they had moved on from – a task as easy as urging a teenager to get off TikTok.
This left Today FM in an uncomfortable limbo perhaps best typified by the early advertising, which saw the line “a more balanced mic” alongside the face of Tova O’Brien.
Advertising for Today FM. Image / MediaWorks
It was an incredibly clever pun that any headline writer would be proud of - but it hinted at a show that wasn’t entirely sure what it stood for.
In the classic battle between Coca-Cola (Newstalk ZB) and Pepsi (RNZ), Today FM had been positioned as something lukewarm in the middle. It was essentially the house-brand cola that battles to even get refrigerator space.
Focus groups might tell you that listeners want more balanced radio, but as Henry Ford famously said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
What people say they want and what they actually want are often quite different. There’s no shortage of critics of the partisan leaning of Mike Hosking, and of RNZ National, but listeners keep tuning in day in, day out. These are brands that know what they stand for, and listeners know what they’re tuning into.
As a challenger brand, Today FM has struggled to carve out a unique space in the media ecosystem, leaving it as a distant third choice. Without an established online news media partner to push its content, Today FM hasn’t been able to insert itself into the daily conversation as effectively as its competitors.
Ultimately, this struggling brand must also be viewed as part of Wallace’s legacy as a media executive - and the onus now rests on his successor to find a way to lift the ratings or change the show entirely.
Whichever way this goes, it will do little to placate the internal grumbles at the cost of it all amid job cuts.
For more from Damien Venuto, listen to The Front Page, a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am.
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