INSIDE MAIL: The age-gap romance everyone’s talking about at Sky News, Nine’s HR shocker sparks staff revolt… and the rumour we never expected to hear about Lisa Wilkinson

In our must-read Mail+ column, Steve Jackson reveals what’s REALLY going on behind the scenes of Australia’s media industry. 

Nine’s shock HR fail during interviews for top news job 

It’s a new year, which means new hope and new opportunities after a challenging 12 months for TV and journalism at large.

Unfortunately, we’re less than two days into 2025 and there is already talk of a new controversy emanating from Australia’s largest media company, Nine Entertainment.

Inside Mail has previously revealed veteran Nine newsmen Mark Burrows and Damian Ryan are vying with journalism Swiss Army knife and 60 Minutes star Amelia Adams for the key network role of Sydney news director – one of the most powerful positions in the business – following the unexpected exit of former boss Simon Hobbs. 

We hear all three underwent an extensive interview process via Zoom last month as they each tried to convince the powers-that-be at Nine’s Denison St headquarters they were the best person for the job in what’s already shaping up as a fierce contest.

But wait, as one-time Demtel home-shopping adman Tim Shaw would say, there’s more…

Because – in an HR shocker for the ages – they could all see the other contenders booked in for interviews during the hook up… given the top brass’s schedule of ‘upcoming meetings’ was prominently displayed on screen. 

Whoops.

And what’s more, there was one name on the list we didn’t know about! 

That of one-time Sunday Telegraph editor, short-lived Today show executive producer and former 4BC shock jock Neil Breen. 

Breenie, as he is known, is the man who infamously slapped ‘intimate’ images of a woman with a very passing resemblance to Senator Pauline Hanson (it helped if you dimmed the lights and squinted) on the front page of The Sunday Tele back in 2009.  

He boasted at the time that the paper had the technology to ‘strip back’ the nude photos to their ‘rawest form’ and check the pixels to ensure the pics weren’t doctored. 

And, of course, they weren’t. They just weren’t of Senator Hanson. 

The gaffe ended with the firebrand pollie receiving a wholehearted public apology from Breenie and a little News Corp cash into her personal account to boot. 

By the time Inside Mail signed on as the editor’s chief of staff a few of years later, the fiasco had become part of Holt St folklore… but the kind of folklore that dared not speak its name (at least while Breenie was about). 

Fast-forward to 2012 and, after six years at the helm, the Sunday Tele boss announced he was making the leap to commercial TV, having been offered the task of fixing Nine’s struggling Today show by his close friend and then-network chief David Gyngell.  

At first, it was a match made in heaven. 

After taking over the ailing program in early 2013, Breenie quickly closed the ratings gap between Today and long-standing gold-medallist Sunrise on Seven. 

But behind the scenes, the pressure to win was starting to show and there were rumours about brutal on-set blow ups, bitter staff infighting, and toxic network power plays.

The negative publicity was so vicious that Breenie told his bosses he was stepping down as EP for the good of the program after just nine months in charge (at least that was his spin at the time).

Honestly, it all happened so long ago, no one can really quite recall who said what, when, where and to whom – either way, all that drama is very much done and dusted. 

But far from retreating from TV, Breenie copped a humbling demotion to the reporting ranks, where he impressed with his work ethic and willingness to cover just about anything. 

He parlayed that success into a stint as a talkback host at Nine’s Brisbane-based 4BC radio station before returning to Sydney as a reporter for A Current Affair last year. 

Still, whispers he’s now one of four candidates in the running for the Harbour City’s top job have been meet with mixed emotions in at Nine’s North Sydney bunker. 

Some have been quick to dredge up all the old tabloid news reports from his raucous days running the Today show. Others in his corner point to everything he has accomplished at the network since then. 

Breenie has been written off before. Will he prove his critics wrong again? 

Mum’s the word as Caleb Bond finds love again 

His name is Bond. Caleb Bond. 

But fear not, good mothers of Sydney, you need not lock up your daughters, for the debonair Sky News Australia host is no longer looking for love – he’s found it….

Though perhaps it would have been more fitting if the good daughters of Sydney had been locking up their mothers. 

After all, the 25-year-old TV presenter and certified old soul has openly conceded he has ‘a thing for older women’. 

Proving he is a man of conviction, since breaking up with former flame and feminist columnist Rosie Waterland (13 years his senior), Bond has coupled up with child psychologist, columnist and mother-of-one Clare Rowe (15 years his senior).

Rowe is an occasional guest on Sky News and we are reliably informed they met through her appearances on the right-wing station. 

Hey, the man knows what he likes and he’s been quite candid about it.   

Bond and Waterland famously spilled the details about their unconventional romance in a head-scratching Good Weekend interview barely 18 months ago that had absolutely everyone in the industry talking. 

Waterland revealed she first connected with Bond over Twitter in 2016 – when he was still an unassuming ‘skinny teenager’ of just 17 years making a name for himself as the country’s youngest conservative commentator, and she was 30. 

They met in person for the first time three years later, in 2019, to ‘see if the chemistry translated from typing to talking’. 

It did. 

Bond said they found themselves locked away in ‘a hotel room and didn’t leave for five days’. (Yikes, that sure is a lot of talking.)

‘We just clicked,’ he said. ‘By the end of the week we were a couple. 

‘Months later, in March 2020, I drove from Adelaide to Sydney to visit her. Just as I’d driven over the border, it was closed because of Covid: I had no option but to move in.  

‘If you want to work out whether you work as a couple, being thrown together literally 24/7 for three months will tell you. By the end, we said, ‘Well, if we can do that, we can probably survive anything!”

Or possibly not. Because it must have been love, but it’s over now. 

Within weeks of opening up about their relationship, the media odd couple split up. 

A chronic over-sharer, Bond detailed his heartbreak and attempts to find new love in a column last January while offering a few choice dating tips on the side. 

‘Men and women are different, thank God,’ the lonesome dove studiously enthused. 

‘Women are infinitely better at keeping a diary, for instance, but much worse at arriving at those events on time (which is probably still better than the blokes who forget altogether). 

‘In my recent, somewhat unsuccessful return to the dating scene, I haven’t hesitated to pay and I’m usually a tight-arse. It’s the right thing to do. Strangely enough, I actually enjoy it.

‘After that you can make up your own rules between yourselves. But men, if you want a second date – pay for the first.’

Sage advice, indeed – and it clearly worked for Bond because we hear he has been dating Rowe for months now, with friends saying they are ‘an adorable match’.

Bond ‘soft-launched’ the relationship on Instagram in October, posting a happy snap of them out and about for a function at the Sydney Opera House, set to the dulcet tones of Tony Bennett‘s Steppin’ Out With My Baby. 

He posted another photo and a little further love advice the following month, sharing a picture of them together at Flemington for the Melbourne Cup alongside a caption that suggested: ‘Get yourself a gal who can punt.’

Here’s hoping this one’s a winner. 

TV promo producer puts himself in the frame 

They say there’s lies, damned lies, and network television promos – and up in Nine’s bustling Brisbane bunker at Mt Coot-tha they’ve pulled together a doozy. 

The network’s latest 60-second promotion clip packages together sensational vision captured by the city’s hard-working news team throughout the previous year with a booming voice announcing: ‘If it’s important… find a way to get the story. If it’s important… ask the tough questions… to get answers.’

Ok, we will… because we’re reliably informed Brisbane’s promos department couldn’t find enough sensational and ‘important’ moments to sustain a one-minute promo. 

So they fudged it and shot fake moments to help carry the clip instead. 

What makes us so sure? 

Well, because one of our eagle-eyed readers spotted the station’s promo producer Leon ‘Alfred Hitchcock’ Cull playing a sinister starring role in his own package while pretending to get ‘bounced’ by a network colleague about 20 seconds into the clip! 

And what luck, all the camera angles were covered. Would you believe it?

Incredible! And the Oscar for Best Actor in a News Package goes to… envelope please.

Seriously, though, is fake news vision really the sort of thing Nine want to be promoting? We wouldn’t have thought so – and neither did the industry insider who clocked it.

‘It’s supposed to be a promo all about ‘important moments’ but instead one of the moments is a staged recreation,’ they said.

‘That’s not ‘important’ – it’s lying to the viewer. If it’s ‘important’, why do we need to fake it?’

Yeah, that definitely sounds like one of those tough questions Nine wants us to be asking.

So we did – and they insisted the promo package had been an early and unapproved version posted solely on Cull’s social media account and that the offending shots would be deleted before it officially went live. 

Good, because when you’re promoting yourself as a trusted news source, we reckon ‘it’s important’ that you tell viewers the truth.  

Berejiklian’s former lover gives Tommy a bad name 

A rose by any other name, would it smell so sweet? Well, it depends whether the other name was Tommy. 

Inside Mail revealed earlier this week that disgraced former Wagga Wagga MP Daryl Maguire has started a new life – and business empire – in the tiny Outback outpost of Ivanhoe, in NSW’s remote central west, where he’s bizarrely referred to as Tommy. 

At least that’s the story he told us.

We got in touch with former NSW Liberal premier Gladys Berejiklian‘s one-time secret heart-throb on Sunday after being tipped off about his latest renovation rescue in the far-flung community of only 162 people: a rundown cottage he snapped up on the main drag for just $9,000 in August. 

We also wanted to know about a nearby property he had already done-up and was letting out for $350 a night. 

According to the online listing for ‘Margaret’s Garden Executive Cottage’ on his official accommodation website, Maguire claimed the place had been bought and lovingly restored by the late owner’s two children, Susan and Tommy, even though property records clearly showed it belonged to him.

‘Margaret was my mother,’ Maguire informed us over the phone from Ivanhoe. 

So, who’s this mysterious Tommy character, then? Well, apparently that was him, too.

‘I’ve always been called Tommy in Ivanhoe,’ he said before going off on some mad rant about the death of the media and why journalists are being made redundant.

Nice fella, get him around for a BBQ. A right barrel of laughs.

By Monday evening though, he was having second thoughts about the whole Tommy thing after Seven News followed our story. 

‘You are a very dishonest person. Your article is incorrect, and you know it,’ he fired off in a text message. 

‘I suppose that’s what you have to do to appease your millionaire media bosses, bare your posteria [sic] to put bread on your table.’

Now, Inside Mail has a reasonably thick skin… and is happy to overlook the odd inappropriate comment about our ‘posteria’. 

But being accused of being dishonest by a disgraced politician… who was forced to resign in shame… because he was found to have abused his public position… for personal financial gain… and has been charged with lying to the state’s powerful Independent Commission Against Corruption? (Note: he’s pleaded not guilty.)

Well, now, we’re just not having that. 

So we asked: ‘What is dishonest about the story?’

‘Tommy!’ he replied. ‘You know that was my nickname from school. I have never used this name to identify myself in my post-political life. Locals may choose to call me that! Not my decision.’

Oh dear, those incorrigible Ivanhoe locals and their zany nicknames. (And we know what you’re all thinking but, no, his middle name is William, not Thomas). 

Still, we weren’t indulging in any of Tommy’s tantrums… so we reminded the discredited public figure that:

• He used the name ‘Tommy’ to identify himself on his business’s official website;
• He set up his business’s official website during his ‘post-political life’; and, 
• He specifically told us that he had ALWAYS been called Tommy in Ivanhoe.

(We don’t know where the whole school nickname subplot suddenly sprang from… but nor do we particularly care).

And hallelujah, would you believe it?  

‘My apoligy [sic]. Your [sic] right,’ Maguire conceded.

Yes, we’re aware.

But alas, old Tommy was still not entirely happy.

‘All things said n done, I Do Not Refer to Myself as Tommy, as the 7 news story suggests,’ he fumed with what can only be described as a cavalier disregard for his phone’s caps button.

Well, we suggest you take that up with Seven, Tom… 

However, we will say this: we noticed you’ve gone back to your business’s website this week and scrubbed out the reference to your name being Tommy. 

But you still haven’t listed your real moniker anywhere on the site. 

We can’t imagine why. 

Western Sydney station gets a little Gold plating 

Speaking of name games, when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve, western Sydney radio giant WSFM officially changed theirs… and not everyone was celebrating.

That’s right, the home of Amanda Keller and Brendan Jones‘ hit breakfast show has rebranded as Gold 101.7 effective immediately.

The outlet’s owners, ARN, hope the new label will help the station, which started its life as a family-orientated AM station operating out of a weatherboard shack in Seven Hills in 1978, shake off its ‘westie’ roots and appeal to a wider – and younger – demo.

But Steve Raymond, who served as the outlet’s current affairs director for almost half its existence, reckons the change is tantamount to treason and shows an ‘obscene’ disregard for the loyal western Sydney listeners and staffers who made WSFM a success in the first place.

‘I still can’t believe it. I just don’t want to believe it,’ he raged online on Tuesday.

‘At midnight tonight, the owners of the ARN radio network will trash nearly 50 years of tradition, heritage – and a loyalty bond that united 2WS and WS-FM with the people of The Greater West.

‘Sure ARN, you have long moved away from our humble home in Seven Hills… but to ditch our very callsign… I find obscene.

‘A prayer for founding chairman, Keith Graham, secretary Ken White and Neil Whiteley who died in an horrific crash while on 2WS business in 1984.

‘Our creative boss Bob Scott survived the crash – but it took a terrible toll.

‘What wonderful talents we had in the late Glenn Daniel (news) and Greg Henricks (sport) … and our dear executive secretary Coral Davidson.

‘Finally, what about the people of the Greater West who saw our loyalty was genuine and responded in spades.

‘ARN may boast Kyle [Sandilands] and Jackie O and Gold FM … but I will continue to fondly remember Hans [Torv] and Kayley [Harris] and Peter Graham… always funny, clean and community-minded.

‘As we said at the top of the hour… Proudly serving Sydney’s Greater West, Your Station 2WS.’

Well said, Steve. If it’s any consolation, the IT department didn’t get the memo and the station is still calling itself WSFM online.  

Another week, another internal Tele investigation 

So we warned you there would be another inevitable internal investigation involving the editors at the Daily Telegraph’s Holt St HQ… but even we’re shocked it happened so soon. 

Unfortunately, we can’t say too much about this one just yet, and will have to simply shut our mouths… at least for now. 

But we can reveal what the Holt St heroes should be investigating – and that’s the ignominious death of the Sunday Telegraph’s once-hugely popular Insider section, which has held up the back half of the masthead’s print edition for decades.  

The long-standing wisdom has always been that the current format is the perfect way to divvy up the weekend paper: footy fans and punters can rip out the middle sports section and form guide, while another reader enjoys all the celebrity news and goss.

Sadly, that’s all about to change – not that there’s been so much to read in the old section of late.

In the past couple of months alone, Insider has lost its one-time drawcard and must-read columnist Annette Sharp, as well as chief feature writer and culture queen Kerry Parnell.

But if that’s not drastic enough, Inside Mail hears the struggling section is now losing its place at the back of the paper altogether. 

As part of a secret redesign of the country’s highest-selling paper to be launched in February, we’re told the sports pages will be shuffled to the back with a somehow-even-further-slimmed-down Insider section folded into the middle of the paper.

But don’t worry, it’s not all bad news: the switch-up means there will be space for more ads in the general news pages.

So that’s something to look forward to.

Channel Nine’s $3m man back in the spotlight

Life can be a bit of a roller coaster and so too, it seems, can Karl Stefanovic‘s paycheque.

Inside Mail hears former Nine boss Hugh Marks clipped the breakfast TV presenter’s multimillion-dollar network deal in 2020 as he desperately tried to quell dissent (and save some much needed money) following a gender pay parity dispute with Stefanovic’s former co-host Lisa Wilkinson.

Indeed, it ended up being one of Hollywood Hugh’s final pieces of business, with the embattled exec resigning at the end of the year following ongoing speculation about his private life and office romance with former commercial director Alexi Baker.

Enter starry-eyed replacement Mike Sneesby, who soon fell head over heels for Stefanovic and promptly pumped his salary right back up.

Now Sneesby is also out the door and former chief financial officer and caretaker boss Matt Stanton is firming as the almost unbackable favourite to be ushered in as Nine’s third chief executive officer so far this decade (and we’re only halfway through it!)

Network insiders reckon the numbers man is already under pressure to re-examine the amount of zeros on Stefanovic’s network deal and bring it down all over again. 

After all, Nine has already committed to cutting $50million from the company’s underlying costs this financial year and is almost certainly looking for further ‘efficiencies’ in what remains a tough economic climate.

‘The thing is, Karl is undeniably an extremely hard worker… but he’s also on the biggest wicket at Nine and that puts a target on his back,’ one well-placed source tells Inside Mail.

‘Stanton is going to be under huge pressure to justify the top stars’ top-dollar deals, particularly if there is an even a whiff of more redundancies – $3million is a lot of journos.’

Now, officially, the network insists it isn’t reviewing anyone’s contracts – even those of the highest-paid on-air talent – unless they are actually up for renewal… 

But insiders say every single network star’s deal is being reassessed by the media giant’s bean counters and that some of them will definitely be asked to take pay cuts this year.

So stand by for further fireworks.

Wilkinson severs ties with Ten but show’s not over yet

After two years of gardening leave to the tune of $1.7million a year, Lisa Wilkinson‘s time at Channel Ten ended with a whimper over the Christmas holidays.

Her multi-year contract lapsed on New Year’s Eve and wasn’t renewed.

Everything was going well when she signed a new deal with Ten in 2021. But just a year later, she stepped down as host of The Project – her sole on-air role – citing the toll of ‘relentless, targeted’ media coverage.

In the two years since vanishing from our screens, she continued to collect a monthly paycheque from Ten, commercial television’s forgotten child, despite industry-wide cutbacks.

Her contentious departure from Nine and the messy circumstances of her exit from Ten – what with the Lehrmann defamation saga – inspired pretty much every media commentator to write off her chances of a television comeback.

But here at Inside Mail, we’re not so sure.

There’s no denying Wilkinson remains one of the country’s most recognisable faces and a major drawcard among certain demographics, so we reckon it won’t be long until she pops up somewhere new. 

Although she did have a falling-out with former Nine boss Hugh Marks in 2017 when she publicly scorched him over gender pay parity, that was more than seven years ago and we hear the two professional pragmatists no longer hold any grudges.

And now that Marks is inbound as managing director at the ABC, it might just be an opportunity for Wilkinson – who has already collected the full set of commercial networks – to take on a role with the public broadcaster.

Indeed, Aunty insiders suggest she could be in exactly the right place at the right time as newly minted ABC chair and commercial media veteran Kim Williams carries out his cultural revolution.

Will we see Wilkinson popping up on Q+A or Backroads anytime soon? You never know.

Three media heavyweights walk into a bar… 

They are three of the most enduring – and recognisable – figures in the business… 

So when former News Ltd chief and industry legend John Hartigan, ex-Seven News boss and one-time talkback wunderkind Jason Morrison, and Hugh Marks (yes, he’s been getting quite a few mentions this week) were all seen walking into a popular Sydney pub recently, it wasn’t long before Inside Mail’s phone started lighting up.

What in the world could they be plotting, we wondered, after they were spotted at the Four in Hand Hotel in Paddington last month.

So, naturally, we decided to find about. And it turns out they were up to.. absolutely nothing. At least, not together. 

All three media heavyweights had set up independent meetings at the watering hole for the same time – but found themselves sitting in separate sections of the boozer. 

Still, at least we know where to head next time we’re short on industry gossip.

It’s time to talk about Sam Armytage… sort of 

We know, we know… can you believe it? The column is almost over and we haven’t even mentioned the human headline Samantha Armytage yet. 

Seriously, what were we thinking? Send us back to journalism school.

Of course, it’s not all about Sam… or at least so we’re told. 

According to our spies at Denison St, it’s been a different network star on everyone’s lips this past week, with Nine’s recently returned U.S. correspondent Alison Piotrowski impressing while co-hosting Today over the weekend.

‘It was obvious how good Ali was in the States – we all saw that in the lead-up to and the day of the presidential election; her reporting and analysis were probably the best on the network,’ one Nine insider gushed.

‘But watching Ali on Today showed a whole new side of her. She was really dynamic.

‘The best part is, she has zero pretensions – she’s incredibly well-liked because she’s down-to-earth, a terrific person, a hard-worker, and good at her job.’

Away from her fill-in duties, Piotrowski looks to have slipped into a senior reporter role since her return to Sydney last month and we hear she’s shaping up as one to watch in 2025. 

You heard it here first.

And finally, to the Dummy of the Week…

Here at Inside Mail, we’ve been known to take the occasional pot shot at Anthony Albanese – but he’s the prime minister, it comes with the territory. He gets that. 

But he made it clear this week what he thought about political non-combatants getting caught in the crossfire after Victorian Labor posted a mean-spirited meme mocking Peter Dutton and his wife Kirrily on Facebook.

It featured a photo of the Duttons under the headline ‘He is not a monster’ with a strap reading: ‘Justifying dating your new partner to your friends who don’t like him.’

The original image and header came from a 2019 article in the couple’s local paper, the Courier Mail, at the height of the federal election campaign, with Ms Dutton explaining she felt her husband’s public persona did not always reflect the real man. 

For some inexplicable reason, a staffer at Victorian Labor thought this was not only hilarious but an appropriate meme to post on the party’s official account alongside the comment, ‘We all know that one couple.’

But Albo certainly wasn’t laughing and demanded the post be immediately deleted after it was brought to his attention on Monday evening, with a spokesperson saying the PM believed ‘families should be off limits’.

Still, Victorian Labor state secretary Steve Staikos didn’t seem to get it, insisting the post was just a bit of harmless political ‘commentary’ and ‘not a personal attack at all’.

‘It’s supposed to be a comedic meme,’ he said. ‘It was posted as a bit of commentary, like a lot of memes are by all political parties.’

Yeah, we all know that one guy, right? 

Anyway, we’re siding with Albo on this one. The post was out of order and, by and large, families are off limits. 

Staikos’s inability to read the room earns him the unenviable title of Dummy of the Week to be shared with the equally tone-deaf and nameless idiot who posted the meme. 

• Peter van Onselen is on leave