From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Monday, May twenty six, twenty twenty five. One of the AFL's most memorable players, Warick Kappa, says he's concerned about his cognitive decline and believes the CODE didn't do enough to protect him and other players from head trauma. That's an exclusive live today at the Australian dot com
dot au. Business leaders want to slow the introduction of Fair Work Commission pay rises for health and childcare workers, saying it's too much for employers to come up with wage increases of up to twenty eight percent immediately. That'll blow up into a dispute with unions. Who's the highest earner on TV and who earns six hundred grand for two hours work? Today the top salaries on Free to Wear TV and why the glory days of superstar salaries
are coming to an end. Steve Jackson is The Australian's media writer, and today he's publishing the inaugural Media Rich List. JACKO, this list should be making both you and I feel a bit angry.
I think yes and no angry that we aren't on this sort of money. But it's good to know that there are people out there on this sort of cash. And if we work hard and get the right brakes, we too will know ever to earn this amount because it's going to be gone very soon. But it's nice to know some people are raking it in while we're the good times last, who's.
The Ginna Reinhardt of Australian media.
Karl Stefanovic.
Just keep it at real people.
Karl has long been the highest paid person on Australian television. In fact, he's the highest paid person involved in television except for the people who own the networks. He was made a millionaire by Dave Ginjel back when David Lecky tried to poach him across to seven. Lecky never forgot that. I met with him for lunch a couple of weeks before he passed and he was still talking about how
Carl had dudded him after agreeing to switch networks. But basically Ginjel put him on this multimillion dollar deal to keep him there and then he's been on it ever since. Hugh Marx, when he was the chief of Channel nine, did manage to bring it down. He was bringing it all the pays back in line with something that was probably a more feasible amount. But then after Hu Marx left, Sneezey bumped Carl back up to two point eight million a year.
David Ginjel, who you mentioned, was the favored sign of the Packers. He was the boss of Channel nine in the tail end of the glory days. Really is Carl and his salary the last remnant of those Packer glory days when salaries were huge and personalities were also huge.
Yeah, it's that thing about television from an era where everyone was tuning into it and you kind of had three options of what you're going to watch at night, and it really mattered if you had these stars on your network.
Okay, Number two is not a journalist. It's Scott Cam, who's a bit of an everyman. He won the Gold Logi a few years ago, famously hosts the.
Blog Look, I tell you what.
I haven't had a drink in a week, which I haven't done a seventies.
I'll tell you what. I've gone to school. I am going to strangle a few tonight. Let me tell you if I get it made get it?
Why is Scott Cam earning two point four million dollars.
Scott Cam is the face of probably one of the most important shows on Channel nine. The block has been a staple of its line up since two thousand and nine, I think, and what's so important about it is it makes heaps of money. It brings in product placement. The sets actually effectively don't cost anything because they auction them off at the end of the show and recoup all
the outlays that they've spent buying them. Legend has it Scott Cam was enjoying a beer at the local watering hole near nine and he was talent spotted, ended up working with Jamie Jury and then just becoming probably one of the most popular people on Australian TV. He's the most loved trade in the country. You'd have to say the.
Next two also come from what you'd broadly call light entertainment. I guess Hamish Blake and then Larry MdeR earning two million and one point six million dollars respectively. Hamish Blake is really a self made personality, isn't he.
He is, without a doubt one of the funniest men in the country. Everything he turns his hand to is a success. The amazing thing about Hamish's last show, which has now been going for four or five years, Lego Master's as I remember being at nine when it launched, and the wisdom at television is you don't say what you think of the show until the ratings come in. So as it was being rolled out everything Lego, that's going to be interesting the moment the numbers dropped and
it was a huge hit. Always knew Lego was going to win, but the fact that Hamish Blake can make a show about building stuff out of Lego into one of the most entertaining programs on television shows what his genius.
Is and the gold LOGI goes to Larry Emder for The Chase Australia in the morning SHOWY seven Network.
On my very first day going to the Channel seven newsroom as a cub reporter, I said, Dad, what am I doing there for my job? And he goes, may just be nice to everyone, Just be nice to everyone. But I came home after a couple of weeks and Dad said, how's it going. I said, Dad, I'm trying with there's so many assholes in this business.
Larry actually started his career as a copyboy in a newspaper in Sydney. He dropped out of high school at fifteen to chance his luck at journalism, and he actually ended up becoming, at the age of just nineteen, the youngest national news anchor in the country. While a lot of people on the list are there for earning a lot of money for one job, Larry's one of those
guys that fills in for people when they're off. He hosts the Morning Show, which is incredibly important because of the amount of money it brings in through advertorials and advertising, and he also hosts a Dailey afternoon game show, which again is critical to the six pm bulletins as it gives a leading into the six pm news.
Now we get to number five before we encounter a woman. That's Natalie bar Co, host of Sunrise on seven on one point three million dollars. She's a great example I reckon of tenacity. She started out as the newsreader on Sunrise when she was really quite young, having come there from being a news reporter. And she's just stuck with it, hasn't she. And now she's eclipsed the people who used to be the hosts.
It's interesting to see with matt Is when she replaced Samantha Armitage as the full time co host of sun People weren't quite sure. Samantha had this larger than life personality, very much talked about in the media.
Coming to Alix Springs, it was just one thing that I wanted to do.
I wanted to drive a road train.
Natalie was a more straight, hard news journo and she's coming. She's brought a completely different flavor to Sunrise and you'll see it quite often being ridden up in the media for hard hitting questions at breakfast and I hope that.
They pick up their game. Okay, look with respect, you just haven't answered the question. We know what Pontus is doing.
I think she's really earned the respect of that audience and probably deservedly her place at the top of the country's highest paid female journalist.
Alison Langdon, the host of nine As a Current Affair, comes next on one point two million dollars. She's another Stayer and she's gone from news to pretty gritty reporting for sixty minutes over a decade. Now in Australia, hosting a Current Affair and replacing the beloved longtime host Tracy Grimshaw. It's really hard to step into the shoes of someone like Tracy, isn't it, But she seems to have made a success of it.
She has.
And the thing that I think is interesting about Alison is she's one of those people who makes things look easy. I've had the opportunity to produce stories for her, working with her at sixty Minutes, and she's got this uncanny knack where it just looks like she's calm and relaxed and it's all very easy. But what you don't see is like a duck swimming on the water. She's paddling like that underneath, works incredibly hard, involved in every aspect of making the show, and I'm sure she'll be the
same doing that in a current Affair. A Current Affair is a very exciting mix of light and bright, fun news, quirky stuff, but also hard hitting investigations. She's covered all that gamut and she's really at home introducing those stories, and I think everyone out there really likes her as well.
It's eight years now since Lisa Wilkinson quit the Today Show in a fury at the fact that she just could not negotiate a wage as high as Karl Stefanovic's looking at the wages of the women who are in this top ten, the next to a Sonya Krueger at one point two million and Kylie Gillies at one point one Did Lisa make a big mistake stepping away for just a measly million dollars?
I think so. It's a difficult one with Lisa because her pairing with Karl was fantastic. They were phenomenal together, great chemistry. I don't think anyone was expecting it to go as far as it did and completely break down. Obviously, hu Marx said no, we're not doing it, put his foot down, and he had some valid reasons, but I think that was very much the beginning of network chief executives to say, hey, we've got a real this in because we just simply can't afford to pay insane salaries anymore.
There are two personalities at number nine and number ten. That's Peter Roverton and Tracy Grimshaw, both on roughly a million dollars. Why is Tracy Grimshaw still earning a million dollars?
Well, it's a little bit deceptive. Tracy's not quite earning a million dollars. She's on a year by year contract and that may have been reduced to about half a million dollars. It's one of those things that's being reviewed at the moment because last year with this deal, she did a four part series on blue zones around the world and one interview with el McPherson for sixty minutes.
And unfortunately the days where networks could warehouse staff to prevent them doing reports on rival networks are gone, so the accountants really have to go, how can we justify this? Is that value for money? The thing is that we know that once you release a network talent and they're well known with people, they will get picked up to
do stuff elsewhere. So we saw with Liz Hayes departing Niner for forty four years earlier this year in February, that within months she was doing a guest appearance on Channel seven Spotlight. So it's one of those things that Nine's developed. All these people, how do they retain them? Traditionally they just pay them to only file the odd report for nine. That's no longer feasible.
Coming up the journo who's paid six hundred grand for two hours of TV a week. I think we can accept that salaries in media are based on market forces. It's not a meritocracy. You don't get the money because you're better than everybody else. You get it because other people potentially want you. Nowadays, in the present environment of television, does that still apply? I mean, is anyone going to offer Karl Stefanovic an equivalent salary to come to seven.
There is still network poaching, but the poachings at the lower level. We saw Joel dry being poached from seven to go anchor nine News in Brisbane, but we're talking about twenty grand pay rises. Ten grand pay rises Joel being poached to nine. That's for a quarter of a million dollars. And I think what we've seen now is with the generational change, it shows like sixty minutes, those reporters aren't on anywhere near the same amount that their predecessors were.
One name that stuck out to me on your list was number eighteen, Georgia Gardner from nine on six hundred thousand dollars. This there's nine New with Georgia Gardner. Good evening. We begin with breaking news and very sad news. I don't see Georgie on TV that much pro rata.
Georgie is the best paid journalist in the country. And it's a legacy from when she was brought in to do the Today Show. She got a massive bump up because she was the Today Show host. Again, that didn't work out. The experiment was canned after a year, but she remained on that salary because that contract was locked in. Georgie is a hard working journalist, really well aliked and known in Sydney. But she's on six hundred thousand to present the news two nights a week in Sydney alone
and obviously filling for Peter when he's unavailable. But I mean, it's not bad money. If you can get it, no one can get it.
Steve Jackson is The Australian's media writer. His diary column is onmissible. You can check it out right now at the Australian dot com dot au