Karl Stefanovic, barbecue stopper
Very few Australian journalists understand their business. Karl is no exception.
Everyone is talking about Karl Stefanovic. He's temporarily replaced the weather as the preferred in-ride conversation starter of all Uber drivers. LinkedIn and Instagram have for days been a lamefest of spiels (much of them AI-generated) in Karl's defence, his condemnation, or just as a tangential sales hook. Even those deriding everyone else for talking about him cannot themselves help talking about him.
The furore over Karl's podcast interview with British nativist criminal Tommy Robinson, and Karl's immediate departure from Nine as a result, have generated money-can't-buy publicity for his new enterprise. He's going to need every shred of it.
This culmination has been arrived at virtually in slow motion since January, when Nine made the penny wise, pound foolish decision to slash Stefanovic's pay (again) and – as quid pro quo – to relinquish exclusivity over him.
That exclusivity was previously Nine's justification for Karl's much higher value to the network than Lisa Wilkinson when former CEO Hugh Marks showed her the door in 2017 (she was spruiking garlic pills in her spare time rather than chumming it up with neo-fascists).
By entering into an open relationship with Karl – not a man renowned for his astute judgement when left unsupervised – Nine saved itself approximately $500,000 a year. Yet how many millions of advertising dollars did it needlessly jeopardise and how myopic has Nine's latest management team revealed itself to be?
