NEWSROOM DISMISSALS:
The news directors at three of the four television stations in Brisbane have been summarily sacked overnight for missing what is arguably the news story of the week, if not the year so far!
The executives at Channel 7, Channel 10 and ABC TV were escorted from their respective workplaces after management at each studio realised they had missed a major item aired on rival Channel 9’s 6pm news last night – the fact that Costco Wholesale is about to introduce an executive membership level providing up to $1000 in rewards a year, including extra benefits on insurance matters but not petrol!
A colleague of the Channel 7 news director dismissed up at the station’s Mount Coot-Tha studios told The Bug: “He is really kicking himself because Melissa Downes at the end of Nine News’s 6pm bulletin on Monday had gushed about the Costco deal when plugging it then as a major story for last night.
“He has only himself to blame, really. His antenna must have really been off to miss a great news story like that one. And with that 24-hour warning that we thought Melissa was silly to give us given the breaking news value of the yarn, we reckon our reporter would have been able to extract even more crucial information about Costco than Eddy Myer did!”
The Channel 2 executive told to pack his things and leave that station’s city-based studios was also ruing his oversight.
“Very, very unprofessional, I have to admit,” the long-term senior newsman at Aunty admitted. “To be fair, I was deeply involved on Monday night getting our 7pm news service to air so I missed Melissa’s gushing and enthusiastic promo on that breaking news involving Costco,” he told us.
“And while I accept full responsibility for missing this great yarn I’m a bit miffed that my staff didn’t alert me to it as we normally pretty much present a mirror image of Channel Nine’s 6pm bulletin.
“Just like Nine depatched Eddy Myer, we could just as easily have sent out a crew yesterday to interview the Costco CEO not only about the new executive membership deal, but generally about how much its members already save as Gold Star holders, the company’s reach around the nation including a new outlet on the Gold Coast and one proposed for Victoria, the fact that the member-only retailer’s annual retail turnover at $3.6 billion is now bigger than Myer, David Jones and Office Works combined, and how the company, being a worldwide retailer, gets a lot of leverage in bringing goods in at great prices for customers, especially with transit costs now coming down.
“I just hope my successor has a better nose for really important, punchy and topical news like this than I have regrettably displayed.”
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