Composite featuring Piers Grove and David Haslingden (Image: RACAT/Private Media)
Composite featuring Piers Grove and David Haslingden (Image: RACAT/Private Media)

The buyers of Junkee Media were, on paper, a good match for Australia’s last major independent youth media outlet. 

In December last year, RACAT Group chief David Haslingden and publisher Piers Grove proudly announced the purchase.

“We are huge fans of Junkee’s brands, its loyal audiences and the huge array of content it delivers every day. We value the exceptional team that make Junkee the go-to news and entertainment source for millions of young Australians every month,” Grove said.

But less than a year after the sale went public, Junkee Media is facing a mass exodus of staff, mounting losses, and accusations of internal dysfunction, according to interviews with multiple former and current staff members who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Employees say they cry at work every day. Grove hasn’t been seen in the office in months and has told former staff he plans to sue to recoup $1 million he claims he put into the company, while Haslingden’s hands-on management style has convinced those who remain that the media mogul does “not understand digital media at all”.

The rapid decline of the company under the leadership of a former Fox executive and a youth media investor has left some staff wondering whether it will even exist in a year. 

“It was the perfect storm of how everything could go completely wrong,” one staff member said. 

Junkee Media had been stuck in limbo for years. ASX-listed advertising company oOh!Media bought the company in 2016, hoping Junkee’s content would be a perfect pairing with its advertising. It never quite worked out. 

Launched in 2013, Junkee carved out a unique place in Australian media. It was one of the few outlets that published long-form cultural criticism, like 10,000 words on whether it was ethical to listen to the music of the controversial Dr Luke. It was more political than rival Pedestrian.TV — it frequently took politicians from the major parties to task about how their policies affected young people.

It featured unapologetic, sharp coverage of the environment, social justice, gender, sex, internet culture, music and sport. It published work from First Nations writers on race, but not just on race. It was cheeky, horny, relevant and knowledgeable; sometimes all at the same time. (See: “From Flume to Sex and the City: the most important ass eating in pop culture”.) Junkee Media also launched Punkee in 2017, a Gen Z-focused publication that was the first in Australia to make reality TV coverage a major focus. 

To get a sense of Junkee’s range: the publication’s all-time most popular articles on social media are “Media coverage of Hannah Clarke is failing domestic violence victims”, “Dancing to voicemails from exes is the new and best TikTok trend”, “Air fryer recipes: air fryed Caramello Koala is the best thing ever” and “This couple has chickened out of their divorce over marriage equality“, according to social media analysis tool BuzzSumo.

These titles also show why the popular publication’s content — which reached 1.3 million users each month and counted 1 million followers across its social media accounts before it was sold — was not the perfect fodder for oOh!Media to place its advertisements next to, especially compared with other straitlaced media outlets. 

While youth media competitor Nine-owned Pedestrian Group buys new websites and rolls out podcasts and video projects, oOh!Media had been reluctant to put money into projects that wouldn’t help it with its core business of out-of-home advertising. 

Then the pandemic arrived and oOh!Media was hit hard by COVID-19 restrictions; the company’s earnings halved, from $125.3 million in 2019 to $59.9 million the following year. Soon oOh!Media decided to offload Junkee and was pitching prospective buyers by the middle of 2021.

A number of Australian media companies were sniffing around the company, including Guardian Australia, Mamamia and Brag Media, but ultimately RACAT Group bought Junkee Media (minus its creative studio) at a reported price of about $2.4 million — a big drop from its $13 million valuation in 2016.

RACAT Group owns Australian Geographic, television production company Northern Pictures and New Zealand game developer Runaway.

Employees were thrilled. At the time, Junkee had 15 editorial staff, many in their 20s and in the early stages of their careers across its Junkee, Punkee and AWOL mastheads, who felt they had been treading water since being acquired by oOh!Media. Still, the company had a relatively low staff turnover. 

Haslingden and Grove came to the office to speak to Junkee staff about the purchase soon after it was made public. 

The two had met as supporters of teal independent Allegra Spender. Grove, who was the publisher of the satirical publication The Betoota Advocate and social media-first youth publication The Daily Aus, had experience in growing media startups into fully fledged companies. Haslingden was a former Fox executive and executive chairman of Nine Entertainment with a passion for environmental causes. 

They told the staff they were supporters of media that made a difference and were willing to invest to improve a youth brand like Junkee so that they could achieve their vision.

“Everyone was so excited,” one former staff member said. Another reflected on it and said: “Looking back now, I’m like, God, why did I believe that?”

Junkee suddenly had money to spend. Staff went from working over laptops with no monitors and the occasional broken chair to a new office in Redfern with a custom fit-out including podcast recording spaces and new gear. For the first time, reporters had a travel budget to go to Canberra to cover the federal budget, Tasmania for the federal election, and the Northern Rivers after the floods. The company even brought a Toyota Tarago for use on trips.

Along with this influx of cash was a hunger for change. Multiple former and current staff described the new management as bringing a startup energy. In April, RACAT Group brought together Junkee Media with its other publication Australian Geographic to form Scout Publishing. Led by Grove, he spoke publicly about Scout Publishing’s intention to experiment, grow and even acquire publications.

Grove, who said he had learnt how to “have fun, break things, move fast” at other burgeoning media companies, encouraged Junkee staff to propose ideas. He also approved spending on big-ticket items. There were off-site planning days, long meetings, team bonding and drinks where Grove and staff bandied about what the company could do to improve. 

For some staff, this was a breath of fresh air that swept away the staleness of oOh!Media ownership. 

“We were going to have time and space to diversify our content, do video, do podcasts, the things that other media companies were talking about,” one staff member said. “It was like starting a new job again.” 

Others felt uneasy. Grove was hoping he could repeat what he’d done at his two previous youth media publications, but Junkee wasn’t a bootstrapped media startup. It was a mature, two-decade-old media company with a total of 40 staff and a well-established brand. Junkee’s content creators wanted decent working conditions and were not motivated by owning equity.

One of the first points of contention was Grove’s big idea to break the Junkee brand into six mastheads on topics like sport, music, food and dating, without adding any new writers. Some staff acknowledged the strategy of creating more focused publications to court smaller, engaged audiences, but were worried about what it would take to start up brands from scratch with their resourcing — if these mastheads took off at all.

“That’s when the disillusionment started,” one employee said. 

Meanwhile, these early returns weren’t what management hoped. When Junkee Media was sold, it was not profitable, but it was close to being so (although its entanglement with oOh!media made it difficult to be precise about revenue). It had earned most of its income through digital advertising sold on its website and by producing native advertising such as articles commissioned by advertisers to be written by Junkee employees.

It also signed multiple three-year-or-longer deals with Google and Facebook (now Meta); the latter arrangement involved a significant amount of money to employ staff to produce hundreds of episodes of Facebook Watch show The Junkee Takeaway. These deals gave the company consecutive years of guaranteed income as it tried to find new revenue streams. 

It also faced significant uncertainty. Junkee’s business model mostly depended on Facebook traffic — the precarity of which was made clear when the platform temporarily banned news in 2021. The company was still dealing with the impact of the industry-wide advertising freeze during the pandemic that saw its revenue drop from 2019 levels. For similar reasons, oOh!Media didn’t replace some staff who left during the pandemic. 

In January, Grove projected that Junkee’s traffic and revenue numbers would return to their 2019 peak by the middle of the year, even after he was warned by staff that this wasn’t possible. Grove’s plans to replicate the success of The Daily Aus and The Betoota Advocate, which had grown their audience through social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, simply wasn’t feasible in 2022 since Meta had changed its algorithms. It wasn’t going to be as simple as using the old playbook. 

Multiple Junkee staff told Crikey that Grove had claimed he sold his stake in The Daily Aus and invested $1.2 million into Scout Publishing. 

Suddenly in May, staff were brought into a meeting room. Grove appeared via video from an Adelaide hotel room. He told the staff that both Junkee’s chief operating officer Rob Stott and editor-in-chief Gyan Yankovich had accepted redundancies and wouldn’t be returning. Grove explained that he wanted to break down hierarchies and move faster. 

“It went from a very fun, new, safe environment to everyone losing their mum and dad overnight,” one staff member said. 

What resulted was organisational chaos. Staff didn’t know who they were reporting to; Groves didn’t seem to know how many people had reported to Stott or Yankovich. He had promised to bring in Yankovich for a day of handover, but that never eventuated. 

Still reeling from the departure of Stott and Yankovich, staff were rocked by another event. On May 21, the morning of the 2022 federal election, Grove suffered a stroke. He took immediate leave with no indication when he was to come back. In fewer than three weeks, Junkee staff had lost the three most senior staff. 

“It created complete chaos and instability across the business,” a staff member said. 

Soon after, Haslingden started to take on a bigger role. Grove had returned to work less than two weeks after his stroke, but soon it was announced to the company that he was taking three months of medical leave, starting in the middle of August.

In his absence, Haslingden started working from the office each day and sitting in on editorial meetings. According to staff, he seemed alarmed at the state of the company’s finances and would frequently complain in meetings about how much money the company was losing each week. The office stopped supplying breakfasts and snacks. There were no more out-of-office reporting trips. “Tiff”, the Tarago parked in the back streets of Redfern, went mouldy. 

Haslingden spoke disparagingly about Grove’s spending in front of junior staff. This financial stress was passed on to editorial staff as they felt pressured to somehow sell advertising inventory, even though they had no experience and little capacity to do so — they were employed as writers.

Haslingden also seemed to clash with the culture of the company’s staff at times. He saw similarities with the publication’s progressive values — Haslingden is an avowed environmentalist and chair of the Australian Geographic Society — but there were moments of awkwardness. When he came to open the new office earlier in the year, he joked about doing a “welcome to the office, not a Welcome to Country”, which shocked some employees. One staff member pointedly led an Acknowledgement of Country for staff when he finished. 

Another awkward moment came when Queen Elizabeth died in September. Staff recall that Haslingden went “on a rant about how good the queen is” during the morning’s editorial meeting where stories were assigned. This outburst was at odds with Junkee’s coverage, like “With all due respect, there’s no need to be ‘polite’ about the queen’s death”.

Staff were amused by the way that Haslingden would speak about his former News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch, with whom he was on first-name basis. Some of Junkee’s most popular content has been scathing critiques of News Corp. 

“He called him Rupert. I was like, what do you mean, like, the Rupert?” a staff member recalled. 

Things were not going well for the company either. Website traffic had picked up in 2021 and was steadily improving until it nosedived after Stott’s and Yankovich’s departures and the ensuing reshuffle of staff. Sales were nowhere near expectations. There was a bell in the office that sales staff could ring when they closed a deal. One staff member joked that they didn’t remember it being rung during that period. 

Despite Haslingden’s long, storied career in media, staff were puzzled to see that he had little knowledge of how to run a digital media company in 2022. He seemed genuinely interested in learning how the industry worked, but it didn’t do anything enough to quell the fears of staff who had heard his warnings about the downward direction of the company.

“It’s not to say that David failed us. He’s just never worked in a digital publisher,” one staff member said. 

Multiple staff independently described a similar experience: they would meet with Haslingden to share ideas about how to turn the company’s fortunes around; he would give them the green light to go ahead. Yet, a week or two later he would change his mind or become fixated on a small part of the strategy. 

Others described being on the receiving end of Haslingden’s leadership as a mix of constantly changing strategies, endless meetings, and no progress towards improving things.  

“Without having a person in place who really knows the digital publishing industry, it’s hard to imagine how things are going to get back on track,” a staff member said. 

Some changes he made were welcomed. Staff were relieved to hear that Grove’s plans to start multiple new verticals under the masthead were put on hold. Others less so. Staff had rushed to prepare a music masthead, Check Check, in just six weeks to launch in time for Splendour in the Grass in July. It was put on hold not long after.

Other changes included tearing down the firewall between editorial and native advertising. Editorial writers were given native advertising to write, blurring the line between what was and wasn’t sponsored content. Haslingden seemed insistent on cross-posting some Australian Geographic content to Junkee against the advice of staff who thought it wasn’t a good fit.

Eyebrows were raised when the company hired an editor-in-chief only months after offering a redundancy to Yankovich, who held the same title. Haslingden also brought on his daughter Rebel to work on the publication AWOL. He became fixated on Junkee’s deal with Facebook, trying to figure out ways to get around exclusivity restrictions that the tech company placed on creating videos for competing platforms. 

Grove’s medical leave was set to finish in November, but he has not come back. He is still listed as one of the directors of Scout Publishing in ASIC’s business records, on RACAT Group’s website, and his LinkedIn profile lists him as still the managing director of the company, on health leave until February 2023. But his name is nowhere to be seen on the Scout Publishing or Junkee websites. Staff were told in October that Grove wasn’t coming back, and one staff member said that Haslingden had been dropping hints for a month prior. 

One staff member told others they ran into Grove loitering near Junkee’s offices during his leave. Others who’ve announced they’re leaving the company have received phone calls from Grove, telling them about his intention to sue Scout Publishing and launch other media ventures. He recently sent an email to some Scout Publishing staff with a podcast he’d just recorded.  

Grove declined to comment for this article. Haslingden did not respond to repeated requests for comment, although his read receipts showed that the messages had been seen. 

Meanwhile, staff have been leaving in droves. More than half of the 15 editorial staff have left in the past six months. In the past two months, seven staff have announced their departure. Others are set to resign this week. Those who are still there say that “almost everyone” is looking for new roles. 

Some staff speculate that they’d be surprised if the company still exists as it does now in a year, given how poor the company’s ad sales are going and with so much institutional knowledge going out the door. Others have poured cold water on that, noting the stability given by Google and Meta deals. 

But everyone Crikey spoke to had serious concerns over the direction of Junkee. They spoke with sadness about the loss of the “old” Junkee that published work that will struggle to find a home in the Australian media market, let alone its dwindling youth market. 

“I’ve never loved a company as much as I’ve loved this. To see it go the way it’s gone … It shouldn’t have gone this way,” one staff member said. 

Another member spoke wistfully about what it was like now to look at the publication’s content: “I don’t really look at the content that is posted now, but if I do, I look at it and I’m like, the spark and life and character it once had are gone.”