A Nine building
(Image: AAP/Luis Ascui)

Two top editors of The Chainsaw have exited as editorial tensions at Nine’s Pedestrian Group remain over the newly launched crypto publication.

Samantha Howard, the site’s head of editorial, is set to stand down and will instead contribute to the publication in a peripheral role, and its former managing editor, Dale Warburton, left in early February. A spokesperson for Nine said Howard decided to leave of her own accord, and the managing editor role has been “restructured”.

“The Chainsaw continues to cover the topics young people want and help them navigate the nascent Web3 and future tech space,” the spokesperson said.

The departures coincide with rising editorial tensions across Nine’s Pedestrian Group over the publication’s “booster” approach to Web3, which came to a boil in early February after it published as fact false claims related to the crash of crypto exchange FTX.

Rumblings within the tent steadily escalated in the months leading up to the debacle, sources said. Staff were warned against criticising Web3 after employees at The Chainsaw became outspoken about feeling “unwelcome” as a result of crypto-scepticism in the office.

Editorial staff across Pedestrian Group grew concerned The Chainsaw’s casual approach to journalism posed a threat to the reputation of other work across the group.

The site’s leadership, workplace culture and a fundamental misunderstanding across the team regarding how cryptocurrency works have doomed the site to find itself at the centre of future scandals, according to a source close to leadership.

The site, which is understood to be operating with a reduced headcount of three, was launched as Australia’s “first Web3-focused news site” with a promise to “sort fact from fiction” on developments related to blockchain technology across “all platforms” at a time when the industry was on the out.

Howard, a former public relations manager who once counted FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried among her clients, was installed as head of editorial on launch and was later joined by Warburton, who moved to The Chainsaw from news aggregator Crypto News Australia.

It was the first non-licensed publication launched by the group since Pedestrian.TV nearly 20 years ago.

The first six months for The Chainsaw were “slow”, said sources who spoke to Crikey last month on the condition of anonymity for fears of retribution, as hype around Web3 has tapered off and given rise to sceptical media coverage of the industry.

Monthly readership numbers were pale compared with the rest of the group’s publishing slate, sources said, which includes VICE and Refinery29 in Australia, along with Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker and Pedestrian, and has been a slow burn on other platforms, too.

Pedestrian Group said leadership expected it would “take some time” for The Chainsaw to come close to the traffic numbers clocked by the group’s other, established brands. It had shown “impressive growth” on social media platforms, “particularly TikTok”, where its Web3 news round-ups get an average of about 600 views and have attracted about 1200 followers.

All the publication’s social media accounts, except for TikTok, once belonged to Business Insider Australia, and were rebranded The Chainsaw after its launch. Content was deleted but followers remained.

Even still, the publication intends to persist, with a view to be “in a great position” to serve young readers with a “passing interest” in Web3 when the market bounces back, said one source close to leadership.

“From day one The Chainsaw has approached the Web3 space from a journalistic perspective, with a key mission to help readers sort fact from fiction,” Pedestrian Group said in February.

The Chainsaw’s mandate was never to be a “cheerleader” for the Web3 space, said one source close to leadership, who pointed to the website’s “scam” tags, where “more than 70 articles” have been filed to alert readers to the various ways they could be duped.

“In the same way that Pedestrian.TV and VICE have built distinct voices despite both covering youth culture, The Chainsaw is building its own voice within the Australian ecosystem, covering the topics young people want when it comes to sorting fact from fiction on Web3 and the future of the internet,” the group said.