The fifth and final sacking of Hugo Kelly
March 23, 2010
Here is Stephen Mayne's story from the Crikey edition on Thursday, February 16, 2006.
6. Vale Hugo Kelly – a Crikey "madman" to the last
By Stephen Mayne
The fifth and now definitely final sacking of Hugo Kelly from Crikey this week has turned into another classic chapter in the history of our little ezine after the "mad but brilliant" contributor dumped all over us in The Australian's Media section this morning, plus spun the story of his departure to The Age.
Crikey publisher Eric Beecher produced a small right of reply in The Australian, but there's a few important points which need to be made.
First – and even Hugo admits this – our circulation is stronger than it's ever been. Instead of suggesting that Crikey's lost its edge, what it means is that Crikey has more readers and more influence. Second, if subscribers think we're boring, we're only a click away. We still welcome feedback, and yarns. Especially yarns.
My old flatmate, workmate and political campaign manager had more than used up his nine lives before his final indiscretion last week in crashing the Gavin Anderson drinks party at Old Parliament House and then reporting a private conversation with Jeff Kennett's former senior adviser Alister Drysdale as if it was an on-the-record interview.
Sacking Hugo was literally almost an annual event at Crikey, but it usually related to his personal behaviour rather than anything he wrote. Whilst I'm a bridge burner par excellence, Hugo is even better at accumulating passionate enemies than me but he always managed to wangle his way back into Crikey on the strength of his sometimes brilliant writing and my forgiving nature.
He's produced some great pieces over the years, some under the cover of anonymity, and my personal favourites included this magnificent demolition of John Howard's press secretary Tony O'Leary and a thoughtful piece on being press secretary to then deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe, although we didn't properly disclose that he was sacked and sued Labor for unfair dismissal.
That said, there's plenty of inaccurate spin in his account of Crikey's history today. Firstly, to suggest he "co-founded" Crikey is laughable, although it's a myth repeated in the expansive multi-volume Wikipedia entry he wrote about himself.
Go back and read the full page story in The Australian's Media section just before the launch and you'll see that the four co-founders are listed as Con Christov, Andrew Inwood, David Terrazas and yours truly. The other three had all completely departed and settled by the middle of 2003.
Hugo would probably have been a co-founder, but an appalling performance in Sydney six weeks before the launch on the Millennium New Year's Eve – which involved a near punch-up with my best mate and running up and down Victoria St, Potts Point, at 3am with a hockey stick – put paid to that.
Today's piece demonstrated once again that Hugo has been largely out of the loop ever since he sat in the editor's chair in mid-2003 when I went overseas for three weeks. I returned to an upset staffer and a stinging four page memo from Mrs Crikey documenting a litany of complaints and demanding he be sacked – yet again.
However, revenue and traffic was up over this three week period as Hugo once again demonstrated those "mad but brilliant" characteristics.
The biggest inaccuracy in today's piece was the following line:
Another pre-sale problem for Mayne was that he still had two people working with him – Christian Kerr and I – who had also shouldered the burden of growing the business, and were stakeholders. His solution? A payout of just $1,000 each for the small group who had built the business, while he galloped off with his million.
Truth be known, I've committed to voluntarily give away more than half of what will be left after the taxman's big hit and paying off the mortgage on our modest house in Melbourne's east, which is valued at $130,000 less than the median for the suburb. Hugo also seems to have forgotten that he cost Crikey more than six-figures over the years.
His next mistake is to put himself in Christian Kerr's league. We surveyed our readership at the time of the Crikey sale and 41% said Christian was their favourite contributor whilst only 4% said Hugo. Crikey wouldn't be what it is today without Christian but it would without Hugo, whose rightful place in our history is "top four contributor."
His paradoxical contention that I sold Crikey too cheaply but it has also lost its way is also laughable. The professional version of Crikey is far better than anything we produced out of the spare bedroom and all the subscriber numbers and reader surveys bear that out.
That said, you've got to admire the brazen way he's gone out. It was a very Crikey thing to do and we'd have published exactly the same piece on any other outlet. I fully support the sacking of Hugo but do hope he falls on his feet.
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