Today, ABC production staff get their marching orders, newspaper circulations fall yet again, and The Bunyip makes a curious contribution to the submarines debacle.

Master of their Domain

It’s been more than a week since the Adelaide Crows announced Fairfax-owned Domain as a major sponsor.

As InDaily reported last week, Domain is a major competitor to News Corp majority-owned Real Estate Australia, which runs real estate marketing website realestate.com.au.

The bright green Domain slogan now appears on the Crows’ shorts – and News Corp’s The Advertiser has, until today, managed to avoid showing the logo in its pages. It’s in black and white – and those without 20/20 vision might need a magnifying glass – but there it is on page 98 today.

News Corp is notoriously edgy about all competition and almost never mentions competitors in its newspapers. In Adelaide, it views market dominance as its birthright – and Domain is making an aggressive push into its territory.

But the Tiser is going to find it increasingly difficult to avoid the Domain branding.

The Western Australian Football Commission has inked a three-year deal to rename the home of football in Perth – previously known as Patersons Stadium – to Domain Stadium.

I guess the Tiser subs could go the Prince route – the Stadium Formerly Known as Patersons?

ABC axe finally falls

More than two months have passed since ABC managing director Mark Scott announced the death of television production in Adelaide.

However, it’s only been in the past week or so that television production staff have been handed their redundancy notices.

The ABC’s Sydney media spokesman wouldn’t tell InDaily how many staff had been lost, nor make any other comment other than to confirm that redundancy notices had been issued.

InDaily understands that the 11 staff in the production unit and some additional associated staff have been given their end dates.

The process has caused some conflict, with some staff set to leave almost immediately and others to work until the end of the financial year.

InDaily understands the TV unit has yet to complete production of the series, Restoration Australia, which explains why some staff still have months to work.

After June, TV news will remain the only television production left at Collinswood.

More redundancies are coming through the bizarre “pools” process (aka The Hunger Games), in which staff are effectively competing to retain their jobs.  More on that in a future column.

Newspapers continue to freefall

Newspaper sales continue to plummet across the country.

In worse news, the attempt to move subscribers to digital isn’t taking up the slack.

Not a single newspaper achieved an increase in sales on combined print and digital numbers, according to the December quarter report of the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Here in Adelaide, News Corp’s The Advertiser and Sunday Mail continued their sales freefall.

The Monday to Friday Advertiser lost 9.4 per cent of paid sales compared to the previous year, dropping from 150,583 to 136,458 copies.

The Saturday paper fared slightly worse, losing 9.9 per cent of paid sales (down 197,900 to 178,350).

The Sunday Mail, always the biggest selling paper in SA, is heading quickly to sub 200k territory, losing 9.2 per cent of sales year-on-year (236,261 to 214,609).

New Corp’s Adelaide newspapers don’t report their digital sales, unlike most major outlets in Australia.

The Bunyip breaks it

The best-named newspaper in the world, the Gawler-based Bunyip, has rocketed into the national debate on submarines.

As noted by Australian Financial Review columnist Joe Aston yesterday, the Bunyip has added some more delicious confusion to the subs shemozzle.

To quickly recap – South Australian Liberal Senator Sean Edwards claimed he had secured a bright new future for the Australian submarine-building industry after bargaining his vote in the Liberal spill ballot with Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

He would vote in Abbott’s favour because the PM had promised an “open tender” for the submarine project. As we now know, that sense of triumph quickly sunk as it turned out the tender promise was nothing of the sort. Edwards’ colleagues lined up to say nothing had changed and the Government was undergoing a mysterious “competitive evaluation process”.

So what kind of bargaining chip did Edwards actually hold?

It transpires that the Bunyip reported last week – on 6 February – that Edwards was planning to vote against the spill motion and in Abbott’s favour, which would appear to weaken his bargaining position by a factor of about 100 per cent.

But wait! On Tuesday this week, the Bunyip was back on the case, reporting that Edwards had changed his mind after talking with their reporter and before driving his “hard” bargain with the PM.

Morse and Freebairn sign on

Network Ten has signed Adelaide news presenter Rebecca Morse and weather presenter Kate Freebairn to new two-year contracts.

Stability is a good call for the network’s local newsroom.

Despite being backed by a relatively tiny news team, the Ten 5pm bulletin has been chugging along surprisingly well in the ratings.

Naughty corner

In last week’s column we noted how The Australian’s associate editor and former Adelaide journo Chris Kenny had berated local media for allowing itself to be “distracted” by Jay Weatherill’s timezone debate.

The next day Kenny’s own paper put the “distraction” on the front page.

Well lightning has struck twice.

On Wednesday, Kenny took to Twitter to slap “their ABC” for daring to cover the Abbott Government’s tortuous rhetoric on submarines:

Kenny must have been white-hot with rage the very next morning when his own newspaper’s front page included not one but three pointers to stories on the submarines fiasco, including a solid opinion piece from Dennis Shanahan dealing solely with the “semantics” of the debate.

Top of the class

The image of the media pack is commonly used to demonstrate the rapacious nature of the news game.

But they do have their uses.

Local journalists did a great job this week holding Defence Minister Kevin Andrews to account for his obfuscation on the submarine project. The Adelaide reporters showed the Canberra press pack how it’s done.

Media Week appears on Fridays.