Directors’ Interests

Directors' Interests

Western Areas has announced its chairman Terence Streeter and managing director Julian Hanna are not anticipated to sell further shares after they collectively pocketed more than $11 million.

Mr Streeter netted $9.9 million from the sale of 1.825 million shares at $5.42 each, which prompted his shareholding to dip to 14.4 per cent.

Mr Hanna pocketed more than $1.2 million from the sale of 227,500 shares at an average price of $5.55.

Mr Hanna sold the shares to settle a property transaction.

All the news that's fit to print ...

IT is with the tiniest hint of irony that The Note would suggest it's a sad state of affairs when the media thinks the media is news.

Take for instance our mass-market newspapers' sudden love affair with television celebs, especially the B-grade types who do rather mundane things like presenting weather reports.

When Jeff Newman's retirement from the meteorological bookend of the Channel Seven news bulletin hit the early news pages in The West, we were assured that this was legitimate treatment for a bloke well loved by the Western Australian public.

But it's been harder to justify since then. Take for instance his replacement at Channel Seven, Natalia Cooper, hitting the front page as some sort of exclusive. Cracking stuff that.

Of course, Seven and The West have a very close shareholder relationship, which is understood to be extending into the newsroom.

If that isn't bad enough, readers of the News Corp weekly The Sunday Times have to endure the same sort of lowbrow stuff. While Channel Nine's Dixie Marshall and Michael Thomson might be a fair enough choice to grace the cover of the Sunday Times TV Guide, the newspaper's decision to plant the station's weather presenter Angela Tsun on page three at the weekend was on less solid foundations.

In an era of climate change the weather is certainly news, but it is stretching it to believe the people presenting it are as well.