(Image: Private Media/Zennie )

The founders of Scire, a buzzy news start-up set to launch later this year, are making bullish inroads to secure star talent from Nine’s publishing assets. 

Earlier this week, CEO Chris Janz announced the site’s first official appointment, John McDuling, who will lead the site as editor-in-chief after stepping down as business editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age earlier this year. 

A number of other recently secured appointments wait in the wings, Janz told Crikey, as the site he co-founded with former Nine executive David Eisman continues to pursue star talent capable of doing the heavy lifting that comes with launching a news product from scratch. So it was only a matter of time before Janz and Eisman turned to their old employer to bolster their ranks, according to sources familiar with the site’s recruitment efforts.

Crikey understands that among those courted early were Jonathan Shapiro, a senior reporter at The Australian Financial Review covering banking and finance, and Zoe Samios, a star media reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Both eventually turned Scire down, but the pitch is thought to have been a persuasive one.

Scire was founded by Janz, former chief digital publishing officer at Nine, and Eisman, former director of subscriptions and growth at Nine, in January this year after securing $5 million in private equity funding from Shearwater Capital, with further unannounced funding commitments expected to push the site on a path to profitability.

On its website, Scire’s leadership says it hopes to fill the hole left wide open by “a handful of legacy corporations”, as trust in news media declines and the “integrity of the information we consume is under threat”.

“With the right people and partners there is an opportunity to build a generational company with Australian journalism at its core. One that will add depth and diversity to the national conversation and help shape the future of our economy,” they say.

The site is understood to have ambitions to borrow from the success seen at sites like Jessica Lessin’s The Information, which launched in 2013 as an antidote to clicky tech industry coverage that was light on actual news; and Puck, a news site that covers the powerbrokers sitting at the intersection of Wall Street, Washington DC, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood.

Scire might fit somewhere in between, according to sources familiar with the site’s ambitions, given a perceived lethargy among the mainstream business press and an absence of the process-driven micro-scoops that have reoriented other major media markets in recent years.

Publishing leadership at Nine won’t need much convincing and are quietly threatened by the prospect of Janz and Eisman mounting a material threat to a portion of their business, according to industry sources. 

Nine executives still have a soft spot for Janz following his 2021 exit from the company after being overlooked for the role of chief executive, a job that was eventually handed to former Stan boss Mike Sneesby. If anyone is qualified to mount a serious challenge to the network’s publishing business it’s Janz and Eisman, sources said. 

The duo’s credentials offer promise for the fledgling start-up which, with ambitious subscriptions plans, won’t have to bother much with the soft ad market which has deterred other news operations from considering launching in Australia. 

Politico was among the most recent, before it abandoned consideration of the market in favour of the US west coast and UK, according to a source familiar with the publisher’s plans, where grounds for both coverage and ad revenue are more fertile.

Janz and Eisman, however, aren’t believed to see the same challenges. The duo played a pivotal role in resuscitating Nine’s publishing assets including The Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age into a state of health in the final years of Fairfax’s sole ownership of the papers, and later into profitability following its merger with Nine.

Their success running what was once code-named “Fairfax Blue” — a secret operation siloed outside of Fairfax’s main stream aimed at redesigning the publisher’s digital strategy and overhaul its sales team — has been key to convincing former colleagues of Scire’s potential profitability and recruiting the reporters they want.

The site is expected to launch in either September or October this year.

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