Reddit and weep
A stray Reddit post led Capital Brief to an ANZ scoop that grew much bigger. It's a reminder of how and where stories can snowball in today’s jittery job market.
Just over two weeks ago, an internal note purporting to be from one of ANZ’s most senior executives surfaced on Reddit.
In the message, ANZ’s acting retail bank CEO Bruce Rush apologised to relatively senior ‘Group 2’ and ‘Group 3’ staff, including his own direct reports, for a mishap that saw them accidentally emailed their exit dates before anyone had even spoken to them about being let go.
In the febrile information environment we live in, plenty of things appear online — many of them untrue. But our markets and finance reporter Jack Derwin was alerted to the note and quickly established its authenticity.
Soon after, we published a story about the deeply unfortunate blunder. It struck a chord well beyond the banking bubble at a time of growing anxiety about the future of white-collar careers. The email bungle was picked up by the Australian financial press, then the mainstream media, and eventually went global. But it was far from the biggest development in this ANZ narrative arc.
