Nine’s Melbourne newspapers were printed in Ballarat and will now be printed by News Corp in Melbourne.
It appears that the Canberra Times is being printed at ACM North Richmond in outer north-west Sydney. So that will presumably continue.
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. ACM’s Ballarat Courier will also be printed at the new Melbourne facility.
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The closure of Ballarat plant means the city’s paper The Courier will stop to be printed locally after 153 years. Could it have been printed in Bendigo instead?
The Ballarat plant is relatively new too, only opened in 2002.
I assume The Australian Financial Review will be printed by News Corp in Adelaide also.
ACM executive chairman Antony Catalano defend the closure of Canberra, Murray Bridge and Ballarat plants in an opinion piece today.
The question ACM has been asking is: what business are we in? The answer: we are a print and digital publishing business serving regional Australians. And we don’t need to own expensive factories to achieve our goals.
The old-school mentality was that if you had a newspaper you printed it yourself. And there was a time when you could afford to do that. But there are also plenty of publishers who don’t own presses.
When I ran Metro Media Publishing in Melbourne, starting out with one magazine and growing it to 32 titles, we produced 1,065,000 magazines per week and never owned a printing plant.
At ACM, without these significant changes to our printing operations and operational costs, we will be continually swimming against the tide.
…if we aren’t anchored down by the massive capital expenditure required to maintain these manufacturing plants, we can put the savings towards our journalism, the distribution of our journalism and development of digital marketplaces that will transform our revenues.
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ACM is launching a new glossy weekly in Sydney’s Northern Beaches region on October 7. Former Sun-Herald and Sunday Life editor Kate Cox will take charge of the magazine.
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Here goes the Cat, keen to pounce on the success he had in Melbourne against Fairfax and News when he was running his own race. Will have most real estate agents signing up. Good way to get a start in Sydney and either acquire or kill off the remaining few local print titles News has.
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The weekly comes out on Thursdays from October 29.
Sophie Moeller (pictured) will lead the editorial team. She had been the editor of The Lismore Echo for three years but had also worked for newspapers including The Australian, The Times and The Sunday Telegraph (Sydney).
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When will ACM learn, stick to their own patch, work on areas with no new outlets?
Heaven forbid a genuine business such as Heartland Media in Casino have the market to their own?
Already a successful news outlet here:
Cat would be better off trying his luck on the Sunshine Coast, a huge market to have no printed newspaper.
By the same token, he could set up a new one in South Australia’s south east region which currently has no printed newspaper after the closure of The Border Watch and associated weeklies last month.
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That’s such an obvious gap in the market, I can’t believe Catalano hasn’t gone for it.
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I know there’s a recession and so many cut-backs, but somehow I doubted 900 km was lopped off the ‘great race’…
Perhaps this is more about what ACM need to know?
They went out of their way to advertise (include the sponsor name), but didn’t have enough room left for the 1000 km bit?
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In what might be a first - my local ACM paper has announced they arent publishing (print or online) during the week commencing 28/12
and why is that?
Given the paper has lucky to have been a dozen pages for at least 9 months now, I’m not surprised - local news is basically non existent between Christmas and New year’s
What paper?
Can someone tell the Newcastle Herald that Prime doesn’t do local news and hasn’t done local news since 2001? Because their TV guide says otherwise.
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ACM restructure
Gotta feel sorry for Renee Duffy, began in 2003 with then, Rural Press, has stuck with them all this time in what is a depressing company with cuts every year.
Must have a different region’s Prime schedule. I would be confident in saying that page would be outsourced to an external party, but I forget their name, Pagemasters?
Only one guide for their Northern NSW papers is produced
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