Someone may be better across this - but this is basically all of the portfolio News bought from APN?
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The rural communities in NSW and Queensland are big losers from these changes. It means the residents must subscribe to either The Daily Telegraph, The Courier-Mail, Gold Coast Bulletin, Cairns Post or Townsville Bulletin in order to read the news about their local area.
I can also see local residents set up their own newspapers so they can continue to have printed copies on their hands.
The full media release:
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The full list of papers:
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Three Sydney newspapers in affluent areas â the Wentworth Courier, the Mosman Daily and the North Shore Times â will resume print editions as they have healthy real estate advertising revenue.
Canberra Star and Newcastle News have been digital-only publications right from the start, so why are they included in the list?
Real estate agents wonât be happy with the decision either as they will no longer be able to advertise in regions which only has the News Corp-published title.
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From The Australian, three Sydney throwaways will continue.
A pity about The Manly Daily. In a few years it has gone from a free daily paper to now not being printed.
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this is not a bad thing to be honest. sure the job losses suck and the closure of masteheads is not great but the major city newspapers should be focusing on state issuesfirst
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Thatâs a typical attitude of someone that lives in a capital city. Most of the places that have now lost their newspaper will have no access to local news as theyâre ignored by all other media operators. Not to mention that the number of jobs will have an impact on the economies of regional and rural areas that were already struggling before the pandemic came along.
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Anyone who has seen a metro community title in recent years will understand why theyâre calling time on them - they barely attract any advertisers anymore (pretty much just real estate and old school businesses that donât know that most of them go straight in the bin) and the skeleton staffing they did have would sometimes churn out no more than about 5 articles a week. Many of the titles barely filled 20 pages or less at this point
Obviously a different story to the paid regional dailies / weeklies that theyâre killing off though, and I doubt that many of the stories that were written for these papers will flow through to the major state dailies.
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This sets an interesting benchmark around the size of a market that can support a regional daily - the likes of the Northern Star and Coffs Coast Advocate dont exactly serve small markets, but not one as large as Toowoomba (which appears to be at the lower end of the paper markets to retain their paper)
It will be interesting to see what ACM now do
(I dont consider the Darwin/Hobart papers to be regionals despite how the media treat them)
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Coffs Coast Advocate hasnât been a daily newspaper since 2011.
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Sadly, I think the writing has been on the wall for the print editions of suburban weekly newspapers in the metropolitan markets for some time now. Personally it wouldnât overly surprise me if ACM follow suit by making their suburban publications online-only in the not too distant future, to focus on the continuation of publishing core regional papers like The Canberra Times, Newcastle Herald & Illawarra Mercury. Independent publishers might be able to hold out a little while longer, but who knows what the medium-long term future has in store for them.
Of course by far the biggest losses to Australian journalism coming out of this latest News Corp purge are the regional papers going online-only, since many of these areas already have limited choices for local news and information. As much as I hope this turns out to be the case, sadly I canât see too many stories from regional areas of the state (aside from major stories any media organisation would deem big enough to be covered on a state/national basis) flowing through to the major metro/state papers.
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Something interesting from @SydneyCityTV
The Manly Daily was a Tuesday to Saturday free suburban newspaper, and it was successful for decades. Apparently it was the only one in Australia. That it will no longer continue as a print publication is tragic. I remember Humphreys Newsagency on The Corso used to have a stack of The Manly Daily beside the Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and Gold Coast papers - it was one of the best places in Sydney to get the interstate papers aside from the city train station newsstands.
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Thatâs correct. A majority of the titles that are shutting down or going digital are the ex-APN mastheads. Iâm shattered. I used to work at an ex-APN title. My colleagues and I were part of the fabric of town life. While digital is the future of journalism, itâs still sad to see the physical paper go.
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It will be interesting to see what they do with the paywalls on these papers - the paywalls on regional papers donât appear to work as successfully as the paywalls for the bigger papers.
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This will be interesting to watch - I think the writing is already on the wall for the papers that theyâve stopped publishing (temporarily) due to COVID-19. I wonder whether ACM will consider a reduction in publication days for the dailies before moving to complete closure
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News Corp claims they have 80,000 digital subscribers in regional Queensland, though they didnât specify where they are.
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Miller also spoke to Peter Ryan on The World Today on ABC Radio this afternoon.
Another sign that traditional media outlets (apart from the ABC) are abandoning regional areas. For some large regional centres like Mackay and Sunshine Coast, surely it is viable for locals starting print editions of own papers.
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