There’s a desperation in the air this election, a demand for attention, a real “you’re going to miss us when we’re gone” energy. And that’s just the traditional media.
It’s coming across equally from free-to-air commercial television and the old mastheads, still culturally dominated at their heart by the physicality of what Rudyard Kipling rhapsodised as that “old Black Art we call the daily Press”.
With good reason. The media is already diminished by cuts and closures. By the time we get to the 2025 election it will be a very different media landscape. Printed papers, for one, will likely be no more.
Sadly, plenty will welcome that, whether it’s for the democratisation of information once corralled into local and national monopolies or for an end to the tabloid front pages as campaign posters. Others (me included) will miss losing the comprehensive “what happened today all in one place” package, as well as the in-depth contextual analysis that the best print political reporters bring.
Print is a paradoxical medium for media companies: expensive to produce, costly to distribute, and deadline constrained. Yet it’s where the money (still) is.
Although deeply ingrained in political history and culture, and producing the most news content by volume, the (literal) press is not widely read — not even as widely as its digital versions. Yet its hold-in-your-hand presence still delivers the clout of monopoly (at least with political players) that pure digital plays lack.
Print papers today face a double bind. The decades-long income drop has accelerated during the pandemic — by about three years according to a report released last week by Economist Impact, supported by UNESCO. Globally the report found: “Revenue from print — a mixture of circulation and advertising — fell from US$90bn in 2019 to US$75bn in 2021.”
Worse, it expects a further drop of US$19 billion in the next three years.
Expect the same in Australia, starting with the immediate post-election contribution to that decline with the end of those appalling front- and full-page United Australia Party advertisements.
There’s more post-pandemic bad news on the cost side. With inflation and supply-chain disruption, newsprint costs are soaring. Last week Australia’s major regional newspaper publisher, Australian Community Media, boosted on its front pages a “Your Paper in Peril” campaign to pressure the federal government to subsidise newsprint in response to its claims that paper costs were soaring up to 80%.
Again, it’s a global trend, the inevitable playing out due to supply and demand up the production chain: fewer pages and shorter print runs mean less demand for newsprint, which means, in turn, that the once-giant paper mills have either closed or retooled production to where their money is now — in packaging.
The monopoly newsprint manufacturer in Australia (and New Zealand), Norwegian-owned Norske Skog, has closed two local plants and says Australian demand has fallen from about 1.3 million tonnes of newsprint a year to less than 300,000.
Paper mills depend on the scale of mass production for profit. As demand continues to fall, expect costs to continue to rise.
The newspaper companies can’t inflate their own prices out of trouble. Newspapers have proved to be remarkably elastic goods — price goes up, demand goes down. News Corp and Nine have both gone to the well a few too many times: over the past decade, they have pushed the cover price up by 5% to 10% a year, usually on July 1. Over this past summer, News Corp sneaked in an out-of-season extra 14% increase for its tabloids.
Meanwhile, the media industry — not just news, but entertainment media — seems to be hitting peak digital subscriptions. The trend leader is Netflix, which reported its first quarter-on-quarter fall in subscribers this year. Last week News Corp reported that subscriber numbers for its Australian news mastheads were (just) up quarter-on-quarter by about 1.7%.
The trend suggests the company’s rescue plan for Foxtel — a pivot to subscriber-funded streaming with Binge and Kayo Sports — may not be the answer to the continued fall in home pay TV subscribers reported in the company’s latest market update.
There was worse news in Labor’s weekend announcement that it would review anti-siphoning laws to get more sport on to free-to-air television, reducing sport’s power as a driver of streaming subscribers. (The announcement also slammed the Morrison government’s $40 million gift to Foxtel so it could paywall women’s sport, suggesting a further hole in future News Corp income.)
In this election campaign we’re already seeing the impact of a diminished news media and a weakened News Corp. Without the residual power of print next time around, expect it to be that much less again.
