Right now, we’re getting a preview of what a world without newspapers — democracy’s traditional fourth estate — might look like. Local elections in NSW are taking place largely in a local news media vacuum, as the traditional regional chains owned by News Corp and Australian Community Media (ACM) shut up shop.
Not that long ago, there were 11 long-established daily newspapers serving each of the largest cities in regional NSW (that is, outside the Sydney-Newcastle-Wollongong metro area), buttressed with a string of tri-, bi- and weekly papers in the smaller towns.
Now, there are just three daily newspapers, while most of the papers on a lesser frequency have been shuttered and rolled into a single corporate digital offering, like News Corp’s Daily Telegraph.
Last week, ACM announced it would stop printing another eight of the weekly mastheads it bought out of the Nine-Fairfax merger in 2019: The Inverell Times, the Moree Champion, the Tenterfield Star, the Glen Innes Examiner and Country Leader (all in New England and north-west of NSW) along with the Dungog Chronicle and Gloucester Advocate between the Hunter Valley and the Barrington Coast and the Milton-Ulladulla Times on the south coast.
It followed the closure of the weekly Blayney Chronicle and Oberon Review in the state’s central west the week before and the end of the daily printing run for the Central Western Daily (in Orange), the Western Advocate (Bathurst) and the Daily Liberal (Dubbo). The three long-term dailies will print once a week. (The remaining dailies in the larger centres of Albury-Wodonga and Wagga Wagga will survive for the time being.)
The closures mark a quick death for the Macquarie Publications network built up from 1949 by two generations of the Dubbo-based Armati media dynasty. The papers were sold to Rural Press in 1995, merged into Fairfax in 2007 and sold on to ACM after Nine merged with Fairfax.
The latest owners are keen to point the blame elsewhere — at Meta for ending payments under the news media bargaining code and at Labor for not renewing the Morrison government’s shakedown of big tech on behalf of old media.
The closures come with the usual pabulum about “a strategic shift towards its growing digital subscriptions business” where less, apparently, is going to be more: “the news teams of the long-standing titles will continue to keep their communities strong, informed and connected with local coverage online across the week and a bigger, better newspaper for weekend reading.”
Nice, if true. But almost certainly bullshit, given there is simply no successful corporate model of digital paywalls on regional media that operates at the scale necessary to meet the needs and wants of regional news audiences.
When News Corp stopped printing most of its regional daily papers in Queensland and northern NSW under the cover of the pandemic back in 2020, it made the same promises of deep investments in journalism with resourced local digital offerings.
By the following March, that offering had been already discounted, with the local sites rolled in behind the pay-wall of the Telegraph and Courier-Mail, puffed out with the quick news hits of crime, natural disasters and development announceables. Staff in regional Australia have been further diminished as the company restructures its news collection into national teams, desperately cutting staff to keep costs beneath its dwindling revenues.
According to News Corp’s official reports to its US regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the total subscriptions of the metropolitan print and regional digital offering wrapped up in NSW’s Daily Telegraph is just 144,000 — down about 5% in just the past year.
It’s a decline that continues to lure the company’s news framing into the clickbait of moral panic that tears at communities — as we’ve seen the focus on crime do in the Northern Territory.
As it shifts its daily papers to digital, ACM is about to crash into the big question mark that hangs over News Corp’s boasted news subscription figures which aggregate print and digital numbers: what are people actually buying? Are they aging nostalgics who want the paper? Or are they forward-looking news consumers? And what happens to those traditionalists when the paper vanishes?
There’s some good news: low-scale independent papers are being tentatively published in some towns to fill the gap left by the corporate chains. (They’re tracked by the Australian News Data Project of the Public Interest Journalism Initiative.) The new voices are bringing a different, more community-based news sense to old media’s perspective of just repeating the news that institutions give them.
The strongest examples — and the most enduring — are in northern NSW, where, as Stephen Wyatt writes in his recent book Rainforest Warriors, the new voices emerged from the community-driven environmental protests of the 1970s and 1980s.
But in most of regional Australia, local news has vanished from the community narrative. And local democracy is being gutted as a result.
Have you felt the impact of regional paper closures? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
