Farmers the focus of The Weekly Times push to become online destination for rural readers
‘Rural news, fresh daily’: News Corp push to make The Weekly Times a national platform
News Corp has upped the ante in the battle for readers in Australia’s rural heartland, developing The Weekly Times as a national digital platform.
Backed by the new campaign, the move to develop the paper, which is distributed in regional Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland as the national online voice for farmers, will take on Fairfax Rural Media and The Land, Farm Weekly in WA, Stock Journal in South Australia and Queensland Country Life.
The campaign has been dubbed ‘128k’ after the 128,000 Australian farmers who work for, feed and clothe 60m people in Australia and overseas, and runs with the tagline: ‘Rural news, fresh daily’.
Really interesting, I think they’ll do well.
I’d love to see some data and statistics around regional Australia’s adoption of technology and internet consumption/usage.
It seems that the default when thinking about our country cousins is that they are very old school/offline/traditional media consumers….but I’m not convinced this is the case.
Can anyone please offer any insight on this?
As distribution newsagents we have to say that this is most welcome news. The sooner it happens the better. On the one hand the service expectations certain rural customers are totally unrealistic, and on the other the publishers are unwilling to fairly compensate for the extraordinary efforts which Newsagents go to, to serve these over entitled customers. The Weekly Times is indeed an extremely unprofitable title to distribute. And the reality is that most farmers are quite tech savvy and willing to use whatever technology where it is enabled by infrastructure