News Corp to launch more than 50 digital-only regional titles
Just a couple of months after ending the print life of more than 100 regional and community titles and moving them to a digital-only format, resulting in 500 to 1,000 redundancies, News Corp has announced a plan to launch more than 50 new digital titles primarily targeting regional areas.
The first 15 titles are due to launch in September, with the rest to be rolled out across three years.
Last Thursday, news editor for the company’s national community network, Jessica Clement, tweeted that she was looking for 15 reporters to staff the first 15 mastheads, which will be based in Albury-Wodonga, Ballarat, Bendigo, Gippsland, Latrobe Valley, inner-city Melbourne, Mildura, Shepparton, Dubbo, Hawkesbury, Port Macquarie, Orange and Tamworth, and South Australia’s Clare Valley and Port Lincoln.
The approach appears to mirror News Corp’s existing News Local model, which sees the titles manned by just one reporter, who covers everything an area’s readers care about, from court and sports reporting to property and business news.
WE WANT YOU: 15 reporters to staff 15 digital mastheads throughout regional NSW and VIC. Drop me a CV 📧 jessica.clement@news.com.au
— Jessica Clement (@jess_clement) July 9, 2020
Three journalists have already been hired, with a further dozen sought. The company’s Australasian executive chair, Michael Miller, said the new recruits will be “embedded in the mastheads’ local communities”.
https://twitter.com/michaelmillerau/status/1282447282688778241
The editor of the national community masthead network, John McGourty, added that the new titles will be “hyperlocal”, and rely on subscriptions.
“It really is just grassroots journalism, the ways it‘s always been and our audiences connecting with that in better and bigger ways than ever before,” McGourty said.
“It‘s important to us that those journalists are embedded in their community, that they are living and working in the communities that they’re serving so that they are true hyperlocal journalists.”
Some revenue will be drawn from advertising, with some of the publications becoming competitors to Antony Catalano’s Australian Community Media titles, the country’s largest regional media publisher. Both ACM and News Corp have closed print centres as part of the companies’ response to COVID-19.
Just last week, ACM said it needed to close four print sites to ensure the business’ future. Two of the sites were closed temporarily in April, when the business suspended more than 150 non-daily titles and stood down employees working at both those newspapers and the printing facilities.
While the new digital News Corp titles are said to serve regional communities, one masthead in the first batch of 15 will be targeted at inner-Melbourne readers. McGourty said these parts of the city, such as Yarra and Richmond, have a “village atmosphere”.
“We’re trying to find out if we can grow an audience at a hyperlocal level inside a city. We’ve already done that in places like Adelaide, and Sydney,” he said.
McGourty
Two weeks ago, News Corp launched its own newswire after pulling funding from AAP, which encountered a close-call with closure before a last minute reprieve in the form of a consortium of investors, fronted by former News Corp executive Peter Tonagh.
And at the beginning of the month, former WPP CEO Mike Connaghan joined News Corp to lead its commercial content division, and it was announced that chief operating officer Damian Eales would be moving to New York to take up the newly-created role of global head of transformation.
Brittney Rigby was Mumbrella's deputy managing editor - news and analysis. She left Mumbrella in April 2021.
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News On The Cheap … that’s the News Corp way. How does it think that one journo a region will be able to adequately cover what goes on in that region. Surely News won’t want people to pay to access these sites. It will be fascinating to watch the way this approach plays out.
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More of the same. Until Newscorp, ACM and Co. realise they don’t belong in the regions any more, they will keep bouncing from one poor strategy to the next as they have for the last 10 years or more. They haven’t had any answers for over 10 years and nothing is likely to change until they finally understand their customers needs, one of which is NOT having to pay for news!
Free news will result in big audiences, big audiences will result in big advertising. Social media has big audiences and big advertising simply because it’s FREE to access. Go figure!
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Better than nothing – please support this initiative with advertising revenue. Make it worthwhile for them to get more reporters and more investment into regional journalism.
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Yeah, good luck with that. Good on them for giving it a crack, but no-one has been able to make digital hyperlocal work commercially — as a paid product or via advertising, or as combination of both. And one journo to cover all that matters in a region? Gimme a break.
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The problem here is that the digital advertising model (CPM) means only sites with very high volume traffic have a hope of making decent ad revenue. Hyper Local, by definition, only appeals to small audiences and thus can only generate low volumes of traffic. Ditto with subscription revenue. Even if punters are prepared to pay for hyperlocal news (and that’s a very big IF), the addressable audience is so small…….
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You think there was more than one journo covering the print editions? There should be of course, with specialists for sport etc, but the free home-delivered papers only usually had one per municipality.
But better than no jobs and no local news; I hope it gets the support it deserves.
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Agreed.
I’ve advised against so many $5k, regionally focused campaigns, but planners love them. They never bloody work!!!
Nobody but google can do hyperlocal well and NewsCorp sure ain’t google. Nice try you cheap dropkicks!
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Yep! It’s all about audience. No audience, no hope!
That said, before paywalls, the Central Western Daily in Orange
boasted millions of views each month, they also claim about 70,000 Facebook likes, interesting in a City of about 40,000 people.
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Not sure it is Adam. Aren’t we better off supporting true local journalism? People in these areas that are local, that care and who don’t have the bloated overheads that come with NewsCorp and as such can make the economics of local journalism work more effectively. This is yet another model from News that seems to ignore the fact that the internet is here and can’t be wound back. If you want local journalism, that is not a local story here and there, but with the bulk of content driven by a state based anchor masthead (e.g. Tele/Courier Mail). The power of mastheads are irrelevant in local journalism in today’s world as distribution is not constrained.
Ironically, I suspect News’ plans will backfire and create a fertile environment for true local jounalism to flourish.
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Bob, with CPM ad rates what they are, a hyperlocal site would need many tens of millions of PVs a month to generate even modest revenue. Given hyperlocal mastheads will only ever have small audiences, that’s a tall order even with no paywall. It’s why hyperlocal has never really worked commercially on digital platforms. That said, if News Corp can crack the code, then go for gold.
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Well, given the closure of 100 or so local print titles by News resulted in ~1000 jobs lost, then yes, this suggests there was more than 1 journo per title (notwithstanding that not all of those who lost their jobs would have been journos)
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I run a true Hyperlocal site in Lane Cove. My content will never be paywall. If you give value to advertisers they will pay to advertise and support you as a true community asset. True hyperlocal is run by an engaged citizen journalist or a journalist. We touch on topics in greater detail and we know what the community want to know about and it is more than rates, roads and rubbish. If you want to run a hyperlocal in your area, I am happy to talk to you about my experiences.
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And a min. wage for the lucky ONE? So little respect NEWS has for the craft of journalism; so little respect for the country audiences and their intelligence. Value is not the price.
No wonder the minds of people are going to shit and TRUST in media is being sabotaged.
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Depends what one means by “adequate”. They’re trying to get people to subscribe to the output of one journo. They’re trying to get people to subscribe to a statewide collection of stories, of which there will now be a few more journos covering regional areas (and central Melbourne).
If that seems more appealing than the local paper available (especially one without the support of a current-strength AAP), then people may choose the News Corp option instead.
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But the other option isn’t nothing – it’s the existing local paper (or papers) that this service will be competing against. If enough people choose a single local journo + lots of non-local journo option over a subscription to many-journoed existing paper, the latter will go broke. Then there will be less journalists employed in that area, not more. News is then unlikely to be motivated to employ more locals.
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This will become just another channel for Rupert to push more rightwing propaganda to regional areas.
The only solution to resolving the “news” drought in Australia is a greater investment and political independence of the ABC.
Kevin Rudd is right saying Australia needs a royal commission into News Ltd.
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