What’s a newspaper for in 2024?
Perhaps it’s by virtue of the types of pubs I visit, but these days whenever I see a newspaper out in the wild, it is inevitably turned to the form guide – an ever-present staple of the daily newspaper since the late 1800s.
But those days are soon to be gone. Tabcorp has decided to pull its racing form guide from three major Aussie papers: The Advertiser in Adelaide, NT News, and The Mercury in Hobart. These are the three largest newspapers in each of the capital cities they serve; each is also the only daily paper in their market. All are News Corp papers.
Last May, News Corp shut its dedicated racing paper, The Sportsman, which had been operating for 123 years. It was launched by John Norton, a colourful Australian who popularised tabloid journalism in our country, coined the term ‘wowser’, once fired a revolver at someone on a crowded Pitt Street, and hired Banjo Patterson as the paper’s editor in the 1920s because he was a good writer, I guess?
On the weekend I managed to knock over and shatter three large Pyrex dishes. Thankfully I had last weekend’s SMH on hand to wrap up the huge pile of glass shards. Could online do that?
But seriously, reading the Good Weekend online just isn’t the same as sitting on the deck in the sun with a cup of tea.
Definitely a dumb move to remove form guides – a real reason to buy Friday and Saturday paper. News Corp once again making a questionable decision based on accounting, detrimental to their publications.