Why the death of suburban papers is about more than just business
As Fairfax prepares to shut six suburban newspapers in Sydney, Medical Media’s Nazar Musa considers the true cost of Australia’s dwindling local newspaper presence.
ACM director John Angilley, who has since departed the company, said that while the organisation was “intensely proud of our current suburban mastheads … we could not ignore the commercial realities of operating these titles, and need to embrace a new and more commercially sustainable approach to delivering our journalism in the city’s north-west into the longer term.”
Angilley left the publishing giant after 10 years on Friday
I agree. It’s no secret that print publications especially have been bleeding money for years, and that no one has yet come up with a suitable solution to plug this financial hole.
The sad reality is that cost-cutting has meant that many local newspapers have been unable to provide useful and relevant information for their communities for some years. Aggregated copy and smaller book sizes have limited opportunities for local storytelling. For some time, too, editors and senior staff have been unable to get away from their desks to find out what’s actually happening; they have been forced by management to lay out their own pages and sub their own copy. There is an opportunity there for a visionary publisher (or group of concerned local businesses) to find a business model that works. Local people still want to consume good local stories.
I totally agree. The rapid changes in media are providing gains but there are a lot of losses along the way that people aren’t talking about. If the subject is ignored, then the new media forms may never evolve to a point where they restore the benefits that we as a society are losing. If we move to a highly sophisticated digital age but lose the fabric of our families and society, what progress have we really made?
Absolutely agree. There’s nothing like local news and having worked there for a brief time, I know how passionate and skilled the journalists are. My local area has lost several papers over the years and I miss them. Here’s hoping the current publication can continue in the years to come.
“While every morning, those of us living in inner suburbs of big cities reach for The SMH, The Age, The Daily Telegraph or even the New York Times (on our iPads, of course)”
– People outside of the metro are using the internet too. Believe me they are. Just drive down any suburban street in the afternoon and see all the free local newspapers still sitting on driveways, destined next for the blue lidded bin. (Or if you are me, the compost bin…)
What is sad, is that Murdoch reigns supreme with local news and the demographic who read his rags are the ones who vote for the governments, that his hateful newspapers support. These specific voters are the ones that a Murdoch supported government screws over. You cannot write the script can you!? Vicious!!
A situation that I have seen pick up in the the Melbourne CBD area is the rise of a local enterprise who instigate their own local mastheads serving the Docklands, CBD and Southbank areas. These papers such as “Docklands News” and “CBD News” most likely work a small newsdesk with a lean budget and yield a small paper, trying to attract advertising from local small business.
Of course, they would be letterboxed or copies piled up at “watering holes” (cafes, pubs and the like), shops and transport interchanges as a way to put them on the map.
Suburban areas with initiative-driven business groups could keep local newspapers alive by running a local enterprise with these similar qualities. An example of this could be a local business association kicking off a dedicated enterprise, perhaps with some local-council money.
Stop calling them rags. It’s insulting. Community newspapers papers have been gutted by news corporations that also own metro dailies. That’s where their focus is. A suburban network with publications in most capital cities had their advertising departments decimated, and those that remained were asked to sell to metros, regionals and suburbans. Took a while for the nincompoop who came up with that scheme to realise the ad reps concentrated more on the metros and regionals than the suburbans. Too late. They’ve never recovered. The thing is, readership has always been steady. But when you have ad reps with no time to knock on doors and instead are asked to sell 15k packages to a small business over the phone, are we surprised by the outcome? When is the last time any of you bought 15k worth of goods from someone cold calling you? Suburbans should have been left to do what they once did well. Shame on those with no clue who meddled. And anyone who complains about the quality of their local paper…the journalists share your sentiments. They wish they could do more but it is physically impossible.
It has been my experience that local newspapers stopped most reporting a number of years ago, choosing instead to receive copy from organisations and publish it as news. How much local relevence is there in a paper covering 3 or 4 Local Government Areas and perhaps a population of 250,000. I belong to 3 facebook community pages that are suburb based (my own suburb and 2 adjoining) This is in total probably 40,000 people. I know of every fete and event and have the potential to get genuine recommendations regarding trades should I require. I think the argument that the older demographic is just not there is increasingly irrelevent.