Seven local newspapers to fold

Is it any surprise that the death of the newspaper would start with the local version?

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about “disruptive technologies” even if the phenomenon isn’t new.

Television sounded the death knell for popular Australian cinema news reels Cinesound Review and Movietone News in the 1960’s. The internet has been slowly destroying commercial television in Australia since the turn of the century (although it is working just as hard on destroying itself). Perhaps the biggest impact has been in newspapers, which have struggled to make much money after the rivers of gold dried up and they struggled to compete with other news sources on the internet.

In Australia, all eyes have been on the two major publishers News Limited and Fairfax. Fairfax is the smaller of the two companies and has suffered some of the biggest staff cuts, especially at The Age, The Canberra Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. News Limited has been publishing The Australian for years despite the propaganda sheet making no profit, but the company has also haemorrhaged in other areas.

In a further sign of decay, News Corporation has now announced that it will be closing seven mastheads from its Leader Newspaper Group who publish those locally-focussed newspapers that end up in our letterboxes every week. Titles to go include the Melbourne Leader, the Berwick Leader, the Brimbank Leader, the Free Press Leader, the Hobsons Bay Leader, the Melton Leader and the Wyndham Leader.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is the Melbourne Leader; if a local newspaper servicing the CBD of the nation’s second-biggest city can’t turn a profit, there’s really not much hope for the rest of the Leader titles. Some of these newspapers have very long histories.

Personally speaking, I have not read a local newspaper in more than a decade. For far too long now, the bulk of my local newspaper has been advertisements garnished with the odd story about grumpy pensioners with less and less important news. Sometimes it’s appeared that there’s been about as much news in a Leader newspaper as a Myer catalogue. With the demise of those local newspapers goes scrutiny of the municipal governments that they are based around. This is truly a loss, although it’s not a recent one.

In some ways I am surprised that local newspapers have survived this long. I’d long suspected that they’d be the first publications to suffer from the slaughter of online news, even if the internet largely ignores local government decision-making. Local newspapers have relied on the assumption that people actually read them and advertisers have presumably worked on the principle that circulation equals readers. We all know that this isn’t the case and it’s fair to assume that advertising rates have plummeted.

If the rot is setting-in for local newspapers, it will be a matter of time before a major city newspaper falls. Which one that will be remains to be seen, although I’m betting it will be for a regional city such as Bendigo or Wollongong or Mt. Gambier before a capital city paper dies.

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