There’s a lost zombie wandering the Australian media landscape hungry for brains (or, at least, for “audience”) — the printed newspaper.
For more than two centuries it was the dominant journal of record, the setter of the news agenda, the Fourth Estate holding governments to account, embedded in Australian news-consumption habits. But then COVID turned print into a zombie. Suddenly, with the 2022 social media election, everyone’s noticed.
Australia’s news media leads the Anglosphere in the transition to digital-only distribution. Last month, news site Axios sent a shiver through US journalism when it predicted digital news advertising would outstrip print advertising in 2026. Welcome to Australia 2022. Big media’s digital news sites, such as such as news.com.au and Nine, already outpace their print siblings for advertising, largely off the back of their successful digital news products.
In the UK, the market-dominating voices are still the printed “red-tops” such as Murdoch’s The Sun or The Mirror, whose outgoing political editor Pippa Crerar has wielded good old tabloid journalism to do the most damage to Boris Johnson’s prime ministership (other than BoJo himself, of course).
In Australia, the print zombie is the media’s dirty secret — where it no longer matters “what the papers say” because they’re saying it to so few of us.
Take Australia’s once haughty establishment papers, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age: extend the circulation trend line since they stopped reporting through the independent Audit Bureau of Circulation about five years ago, cross-check against reported print subs income in Nine’s annual report, and it looks like their Monday-to-Friday circulation is about 55,000 a day from Monday to Friday — maybe stretching up to 90,000 on the weekend. That’s about one-fifth of their daily circulation before the internet, and heading down.
Those newspapers once put Fairfax among the 50 largest companies listed on the ASX. “Rivers of gold,” Rupert Murdoch enviously called them. Now, based on Nine’s most recent half-yearly report to the Australian Securities Exchange, print publishing contributes less than 10% of the revenues of its television-focused parent.
Print circulation for News Corp mastheads is harder to read — they don’t break out print and digital revenues for Australia in their financial reports. They didn’t follow Fairfax/Nine in boosting cover prices to drive readers away until they stopped reporting ABC-audited circulation, which suggests the fall since then has been harder and faster.
A parsing of their quarterly reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission suggests their daily print sales in Sydney and Melbourne may be about the same as the Nine mastheads.
So, why hasn’t Australian big media put the zombies out of their misery? Partly perception and the political clout it brings, partly reluctance to abandon a still valuable niche market.
Political perception lags the market. Canberra still thinks in 20th-century terms: that print is power. Old media traded on that perception in their hunt for a pay-off from Google and Meta (aka, the news media bargaining code). Good value, if you can get it: it’s boosted the profits (if not the journalism) of both News and Nine.
Will that monopoly clout carry over into the far more competitive digital-only news market? What happens to old brands once they’re digital-only?
Look at all those regional and suburban titles that News stopped printing in 2020, as COVID-19 impacted sales and advertising. Within a year they were gone digitally, too, only to linger deep within the company’s metropolitan digital tabloids.
Better, then, to keep printing — at least as long as it drags in enough dollars to pay for itself from those few advertisers who still want to reach their audience of over-65, self-funded retirees. Take a look at the ads in last Saturday’s papers: bowel cancer checks, Specsavers, managed pension funds, cruises — and the Ds left over from the once-essential births, deaths and marriages classifieds.
No wonder Clive Palmer picked print front pages to puff his United Australia Party (speaking of zombies) to his grumpy-old-men target market. Seems he picked up enough votes off the strategy to fluke a single senator.
Print ads are being squeezed. The audience is, literally, dying, replaced by younger-thinking over-65s who have long lost the print habit. Despite the post-COVID advertising boost, News Corp’s most recent quarterly investors report noted that Australian print advertising was down.
Seems those few advertisers who want to reach the over-65 market are discovering that boomers’ social media of choice — Facebook — does a better job.
Now, when the mastheads stop printing, who will be left to notice?
To be precise: the “rivers of gold” were the classified advertisement sections of the newspapers. In the 1980s, the Saturday SMH must have weighed a kilo a copy as it came in eight sections, with thick job, real estate, cars, and other classified sections. Circulation figures only tell part of the story – try weighing the papers from then and now!
Isn’t the real question, to what degree has what was the print news media successfully moved to digital media and taken its audiences, present and future, with it? I haven’t read the Age newspaper for I don’t know how long but I subscribe and read the Age website most days, ditto the Guardian. I didn’t read newspapers much until my twenties. They were there as authoritative sources of news in plain view to find when I was ready. With that conveyor belt to consumption via physical presence gone, how will the mastheads fare going forward?
The future of news and culture is definitely more fractured, mass media and mass audiences in decline, FTA and print, but by how much? In terms of agenda setting and authority the digital forms of the big press are still pretty dominant. Even News, which is really now mainly propaganda and sensation. So yes the trend is there but heading to what end? Will there be a new equilibrium of plural news sources (you know, an actual competitive market) or just an ultra pluralism where facts really are just agreed facts formed in a rolling series of fluctuating digital interactions. What are the implications of this for cohesive democratic polities built on economic inequality? Don’t expect definitive answers but to me these are the key questions.
A good example is The Moloch’s vanity publishing arm, The Australian aka The Catholic Boys Daily©Gadfly, which will be shut down when The Moloch passes on.
NewsCorpse subscription figure are questionable, are they those of verified subscriptions or do they include the freebies at News Agents who are giving away The Hun, The Terrorgraph, The Daily Fail, The DisTizer depending on the state, and nationally The Catholic Boys Daily©Gadfly,
They also seem to infest hotel lobbies, airport lounges as well as rental apartment blocks viz. Oaks, in which we stayed on a trip to Adelaide, with daily a big pile of The Australian in the lobby, with a much smaller pile of AFR.
Daily The Australian pile ended up, unread, in the recycling bin, not so AFR!
*The Moloch became my particular cognomen for Murdoch as the biblical name of a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice, through fire or war…in this case with the hacking of a dead girl’s mobile and the gung ho chickenhawk and cheerleading for both the Afghan Imbroglio and the Iraq Fiasco.
In Sydney most cafes and takeaway joints have a few copies of the Tele lying around. Presumably these numerous freebies are counted as demand driven circulation.
It seems as though the web, wikipedia, social media has lifted the level of perception nationally presumably because it is so much easier to fact check today.
The ABC needs to use and explain the term Neoliberal in its everyday parlance when describing most of our big media if it feels the need to report what they are doing.
The last election and the increasingly far fetched arguments and vitriol pumping out of the Neoliberal media sausage machine also indicate they are losing relevance.
We still desperately need a large media player to to do battle with the majority Neoliberal media arms because of the damage they continue to reap upon democracy. Trustworthy journalism big media would be great to see again because of its ability to reach and educate and inform but maybe many small players is a better model becase it is so hard for the Neocons to target.
The information wars of the past 40 years may be won already and I’m too freaked out by the past bombardment and awesome destruction to recognise it- just as Newscorpse is so emboldened by that power. Thanks for the article CW .
If mastheads are disappearing they have only themselves to blame. Years ago I fastidiously stopped reading any Murdoch publications. He then bought all our local (NSW northern rivers) papers and a few years later closed them all down blaming Covid. Fortunately for us we have another local paper, The Byron Shire Echo, that puts a lie to that claim. Still operating out of Mullumbimby, still free and now also online, they still hold our local council to account.
Yes we have a similar quality publisher in Perth, the Post Newspaper Group.