Ad revenue key to regional press restart, says Antony Catalano

‘Early signs of improvement’ in advertising revenue as the government lifts coronavirus restrictions after ‘challenging’ few months.

Antony Catalano. Picture: Stuart McEvoy/The Australian.

Australian Community Media owner Antony Catalano is hoping to resume the publication of its suspended regional newspapers, subject to the advertising recovery.

Mr Catalano, who together with billionaire fund manager Alex Waislitz’s Thorney Investment bought ACM from Nine Entertainment for $125m last June, said there were early signs of improvement in advertising revenue as the government lifts coronavirus restrictions following a "challenging" few months.

"Everyone within the company has pulled together to meet the challenges. Advertising revenue was impacted dramatically but we're seeing early signs of improvement as restrictions are lifted," Mr Catalano told The Australian.

ACM, which has more than 170 rural and regional newspapers, suspended the publication of "many" of its non-core, non-daily titles and stood down staff in April until the end of June. It was another blow to the rural and regional journalism following the print suspension of independent rural media titles, like Mildura’s Sunraysia Daily (which retained an online publication).

The group, like Seven West Media, oOh!media and HT&E, has applied for the federal government's $130bn JobKeeper payment scheme, and is this week notifying staff if they qualify.

Mr Catalano said ACM is currently reviewing all its suspended titles and the current environment to decide when they will resume publishing. He said there was no point in bringing them back if local traders were not open and areas remained in lockdown.

"Victoria for example has tighter restrictions than NSW. It's certainly our hope and our intention to bring back as many of them as we can," he said.

"We're obviously working as hard as we can to ensure all titles are protected in the long term and that we grow our business."

Mr Catalano said there were no plans to follow News Corp Australia's recent decision to stop publishing the bulk of its regional and local newspapers and make them digital-only.

"Up until the stand downs, we had actually grown a number of titles since acquisition of ACM. The suspension of titles is a temporary thing until June 29," he said.

Mr Catalano was in talks with News Corp, publisher of The Australian, about buying its regional and community portfolio of more than 100 newspapers, but News Corp last month decided to retain the titles and take them online.

ACM, which belonged to Fairfax Media before its $4bn merger with Nine in December 2018, is looking at growth opportunities within digital and print.

"Like News, we're exploring more digital opportunities, we continue to have a look at potentially any print acquisitions if they're attractive," he said.

"It all depends on the performance of the business, so we're not ruling anything out and we're not making any guarantees around titles because we don't know what those economic circumstances look like."

Mr Catalano has urged the Morrison government to relax media ownership laws and provide financial assistance to the embattled media industry, which was struggling before the coronavirus crisis.