Antony Catalano: Australia’s newest media baron

He’s expecting his ninth child and lives in Melbourne’s priciest apartment. Who is Antony Catalano?

Antony Catalano at his penthouse in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda yesterday. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

Antony Catalano calls it his “only child”.

He means it in a business sense, after emerging this week as the country’s newest media mogul with the purchase of the 160 regional newspaper titles of Australian Community Media.

In a literal sense the famously reproductive former journalist-cum-media-executive is also expecting his ninth child, having apparently reversed a vasectomy he had in 2015 following the birth of his eighth.

After recently moving into Melbourne’s most expensive apartment — a $30 million, two-storey penthouse in St Kilda — he will have plenty to keep him busy once he and his fund manager backer Alex Waislitz take possession of ACM on July 1.

Catalano is betting he can bring some of the magic that he used to undermine, rebuild and then float the Domain property listings business to restore the fortunes of a newspaper business that was an unloved and neglected child at both Fairfax Media and then its new owner, Nine Entertainment.

With uncanny timing, Catalano’s ACM deal was announced on the same day the Nine-controlled Domain downgraded its revenue guidance because of a steep fall in residential property listings. Catalano left Domain in January last year amid claims he oversaw a “boys club” culture.

After years of revenue falls and job cuts feeding off each other, Catalano says there is big growth potential on offer from investing in ACM’s mix of daily and weekly titles papers including the Border Mail, Canberra Times, Illawarra Mercury, Newcastle Herald, The Land, Stock and Land and Queensland Country Life and restoring their position in towns stretching from rural Victoria to Queensland.

“They really should be investing in their towns and talking to the people in those towns,” Catalano says. “I hope that we can bring new life to them.”

Brian McCarthy, who ran Rural Press — essentially the ­assets in ACM — for 13 years until it was sold to Fairfax in 2007, says the sale to the entrepreneurial Catalano is the best thing that has happened to the titles in ages.

“It has been lost within Fairfax for some number of years and it has been decimated, really,” ­McCarthy says. “At least it has been bought by someone who cares about it.”

Catalano’s plan is like the advice given to would-be homeowners to buy the worst house in the best street.

The $125m price tag for ACM — including $10m of contra advertising to be provided to Nine — is about three times earnings, meaning he and Waislitz can make their money back in three years. There’s $60m of property — including 16ha of vacant land at Richmond, northwest of Sydney — in ACM and no debt, which Catalano says provides scope to borrow and reinvest earnings back into the business.

“Perhaps if we hold on to that land and wait for the city to get closer then I can fulfil that dream of building a big apartment complex,” the entrepreneurial former property editor and head of advertising at The Age jokes of the Richmond site.

There are big hopes that under new management ACM might be able to right an imbalance in advertising spending that sees just 10 per cent of budgets for national brands spent in regional areas where nine million people — a third of the nation’s population — lives.

ACM is part of the Boomtown campaign alongside other regional publishers and broad­casters who have committed $1m to encourage national advertisers to spend more of their budgets targeted at that large, underserved audience. “There is a disconnect there and the story is not being told well,” Catalano says.

He is betting that if that story can be told better, the revenue will be there to hire more journalists and tell better stories.

Investing in the sales team is one of the top ­priorities. Another is bringing a consistent digital strategy to the business, a necessity highlighted by famous US investor Warren Buffett, who has spent the past decade betting that local news will have a value people are willing to pay for in an age of increasingly globalised media brands.

The damage that a decade of digitisation has done to the brands is underlined by the price. The last time the ACM titles traded was in 2007, when the John B. Fairfax-controlled Rural Press was sold to Fairfax for cash and shares valuing them at $3 billion.

They have lost 96 per cent of that value based on the $115m ­Catalano and Waislitz are paying.

But Catalano remains confident that, with a bit of investment and focus, he can increase the value to $300m.