News Corp’s community and regional newspapers digital switch drives subscriptions higher
News Corp Australia has recorded a big jump in digital subscriptions across its community and regional mastheads.
The new digital era at News Corp Australia’s community and regional newspapers has been strongly received by the media group’s readers, who now have access to a “supercharged local edition”.
News Corp has sold about 8000 digital subscriptions across the 76 mastheads that have shifted to digital-only over the past four weeks — a spike of about 200 per cent in online subscriptions on the same period last year.
Chief operating officer Damian Eales says the mastheads, including Macarthur Chronicle, The Canberra Star, Warwick Daily News and The Northern Miner, will continue to deliver vast amounts of local content through their 375 journalists in dozens of communities.
Digital subscribers will also have access to premium journalism through News Corp’s state-based newspapers, including The Courier Mail and The Daily Telegraph.
“It is a supercharged local edition,” he said. “And the reality is that no other regional publisher in this country can offer that. They don’t have that scale and capability.”
Mr Eales said the business had moved swiftly to digital subscription following its publishing restructuring announcement last month as others struggled to stay afloat, particularly given the assault by technology giants Google and Facebook.
“I would say that News Corp in Australia is setting the pace globally on this front. There is a litany of examples globally where newspapers have closed and with that has gone the journalism. That is not what we have done. Importantly, we have retained journalists and we’ve done so in a digital format,” he said.
Mr Eales warned that regional journalism will “remain challenged until the digital duopoly of Facebook and Google is made to pay for that content that they leverage in those communities to sell advertising, and today they don’t”.
The number of digital-only News Corp community and regional mastheads now sits at 92, with 16 purely digital titles launched over the past 18 months. Ten regional and community titles, including the Geelong Advertiser, Cairns Post and North Shore Times, continue to produce print editions and will also provide a digital offering. News Corp’s biggest regional publishing competitor is Antony Catalano’s Australian Community Media, which suspended the publication of many of its titles and stood down staff in April.
Since News Corp’s announcement, Mr Eales has been inundated by calls from other publishers globally, who are struggling with the move to digital.
“It’s clear from those conversations that we acted a lot earlier than a lot of those companies globally to move towards a digital subscription model,” he said.
One of News Corp’s newest subscribers is Australia’s oldest man, 110-year-old Dexter Kruger, who wants to keep up to date with all the latest news from around Queensland. “I think it’s just symbolic of the fact that we embrace a digital future because our customers are embracing a digital future, and we’re very optimistic about what that means in terms of the consumption of news media going forward,” Mr Eales said.
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