News won’t let regions down in its digital push

News Corp Australia executive chairman Michael Miller. Picture: Brett Costello

Let me be clear from the outset: News Corp is not turning its back on Australia’s regions and communities. Nothing could be further from the truth: we remain their greatest advocate — they are what makes our country great.

News’s decision to transition the bulk of our regional and community newspapers to digital-only mastheads does mark a turning point, but it’s one that’s unavoidable to secure their future.

These changes follow a comprehensive review of our portfolio, the fundamental consumer shift to reading and subscribing to news online, and the acceleration of businesses, large and small, using digital advertising.

This review highlighted that many of our regional and community print titles had become challenged, and the double impact of COVID-19 and the tech platforms not remunerating us, as the local publisher whose content they profit from, had made them unsustainable publications.

Consequently, we will now have even greater focus on serving the needs of our consumers and clients as a more digital, growth-orientated publisher. I grew up in regional Australia in the upper Hunter Valley. My first love of media was fuelled by reading avidly The Muswellbrook Chronicle and the local sports results and about the community events that brought the town together.

I quickly learned the importance of local media to their communities as often their only source of what was happening around them, local sport, councils, crimes, schools and news, who was getting engaged, married and sadly who had died, and how economic changes were affecting their towns. The pages reflected the prosperity and problems we all directly felt.

Later, during my time as chief executive of APN News & Media — the former publisher of many of News’s regional titles — I travelled regularly through regional Australia and was inspired by my colleagues’ commitment to serving their local communities, often with their own unique set of issues.

The impact of the tech platforms has been a slow burner creeping up on our communities. However, as I warned in April, we are passing through a tipping point where the pain they’re causing is very visible and real.

Regional Australians understand this better than most. They see their high streets with increasing numbers of local shops closed — and local jobs lost — because they are forced to compete against global businesses supported by the tech platforms. The book store in Rockhampton, for instance, is now competing against Amazon, the clothes store for customers against a shop in Manhattan.

This has been a double whammy for regional media — with the tech giants Google and Facebook refusing to pay for their unique journalism, and the remaining local businesses no longer advertising in their local papers.

Like consumers everywhere, regional Australians have embraced digital media: it has enabled them to access the news about their local communities wherever they are in the world.

They like digital news — they like that it’s instantaneous, they like being able to comment and contribute immediately on all the stories and issues, they like viewing a larger selection of local photos and video, and listening to audio.

Many people living in the big cities can’t truly appreciate what a difference this has made. When I was growing up in Muswellbrook, you only received your local news once or twice a week.

Consequently, News has been adapting to how consumers have changed their news habits. And in doing so, we will, quite rightly, provide a better local news service — and we are already seeing this reflected in News’s digital subscriptions being among the world’s fastest growing. More than 640,000 Australians are subscribing to our news content, and this is increasing annually at 24 per cent.

Digital subscriptions for local news have doubled in the past year, and are driving as many as 50 per cent of all our subscriptions. What we are now building is a consumer-funded news service where Australians are willing to subscribe for trusted local journalism combined with the best of our state, national, international news and sport journalism and columnists regardless of where they live.

We will have more than 375 journalists in the regions and communities covering local news and each campaigning for and championing the issues of community importance.

At the same time our state mastheads — The Courier-Mail, The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun and The Advertiser — along with our national flagship titles, The Australian and news.com.au, will increase their coverage of regional issues, giving them prominence in the minds of metropolitan audiences and ensuring they have the attention of the corridors of power in Canberra and our states’ capitals.

I am confident for the future of local journalism, but we must be realists: there will be difficult days ahead as the economic outlook for the country as a whole remains uncertain for the medium term.

The changes we are making will be hard for some, but they’re unavoidable. They also don’t mean that news media is dead, because the true value of a newspaper is in the news, not the paper it’s printed on.

Our regions and communities are our nation’s heart and soul and we at News will never walk away from advocating for an ever-improving Australia.

Regional Australians should not be worried that their issues will not be covered: our journalists living and working in their communities will ensure they aren’t ignored — we will take the voice of regional Australia to a larger connected audience in new ways so it’s heard loud and clear.

Michael Miller is the executive chairman of News Corp Australasia.