In a submission to the parliamentary inquiry into regional newspapers from Rural Press Pty Ltd (trading as Australian Community Media that includes the Bay Post and Narooma News), Tony Kendall, ACM Managing Director said: "Regional newspapers are facing an existential crisis. A combination of factors including the COVID pandemic, a shift of readers and advertising revenue to digital platforms and rising costs of production and distribution have led to closures, suspensions and frequency changes across the sector. He revealed in his submission that without the federal government's timely support through JobKeeper and the Public Interest News Gathering (PING) fund, ACM would have stopped trading saying: "This would have resulted in more than 1300 people in regional Australia losing their jobs, including 600 journalists. It would have created "news deserts" across the country. It would have silenced the voice of regional Australia."
Mr Kendal said "During the past two years ACM has closed five printing presses and sold two others. This was not done lightly, but these capital-intensive manufacturing operations were simply unaffordable. Printing of papers at these press sites has been outsourced to other providers. In many cases these presses were printing other organisations' products at a loss to ACM. This was not sustainable. Rationalising how we produce and distribute our newspapers has helped protect the viability of ACM's core business: regional journalism.
This might explain why ACM stopped printing the Moruya Examiner and now only prints a Wednesday edition of the Bay Post
Mr Kendall said "It is understandable, given the intense sense of ownership regional communities feel for their local newspapers, that they are viewed as a community service rather than as a business. But newspapers, like any business, must be profitable to survive. We cannot run them at a loss."
"We estimate that of our portfolio of titles, 20-30 per centare under threat without urgent support. Already a large proportion of our portfolio is operating unprofitably and is only sustained by the larger group."
Of interest the ACM Managing Director said "Printing and production, including newsprint, is the biggest single input to our business after labour. A massive increase in newsprint prices will affect publishers globally this year. It is perhaps the single biggest threat to the viability of our publishing business, after COVID and its economic effects."
"ACM will be heavily affected by this rise because of the number of publications we produce and the high volume of newsprint we require.
"Our supplier, Norske Skog, has advised that the price rise from July 2022 will be more than 30 per cent. This equates to millions of dollars of extra expense a year. When combined with price rises for specialty paper used for our magazines we are confronting extra costs for paper alone that are equivalent to the salaries of 50 journalists", Mr Kendall said. "These increases will likely cause the closure of titles that are teetering on the edge of profitability and will put even our biggest publications under significant cost pressure.
We will have no choice but to increase the cover prices for all our newspapers while at the same time reducing paging. This in turn will reduce circulation and put further pressure on our ability to sell advertising."
You can read all the submissions made to the Parliamentary Inquiry into Australia’s regional newspapers and the ACM submission in full HERE
Further Reading: Is there a future for local and regional news? Going digital amid a changing media landscape post-COVID
Those are the key findings from a national survey conducted by the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, the union for Australian media workers who say regional and rural journalists are overworked, underpaid and pessimistic about the future of their careers and the outlets they work for.
The MEAA say "Yet despite the bleak outlook, regional and rural journalists remain passionately committed to their jobs and their communities, and believe the work they do is valued by their audiences."
The results of the survey will be released today at the Walkley Regional Journalism Summit as a report titled Rescuing Regional Journalism.
MEAA Media director Adam Portelli said regional media had already been declining before the onset of COVID-19, but the pandemic had accelerated closures and cutbacks to the detriment of communities in regional and rural Australia.
Since the start of 2020, more than 100 regional and community newspapers ceased printing, most of them owned by News Corp or Australian Community Media; and commercial broadcasters cut back their staff, bureaus, bulletins and coverage. This is on top of the 106 local and regional papers that closed over the previous decade.
“The slow decline of regional journalism in Australia must be arrested before it is too late,” Mr Portelli said.
“Large parts of regional and rural Australia are becoming ‘news deserts’, and critical areas where journalism preserves public interest – like courts and local councils – are no longer covered.
“This is devastating for communities where the local newspaper has for decades been the heartbeat of the community, keeping them connected and informed, giving them a voice, and holding power to account.”
Key findings of the MEAA survey include:
• 82% of rural and regional journalists earn less than $75,000 per annum, well below the average wage in Australia.
• 44% earn below $50,000 per annum.
• 13% work more than 10 hours of overtime a week.
• 30% receive no compensation for the extra hours they put in.
• 64% said the resources at their outlet were poor or very poor and 63% rated their opportunities for career advancement as poor or very poor.
• 54% don’t see themselves still working in journalism in five years’ time.
• 84% believe their community is a strong supporter of their outlet.
• 27% ranked the impact on communities of the closure of media outlets as the most important issue in regional journalism.
The survey also canvassed possible policy solutions to tackle the crisis in regional media. There was most support (27%) for ongoing government support for regional media businesses through an expansion of the $50 million Public Interest News Gathering program, followed by boosting funding to the public broadcasters to expand their presence in regional Australia (19%).
The least preferred option was relaxing media ownership laws to allow more mergers and takeovers, with support from just 1% of respondents.
Mr Portelli said this week’s Morrison Government announcement of $10 million in grants over two years towards regional journalism cadetships and training was woefully inadequate. Research commissioned by MEAA last year suggested annual funding of $250 million was needed to sustain public interest journalism in Australia.
“The crisis in regional journalism has to be met head on,” Mr Portelli said. “Yet more mergers and acquisitions are not the answer.
“The Federal Government must draw a line – that it is not prepared to see regional media suffer more concentration, more closures, more job losses, that have left communities abandoned.”
MEAA will use the results of the survey to continue to advocate to local, state and federal governments to support regional journalism under its Our Communities, Our Stories campaign.
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