Australia’s regional news outlets are dying a not-so-slow death, and COVID-19 has accelerated their decline.
Over the past two years greater than 100 of the 435 regional and community newspapers that existed in 2019 ceased printing, continuing as digital-only publications or being merged with other mastheads.
More seem set to follow if a federal parliamentary inquiry into regional journalism is anything to go by.
The inquiry, chaired by National Party backbencher Anne Webster, was established in late 2020 to analyze the impact of dozens of local print editions being suspended in 2020, and if there was any recovery since.
Its findings, published last month, aren’t optimistic. While some suspended print runs have resumed, global supply shortages have increased printing costs. Meanhwile the web continues to strip away readers and promoting dollars.
The committee’s recommendations on what to do about it leave even less room for optimism. They show the federal government is ill-equipped to offer meaningful assistance despite committing tens of tens of millions of dollars to support regional journalism.
News deserts
In 2018 the Australian Competition Consumer Commission counted 21 local government areas in Australia lacking a single local newspaper. Sixteen were regional areas.
Such “news deserts” – communities not covered by local journalists – have serious consequences for the standard of local democracy. Newspapers particularly have been cornerstones of local news ecosystems, setting the agenda for local television and radio.
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The committee’s report, “The Future of Regional Newspapers in a Digital World”, doesn’t update the competition watchdog’s numbers. It notes only the submission from the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance that previously two years 68% of 182 news “contractions” – covering masthead or newsroom closures and suspensions – were in regional Australia.
So what do about it?
The committee made 12 recommendations. The first is to have one other, more comprehensive inquiry, into the viability of regional newspapers.
Of the opposite 11, the 2 most vital are to amend 30-year-old laws to enable higher data collection on the state of the industry, and to effectively subsidise rural papers through government promoting.
Amending the Broadcasting Service Act
The first suggestion pertains to the Broadcasting Services Act (1992), which imposed limits on what number of TV stations, radio stations and newspapers a media company can control in a media market.
This leglisation was passed by the Keating government in response to Australia’s then richest man Kerry Packer, the owner of the Nine Network and magazine empire Australian Consolidated Press, making a bid for the Fairfax empire in 1991.
The act’s purpose was to avoid media monopolies by limiting the variety of broadcast licences and newspapers an organization could own in a media market.
The web has rendered differences between print and broadcast news largely redundant. But the Broadcasting Services Act (1992) continues to be vital to bureaucrats because the one piece of federal laws defining regional media – albeit just for radio and TV.
This could explain why the report is fuzzy on the precise variety of regional newspaper closures over the past two years; bureaucrats didn’t have a definition of “regional newspaper” to work with.
The suggestion to amend the act is to offer the Australian Communications and Media Authority definitions that enable it to higher assess the state of diversity and localism in news media, according to recommendations the media regulator proposed in 2020.
So this a useful suggestion, though not one which could make any difference by itself.
Subsidising through promoting
The second big suggestion is that not less than 20% of federal government print promoting be placed in regional newspapers.
This is a really blunt instrument to effectively subsidise regional newspapers.
Government promoting has long been a very important revenue stream for newspapers. But there are good reasons to think government largesse can’t make up for the private promoting dollars lost to higher targeted, cost-effective digital alternatives.
The Victorian government, for instance, has plans to drop all notices in newspapers. It as an alternative wants to make use of the web to publicise things like laws changes, planning permits and road closures. The economics are clearly on its side.
The problem facing regional media, and all newspapers generally, is that the old promoting model is broken. No amount of presidency promoting will fix it.
Deeper community connections needed
A greater strategy to help regional media should start with acknowledging print is dead, So is the the old advertising-funded model of stories services. The recent model is digital only, and user pays – where readers fund the service.
Shifting from promoting to a reader revenue model requires developing diverse streams, collecting money not only from subscriptions but events, e-commerce, mobile messages, event sponsorships, and so forth.
This requires developing community-based news gathering.
News organisations overseas are beginning to use artificial intelligence to attain this, augmenting the work of journalists.
One example is Trib Total Media, a newspaper company in Pennsylvania. It partnered with AI company Crivella Technologies to develop its Neighbourhood News Network.
This platform enables the constructing of neighbourhood-level web sites that deliver “hyper-local content based on the reader’s geography, habits and interests”. The platform also enables local contributors to submit and publish.
To help local news organisations emulate these efforts requires funding for specific technological innovations and partnerships. It also requires deepening links between regional newspapers and the communities they serve.
These are the problems the following review of the viability of regional newspapers in Australia ought to take a look at in additional depth.
This article was originally published at theconversation.com
