The proposal we put to the newsXpress national conference this month is simple to say and confronting to hear. Decouple from the channel. De-identify as a newsagent. Stop defining your business by a word that is losing its meaning, and start defining it by what your customers actually value.
Think about what the word newsagency now means to a shopper. Almost every story about newsagencies is a closing story. The last one in town. Another one gone. Each story is true, and together they teach the public that a newsagency is a business on the way out. That association attaches to the sign over your door whether your own shop is thriving or not. Every newsagent in the country is carrying the reputational weight of every closure in the country, for free, on their own shopfront.
Listen to what the public says online when it thinks we are not reading. “Are newsagents still a thing?” We are called “glorified last minute gift shops”. People group us with video stores and milk bars. Asked whether to buy a newsagency, the replies are blunt: a dying business model, you would be buying a job. That is not a competitor talking. That is our own community telling us what the word already means to them. The nostalgia is real and kind, but affection is not a sale, and the affection is for a good local shop, never for the word newsagency.
Let us be clear about what we are not saying. We are not telling anyone to close. We are not saying print income is worthless tomorrow. Take every dollar the papers, magazines and lotteries still pay, but take it knowing what it is: a declining annuity, not a foundation.
What must change is the identity. The sign, the window, the Google listing, the socials, the in-store experience, and above all the position your shop holds in the customer’s mind. You can be anything you want. The best card and gift destination in your community is the most natural move, because the categories that resist Amazon and Officeworks, cards, gifts, the tactile, the local, the last minute, are already in your shop. But members have become the best toy shop, the best homewares shop, the best coffee stop in town. What you become is entirely up to you. There is simply no longer any value in being the best newsagent.
The businesses that survive the next ten years will not be the ones that held the word longest. They will be the ones that quietly stopped being one, early and on their own terms.
Tomorrow: the how. Five jobs, two years, four numbers.
Website: www.newsxpress.com.au | Find out more: help@newsxpress.com.au | CEO: Mark Fletcher: 0418 321 338
