At our national conference this month we said something out loud that plenty of newsagents have privately suspected for a while. All of the research we have done points to one conclusion: the traditional newsagency channel has less than ten years left.
Not necessarily your business. Not you. The channel. The thing Australians have called a newsagency for over a century is running out of time, and this week on the blog we are going to walk through the evidence, what will not fix it, and what we are asking members to do about it.
Start with newspapers. This year Nine stopped printing its papers in Tasmania altogether. When a single press closed in Tamworth, it did not just end one daily. It took four independent titles down with it, because they all relied on the same press. That is how print ends. It does not fade gently. It holds, and holds, and then a piece of shared infrastructure fails and a whole cluster goes at once.
Here is the part we do not talk about enough. Almost every newspaper in this country is now printed by one company, News Corp. They print their own papers, they print Nine’s, they print for others. For decades those presses kept running partly for sentimental reasons: Rupert Murdoch built them and he loves print. Rupert is ninety-four. The next generation will make the print decision the way any modern board makes it, on margin. Because one company prints nearly everything, one boardroom decision can move the whole channel at once.
Magazines are already in trouble. Are Media has been for sale for over a year without finding a buyer, and the talk is now of a break-up. A publisher collapse took Cosmopolitan Australia down overnight. The mass weeklies, the titles that brought customers in every week, are falling faster than anything else on the shelf. The biggest “magazines” in the country by readership are now the Coles and Bunnings catalogues, and they never touch a newsagency.
The day a capital city daily stops printing is the crack in the dam wall, and every signal says that day is measured in years, not decades.
We know how this lands. Some of you will be angry. Some have heard doom before and stopped listening. Fair enough. Do not take our word for it. Follow the series this week, look at the evidence, and then look at your own numbers.
Tomorrow: the two income streams that were meant to cushion the decline, and why both are being pulled away at the same time.
Find out more: help@newsxpress.com.au.