News Corp to stop printing more than 100 Australian regional papers

Wow...at least one thing good came out of this whole pandemic...no more printed garbage from Newscorp...maybe FoxNews will follow soon.

Sad news for the staff at those papers. They were mostly pretty independent papers without that much political content at all aside from local council stuff.

If I were the Sydney Morning Herald, I wouldn't be gloating. They were only rescued a year or two ago by the Nine tv network because hardly anyone was reading the left-wing drivel they publish, full of identity politics, climate alarmism and more than their fair share of the daily 2 minutes of hate for that orange guy in the US. And they still haven't learned their lesson.

The down side is that a few hundred jobs will go, which is natural sad, but the upside is that tonnes of paper won't be thrown away each day, and a millions of trees will remain intact.

Well, two of them are in my area, and one already has had a new paper going a few weeks now and doing well, and the second has announced one is starting in a few weeks, both supported locally, with all profits going back into the communities and not mainly 'distant unknown places'. Also, both are being handled by the local printers that 'create' our individual district local papers, so distribution and creation processes are already there.

People will have jobs still in their own districts if they want them, as adverts for positions have been released. Those positions that were 'transfered and centralized due to costs' will come home.

Maybe now we will see news and information of a regional content in our regional paper, rather than rehashed state/national/international news that we can get anywhere, with maybe one page for the region.

oh, and zilch, they have remained online, but cut back in size and releases. Use to be mon, wed, fri, changed wed, fri with little or no news except what the locals sent in, maybe!

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/may/28/news-corp-announces-end-of-nearly-100-australian-print-newspapers-in-huge-shift-to-digital

says more, and some of these papers cover big areas. I expect quite a bit of backlash to come out of this.

The death of a newspaper is always a sad thing, especially if it has a 100-year history or more. Even more so in regional communities. I grew up in regional Australia and the morning paper was part of our lifestyle. Mum and dad would read it in the morning before breakfast and I'd read it after school. They had evening editions in those days. Loved the comics and also the weekend editions which were thicker than usual. You could spend an hour or two on the sofa reading the paper.

Regional papers were always good for the local news which the big city papers rarely publish.

Going digital won't be popular with elderly people. It won't be the same for them.

A newspaper is more than just pages. It represents something in a way a digital version cannot. I always remember a scene from an old Humphrey Bogart movie, "Deadline USA," where he is the editor of a paper, called The Day, which is about to sold and put out of business. An old lady comes in and wants to tell the editor about a murder. When Bogart asks her why she didn't go to the police, she tells him she doesn't know the police. She knows The Day, she has read it for 50 years since emigrating to the U.S. and it helped her to learn English.

That is the importance of newspapers (or at least it used to be).