Slow death roll of print journalism ‘silencing local storytelling outside cities’

The slow death of print journalism across the country is silencing local storytelling as media diversity plunges, says new research.

The Australia Institute is an independent, non-political, non-profit public policy think tank. Last week, it released a discussion paper that examined the extent of the devastation wrought to the print media industry: click here to view the paper.

It reveals that many newspapers have moved online in name only with 29 local government areas (LGAs) lacking any local news outlet, print or digital.

FINDINGS

• 11 out of our 20 biggest cities have just one daily or weekly print newspaper.
• Five of Australia’s eight capital cities have no competition in print news.
• In 2008, there were just over 500 newspapers in this country. In the 10 years that followed, 106 of them shut.
• The COVID pandemic proved to be a mass-extinction event for newspapers with another 184 closing.
• In 2024, 29 LGAs lacked a single local news outlet, either in print or online.

“The vast majority of newspapers which stopped printing and told readers they were moving online have become little more than a social media page and subsection of a capital city newspaper website,” says Stephen Long, a Senior Fellow and Contributing Editor at The Australia Institute.

“There are now many towns with no news outlet since the local paper shut down. That’s been a disaster for local journalism and local storytelling.”

Long says a prediction by former PM Malcolm Turnbull that newspapers moving online would lead to additional news diversity and competition had been proven wrong.

“In the ten years since, the opposite has happened,” he says.

“Those newspapers which remain have fewer staff and smaller budgets.”

SHRINKING DIVERSITY

A study by the institute analysed the state of the newspaper industry.

It found the news industry to be highly concentrated with 84 per cent of newspaper revenue going to Nine Entertainment, News Corp, Seven West Media or Australian Community Media.

Even then, competition is rare. Of the 20 largest cities, 18 lack competition between two comparable print media outlets.

Ten million Australians, or 39 per cent of the population, live in one of these 18 cities excluding Sydney and Melbourne.

The three co-authors also reported that the situation is also dire outside the cities as hundreds of news outlets shut down in the last five years, with the worst impact felt in the regions.

The biggest four owners were not spared, either.

Australian Community Media went from 170 outlets before the pandemic to 62 today while in 2020, out of 119 News Corp titles listed by the Australian Press Council, 86 were shifted to its “digital only” model, their presence reduced to social media pages and a subsection on the website of the daily newspaper in their state’s capital city.

Only 19 are full, separate newspapers with their own websites or print editions.

The study noted that some outlets had emerged to replace these gaps but tend to be less regular and have fewer resources than their predecessors.

“There are many towns that have been left with no news outlet since the local paper shut down,” the co-authors say.