More cuts are reported to be part of an ‘Audience 25’ plan to make NewsCorp newsrooms viable, with the Murdoch-controlled media company looking to carve a further $20 million from costs.
Zoe Samios in Nine Entertainment’s the Sydney Morning Herald quotes confidential sources on the confidential two-year Audience 25 project that a team of executives are in the process of identifying where to reduce costs.
NewsCorp’s most high-profile mastheads in Australia are national daily The Australian, and metro titles the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun, the Courier-Mail and The Advertiser in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide respectively.
In addition to printing plants for all these, News has print centres in Darwin for the NT News, Hobart (for The Mercury) and Townsville (for the Townsville Bulletin and Cairns Post).
Last year News closed its Brisbane print centre moving production to the former APN Print site at Yandina on the Sunshine Coast, while production in Adelaide has recently been reinvigorated with the installation of a press moved from the former Fairfax Media (Nine) print centre in North Richmond, NSW.
Nine had also closed the Ballarat, Victoria print site at which The Age was printed, with News now printing its metro mastheads and Australian Financial Review under contract.
With the merger with Fox Corp now postponed or cancelled, News needs to find new savings to make its newsrooms financially viable, if news publishing – a cause close to Rupert Murdoch’s heart – is to continue.
Samios quoted sources that the programme was being led by national community masthead network editor John McGourty, and head of digital, national regional and community network Rowan Hunnam, although News had declined to comment. One possible area is greater centralisation of editorial functions in line with changes which have already taken place for sport and business.
As she points out, the cost-cutting exercise is smaller than that undertaken by Fairfax Media in 2018, when about $100 million was cut from its cost base prior to the sale to Nine.
In 2020, when numerous mastheads were closing their print editions and some closed altogether, the Cairns Post (pictured) boldly pledged to continue to produce its print product six days a week “as it has since 1882”. The unanswered question remaining there and in publishing centres like it, is “for how long”.