Dogged by the drama of a partner’s domestic tragedy, one of Australia’s largest newsmedia groups now faces the prospect of being pulled apart by predatory publisher rivals.
News Corp Australia – the country’s dominant media company – is reported to have been given preliminary ‘due diligence’ access to the books of Australian Community Media to assess whether flagship, and NSW-focussed rural weekly The Land, together with its regional agricultural publications, are worth buying.
These include Queensland Country Life and the North Queensland Registe (QLD)r, Stock Journal (South Australia), Stock & Land (Victoria), and Farm Weekly (WA).
Nine Publishing’s Australian Financial Review noted last week that owners Antony Catalano and Alex Waislitz have opened ACM’s books to its biggest rival “after months of signalling their interest in selling out of their regional media empire”.
News is the publisher of the Weekly Times, which emeritus chairman Rupert Murdoch picked up in 1986 with the Melbourne-headquartered swag of metropolitan dailies and weeklies his father once ran.
And ACM, mostly the former Rural Press arm of Fairfax Media that – together with its network of print sites – Nine hadn’t wanted when it bought Fairfax in 2018’s $4 billion “merger”.
Picked over when Nine decided what it did or did not want in 2018, what is now the ACM business is being picked over again by a rival, with the outcome – if the deal goes ahead, as seems likely – predictable. No figures have been mentioned.
Catalano and Waislitz – a wealthy Melbourne investor and former husband of billionaire Heloise Pratt – paid a total of $125 million for ACM in 2019, with $10 million of it in advertising space, and set out to recreate the success in the real estate market ‘The Cat’ had twice achieved. And if they failed, the value of the regional real estate they were picking up with the 170 regional and rural mastheads would go a long way to compensate them.
Among the other assets – and not apparently of interest to News or anyone else – are the Canberra Times, the Newcastle Herald, and the Illawarra Mercury daily mastheads, though neither party has made any comment.
Following a tragic and of course, much-publicised domestic however, things are not going to plan.
Staff at ACM passed a vote of ‘no confidence’ in Catalano, who stepped down from ACM and other businesses after the domestic incident hit court, handing the executive chairmanship to former Seven West Media and Bauer Media executive Nick Chan.
As for the selective ACM deal, the AFR quoted a spokesman for Waislitz that the company was “often approached about some or all of its publications”. Mentioned was that ACM/Rural’s former headquarters in North Richmond, NSW, were currently on the market with hopes of $25 million. Prior to the Nine deal, these had been expanded to provide out-of-town print capacity for Fairfax metro daily the Sydney Morning Herald, which is now printed by News, by far the country’s biggest newspaper printer.
Whether or not that accommodation would be attractive as a data centre, Australia’s geographically-constrained largest city keeps expanding to the west, making the site – which is also close to the country’s biggest military airfield – more and more valuable.
What happens to the rest would depend on whether a partner big enough to take on the remainder – especially the three regional dailies – could be found. Failing that, there are certainly those who would be happy to see the reportedly loss-making business, like a bad dream, just disappear.
Peter Coleman
Pictured: The former ACM headquarters – and “jewel” of John B. Fairfax’s Rural Press empire – at 159 Bells Line of Road, North Richmond, is in the process of being sold. The former print works is to the top left; and (above) its days as a print centre (and before the press was shipped to News’ Adelaide site