Time was, Tamworth’s Northern Daily Leader would come to life in the last week of January, with daily music festival updates and a souvenir edition you could buy on your way from the annual Golden Guitar presentations.

Made possible by the strategic location of a printing plant in the country music ‘capital’.

All of that may be history (the Saturday-night special already is) with the impending closure of Australian Community Media’s Tamworth print centre, scheduled for May 8. The publisher has announced the Northern Daily Leader will lose daily print editions then, falling back to an ‘expanded’ print edition on Saturdays.

Daily coverage will be refocussed online, a decision already prompting the ire of former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce – the now One Nation MP whose electorate it is – who observed that, “you can’t have a democracy without a Fourth Estate”.

The final daily print edition is also timed for May 8, with weekday “digital-online news” coverage including a digital replica, from the following Monday.

A statement by ACM managing director Tony Kendall bemoans the “significant challenges” faced by the company and the media industry, mentioning higher newsprint prices, rising production and distribution costs, and “the continuing shift in advertising revenue away from trusted local news providers to global digital platforms”.

He says the “new approach” to news coverage will ensure they meet “our modern readers where they are”, while addressing printing costs that are no longer viable. The move follows a formula introduced by ACM in Bathurst, Orange and Dubbo two years ago.

The paper began in 1876 as the biweekly Tamworth Observer and Northern Advertiser, and following a 1910 merger with the News, became the Northern Daily Leader in 1921.

As part of Rural Press, the Leader and its print centre were transferred to Fairfax Media in Rural’s 2007 ‘reverse takeover’. After Fairfax – excluding its print assets – had been sold to Nine Entertainment in 2018, a partnership between Antony Catalano and Thorney Investments acquired the regional publishing business which now trades as ACM.

The Leader had been actively involved in Tamworth’s reputation as Australia’s ‘country music capital’, promoting the annual festival, publishing special editions and the glossy festival guide – latterly printed at the now-closed North Richmond print centre – and organising events including the StarMaker contest, and as publisher, since 1995, of the monthly magazine Country Music Capital News. Fairfax sold these to Tamworth regional council in 2017.

The Leader’s offices and basement former print works still stand at the junction of Marius and Brisbane Streets, the latter home to a dining and entertainment venue known as The Press.

Tamworth played host to Australia’s SWUG printers’ group in 2010, with local Katrina Burgoyne (pictured with president Bob Lockley, centre, and Hol Smith) entertaining visitors at the Westdale print site, while perched on an upturned newsprint roll.

Peter Coleman

Pictured top: Country duo Small Town Romance – which features Slim Dusty’s grandson Jim Arneman and partner Flora Smith – perform in former newspaper pressroom The Press in January 2025