As Antony Catalano’s 35-year-old son replaces his father on the board of ACM – Australia’s third-largest newspaper publisher – questions will inevitably be asked about what that means for the future of its 70-plus print mastheads.

In fact it’s the board of the curiously-named 20 Cashews – which owns Australian Community Media and other assets – to which Jordan Catalano has been appointed. Catalano senior owns the company with financier Alex Waislitz. ACM owns a raft of daily newspapers – in cities such as Canberra, Newcastle, Ballarat, Launceston, and Albury – and 50-plus others with lower frequencies including the Illawarra Mercury and other former dailies.

Increasingly, what it doesn’t own is the presses on which to print them, with News Corp emerging as this country’s dominant newspaper printer.

When the Catalano-Waislitz duo bought what was pretty-much the Rural Press part of Fairfax Media that Nine Entertainment didn’t want, for $125 million, there was always a strong element of financial security in the deal: The underlying bricks-and-mortar assets. Necessary, as it turned out, to enable it to withstand the early rigours of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, the print sites at North Richmond (NSW) and Ballarat (Victoria) – both expanded to replace Fairfax’s Chullora and Tullamarine metro sites until rendered obsolete by a print-sharing agreement with News Corp Australia – have been closed.

As have ACM sites in Canberra (ACT), Launceston (Tasmania), Murray Bridge (South Australia), and most recently Tamworth (NSW). Additionally, its plant in the border city of Wodonga (Victoria) was sold to McPherson Media in 2020, and that in Mandurah (WA) to Ive Group in 2020 (who closed it three years later when after ACM closed a number of WA print mastheads).

Nine had never wanted to be a printer, and picked up a then recently-negotiated contract to print The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review at News’ print sites, an arrangement which has just been renewed.

It’s a tough time for newspapers, their livings snatched and sometimes stolen by digital companies, and it seems like every week we’re writing about small publishers giving up the fight.

This month has been another bad one, as independents opt to close rather than find a replacement for ACM’s Tamworth print centre, which closed on May 8, at the same time as frequency cuts were made to group newspapers.

Putting aside – and you can’t – the personal aspects of ACM’s ownership issues, attention now turns to the personalities: the change of directorship doesn’t indicate or announce a change of ownership, and the success of the business in a difficult market will depend in part on what its directors bring to it.

There’s a strong – and understandable – element of “leave us alone” to comments emerging from the company itself, but life isn’t like that, and someone at least will need to underwrite ACM’s losses or turn the business around.

So who is Jordan Catalano? Forget the “quintessential 1990s brooding ‘bad boy’ and heartthrob” from the US, offered to you by an unreliable Google.

But come to terms with the fact that Australia’s Jordan Catalano – who has been running the family’s fashionable Raes on Watego resort in Byron Bay – hasn’t come from nowhere, and that there is a rival beyond ACM for his attention. Notably, perhaps, the business he and Tom Hywood – who is the son of former Fairfax Media chief executive Greg Hywood – built in off-the-plan property, and sold for a reported for $32 million in 2022 to his father and Waislitz.

Seems like a promising qualification in entrepreneurship, which is what he had been studying at uni; now what’s he going to make of the media business?

We watch with interest and– because it’s necessary – a healthy dose of optimism.

Peter Coleman

Picture (from a Raes publicity shoot): Jordan Catalano and his father