Already distorted by the Albury mill closure, Australia's plunging newsprint import statistics are only the beginnings of the measure of the country's newspaper crisis.

IndustryEdge figures - quoted by Print21 magazine - show newsprint imports in April were down 36.1 per cent on the previous month. Overall, grades also including mechanicals and woodfree fell 18.8 per cent, despite the tissue used in toilet rolls trebling against a year ago.

April's newsprint figures were driven primarily by Australian Community Media's temporary shutdown of four print sites and stopping print production of many of its 170 non-daily newspapers in mid-April. Most are still expected to resume production at the end of this month.

News also started cutting print editions in early April, beginning with the "suspension" of 60 community and suburban titles including the 114-year-old Manly Daily, and will add a further more than 100 when a massive list of regional daily, biweekly and weekly mastheads switch permanently to digital-only from June 30.

IndustryEdge's Tim Woods says the bleakness of the April figures will be nothing by comparison to those for May, where deeper falls are expected "with some grades unlikely to recover".

Norske Skog's Albury (NSW) newsprint mill - which used to produce up to 265,000 tonnes of mostly recycled paper a year - made its last jumbo roll at the beginning of December 2019, after the company announced its sale to Australian packaging group Visy for $85 million the previous October.

Most newsprint in Australia is now sourced from Norske's other mills at Boyer, near Hobart, and Tasman in Kawerau, New Zealand. Each can produce up to 150,000 tonnes of newsprint, improved and book grades a year, Boyer's newsprint capacity having already been cut back with the $85 million conversion of PM2 to make 135,000 tonnes a year of lightweight coated instead in 2014.

Originally primarily owned by Australia's two major newspaper publishers - Fairfax (now Nine) and the Herald & Weekly Times (now News) - the Albury (opened in 1981) and Boyer (1938) mills passed to Norske Skog with its acquisition of Fletcher Challenge in 2000.

In Europe, Norske Skog has plans to enter the containerboard business itself, converting newsprint machines in France and Austria to make the packaging product. The 350 million Euros ($571 million) investment will yield production of 760,000 tonnes of unbleached testliner a year.