Last week APN News & Media announced it planned to sell off its regional newspaper business.
It signals the end of an era. Regional publishing has been at the heart of APN since Tony O'Reilly bought the Queensland newspapers from Rupert Murdoch in the late 1980s.
The sale paves the way for Murdoch’s News Corp to buy them back. As well as being a 14.9 percent shareholder of APN, News Corp already has dailies in Cairns, Townsville, and the Gold Coast so the additional Queensland papers could complement those. APN also has a bundling arrangement with News to give paid regional newspaper subscribers access to News Corp titles. Added to that News Corp’s executive chairman, Michael Miller, is a former CEO of APN News & Media. It’s clear they would know how to value the business for a purchase.
APN’s newspapers comprise twelve daily papers and more than 30 community papers and specialist publications. They cover an area from Coffs Harbour in Northern NSW to Mackay in North Queensland.
Most of the papers were originally founded as family or local concerns, often with their own printing press. But under the management of APN in recent years a lot of the production was centralized to the offices of the “flagship” Sunshine Coast Daily.
That proved to be a hard sell, as editors in North Queensland or New South Wales felt their pages were losing the local touch readers demanded.
For city dwellers it’s difficult to register the sheer size of the geography APN’s regional publishing covers. And from a commercial perspective it seems the logistics and costs of running a collection of small newspapers across such a spread has just become too painful.
The inside joke about APN has always been that it is the biggest media company no one has ever heard of. That might have been true before the company rebranded its outdoor business and highly visible billboards in Melbourne and Sydney suddenly appeared bearing the APN name.
