This week it was announced that News Corp, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is in the process of buying APN News and their Regional newspaper division. Which brings another 12 daily newspapers and 60 community newspapers to the News Corp Suite.
The King of Queensland press is now crowned with News Corp, leaving only a one major publication out of the monarchy.
So what does the change in ownership really mean? We take a look at what this means for both News Corp and Advertisers;
News Corp takes over APN: What it means for News Corp
We can expect to see a more streamlined offering from the overall News Corp brand, with all newly acquired print publications and websites to conform to the News Corp brand.
There’s also talk that News Corp will look at shutting down some mastheads. With an ongoing decline in readership and a double up in publications in many markets, there is a high chance that some closures will occur which could effect community publications.
Our managing director Roger Delaney had a chat with Mumbrella earlier today to discuss the changes we might see in the near future;
Roger Delaney, Managing Director
“There may be some things that fall away like the weekly newspapers but the dailies are the key. They can have a strong paper if they can stop the slide – it’s had a 10% year-on-year circulation drop for close on 10 years now and if that keeps going on, there’s no paper at all,”
“Hopefully News Corp can stop that”, he said.
News Corp may look at changing daily publications to 2 or 3 days a week which will likely make readership stronger on these days.
We also expect to see News Corp reduce newsroom staff, now that they will be able to share and duplicate news over a larger group.
News Corp takes over APN: What it means for Advertisers
If the expected masthead closures happen, we should see a stronger focus poured into the remaining mastheads and hopefully in turn a stronger readership which will be better for advertisers.
With a now multitude of opportunities for News Corp to save money in Queensland, we will hopefully not see any increases in advertising costs and would hope to see the usual fin year increase dropped for next year at least.
Further, for our Sunshine Coast clients, we don’t expect any changes with the publication of the Sunshine Coast Daily, as this regional newspaper still holds a worthy daily readership of around 11,300 on a weekday and 20,050 on a Saturday. We may however see some of our individual community papers such as the Kawana Weekly, Nambour Weekly, Buderim Chronicle etc be cancelled, only time will tell.