The Melbourne Age has finally given up trying to be the Adelaide Age. That seems to be only conclusion to draw from this email from a disappointed
Crikey reader in the City of Churches:

Last week we received a letter politely informing us that The Age will cease home deliveries into Adelaide as of March 31st as it has become too
expensive to fly the paper in. So it seems we are about to go back to the bad
old days of having a Clayton’s choice between the two Murdoch papers: the
aptly-named tabloid The Advertiser and the hard Rupert-line Australian.

Is there anyone at The Age who can review this short-sighted decision to abandon its loyal Adelaide
readership? We have not even been asked whether we are prepared to pay a bit
more to cover rising delivery costs; I’m sure most subscribers would agree it
would be well worth it to maintain home delivery of the best newspaper in the
country.

CRIKEY: The Age’s retreat from Adelaide comes after several years of
attempting to grab a toehold in a marketplace that seemed so similar to The Age’s own heartland – genteel, civilised, urbane – and was mooted as the first
stage in launching an Age “National Edition”. It attracted some 3,000 subscribers, according to local
media watchers, but that wasn’t enough to justify the large expense of
air-freighting papers overnight from Melbourne. And clearly not an expense that
is justified in the interests of padding the circ numbers.