Fairfax newspapers

The announcement last week of suburban newspaper closures and job losses at Fairfax and News Corp is more than another round of media down-sizing; it’s the dying canary that warns us of the threat to the business model of this particular media coal mine.

Those suburban weeklies landing in your garden each week — the traditional source of local news and information — have always been among the most financially marginal media.

It appears that over the last few years at least, revenues in suburban (and regional, for that matter) newspapers have declined faster than in metros.

Last week, Fairfax announced that trend had led it to close six titles in western Sydney, to be replaced with a yet-to-be specified regional magazine. Fairfax also reduced its suburban newspaper staff in Melbourne. In the same week, News Corp announced a 20% cut in its Melbourne Leader group.

Last week’s closures suggest that, for some titles at least, revenues have crashed through the fixed-cost floor of printing and distribution that determines the survival of any newspaper. Each suburban paper (and each community it serves) has its own peculiarities. But the entire sector is threatened.

Their loss leaves a hole in our media and democratic ecosystems: we may know more about Donald Trump, but a lot less about our local council.

This is as much about the interaction between advertising (particularly real estate) and media at a suburban and regional level as it does about the impact of the internet on media. Over decades, the spread and structure of suburban newspapers have always been much more fragile than metropolitan or regional newspapers.

Delivered to you for free, suburbans are exclusively dependent on advertising, particularly real estate advertising. Their geographic spread and page numbers depend on local real estate opportunities. A market boom in, say, the inner suburbs, brought growth (and sometimes competitors). A depressed market elsewhere brought down-sizing, closures and mergers.

While suburbans have always been financially marginal, the internet has made them more dependent on the vagaries of real estate. They once had a monopoly on local classifieds such as for trades or local goods. As in the metropolitans, that has leached away to the internet.

That market position has always brought a journalistic tension. It can be hard to appeal to a community’s potentially NIMBY readership, when developers and real estate agents are paying the bills.

Like other media, Australian suburban newspapers consolidated in the 1980s into chains owned by News Corp (Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane), Fairfax (Melbourne and Sydney) or West Australian Newspapers in Perth. At their peak, about 550 journalists would have been working for these suburban papers across these five capital cities. (It’s probably about half that now.)

Long before the internet, the chains cut costs by consolidating production and advertising and sharing some editorial resources. Early this century, they renamed them “community” newspapers.

If an independent competitor emerged, the monopolies would run them out of town or buy them out. A rare, successful, independent hold-out has been the Post in Perth.

The past decade of revenue loss has led the companies try everything from consolidating metro and suburban operations in individual cities like Adelaide, to splintering suburbans off into a separate operation as Fairfax did in Melbourne, to joint ventures in Perth.

The loss of localism has also hit street papers or so-called alt-weeklies. And not just in Australia. The loss is global, as are the responses.

In the United Kingdom, councils have launched their own newspapers, in the face of vehement opposition from declining commercial media. It may be a sustainable business model, but it brings all the problems of state-run media control.

In Silicon Valley, Nextdoor has sought to be the “social network for your neighbourhood” and Hoodline in San Francisco has applied data to generate online local stories.

In their 2011 book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, John Nichols and Robert McChesney suggested that schools should be resourced to turn their papers or newsletters into a community news resource. In Australia, local communities build Facebook groups, often around local schools or sporting organisations.

These initiatives are giving communities important information. But are they giving us journalism?