AUSTRALIA
By John Schalch, Editor-in-Chief, Capricornia News Pty Ltd
24 February 2003
Australia has a population of 22 million people on a land mass of almost 3 million square miles. This creates tremendous problems of distance and market size for any industry. But the newspaper industry has largely overcome the problems to produce one of the freest and technologically advanced newspaper industries in the world.
There is one national newspaper ,The Australian, which is based in Sydney but has editions in each of the seven state capitals. The capitals also have one local daily and there are two in the major centres of Sydney and Melbourne.
Specialist newspapers - business and sport - are well represented.
In fact, the Australian Financial Review has a small, but increasing, following.
There is a growing number of national and state-based ethnic newspapers publishing in languages other than English, including Chinese.
The circulation of most newspapers has been waxing and waning over the past decade, but has enjoyed a resurgence in the past 12 months.
Leaders among them are some large regional daily newspapers such as the Gold Coast Bulletin, Newcastle Herald and the Albury Border Mail.
The greatest growth in Australian newspaper readership, however, has been in the weekend editions, and primarily in the Sunday papers.
On the editorial side, Australian newspapers are among the freest in the Commonwealth, subject only to the laws of defamation and libel, and an increasing number of equality laws regarding race and gender. Most Australian newspapers observe the rulings of the Australian Press Council which is a self-regulatory adjudicator set up by the industry.
However, this council can be somewhat of a toothless tiger. It has no real legislative power to enforce its rulings. Hence the media possesses great power in this country, but is also at risk of being manipulated by the same pressures of many other countries - power, politics and commercial revenue.
Most metropolitan Australian newspapers belong to one of three major chains (News Ltd, Fairfax or Packer) with limits set by the Federal Government on foreign and cross-media ownership. The trend is towards increasing centralisation of ownership and the government is under tremendous pressure to allow greater foreign investment in the country's newspapers, as well as an abolition of the monopoly laws which prohibit one media company owning TV, newspaper and radio interests in the one market.
There is growth in the regional market with APN and Rural Press, and there have also been some smaller, new and independent suburban newspapers getting readers and showing profits.
Most of the major papers have an online presence to which they are looking for profit. This has included a strong push to get classified advertising on the web, and the offering of full daily and archival text through paid databases. Some major web sites have been downsized until their viability improves.
Only two Australian newspapers, The Australian and The Morning Bulletin, are available for paid, online subscriptions.
