4 cents to 5 dollars in 60 years: As cover prices go up, newsprint’s time is running out
Sixty years to the day that James Manning was selling newspapers in cents for the first time, the price of the Newscorp Sunday papers hit $5. Here the industry veteran opines that publishers are not doing enough to sell PDF versions of papers.
Yesterday's news: Publishers are now passing on print cost increases directly to readers
The price of Australia’s biggest-selling newspapers jumped 11% on Sunday.
The dwindling number of customers who still present themselves to a newsagent, supermarket or petrol station on a Sunday morning for their copies of The Sunday Telegraph or the Sunday Herald Sun didn’t get any change back from a $5 note after the price jumped 50c from $4.50.
The price would have broken $5 for many if buying from an outlet that puts a surcharge on credit card purchases. (I should point out too in Sydney the News Corp product is still cheaper than Nine Publishing’s The Sun-Herald which broke the $5 note barrier some time ago, with a cover price of $5.20.)
Publishers need to keep a printed product going for as long as they can to keep the ad revenue bubbling along. But they are not prepared to absorb the cost base increases they suffer each year, so they try and recoup those costs from cover price rises — which some of the rusted-on print audience will pay.
Circulation boom to bust
A Melbourne Herald front page before the switch to a decimal currency (note the cover price “3d.”, or 3 pence, and the sales figure 495,658 – click to get a closer view)
As a newspaper boy in country Victoria in the 1960s, I was on duty on the day decimal currency was introduced in Australia. That was exactly 60 years ago to the day that newspaper prices went up on Sunday.
On that day in 1966, people buying the Melbourne Herald, a then-thriving Victorian evening newspaper, had to adjust as the price changed from 4 pence to 4 cents. I was one of three paperboys on the evening run, each stationed outside one of the town’s three pubs. We had to act as currency converters for some who found it all too hard! The good news was many customers would flick you a 5c coin and let you keep the change.
The Melbourne Herald is long gone, but its name lives on as part of News Corp’s Herald Sun Victorian flagship.
The Herald as an evening paper had sales peaking above 500,000 in its heyday. The Sunday paper peaked at around 600,000 two decades ago. Sales would be considerably less these days, but unless you are a major advertiser wanting the sales figures, it’s a number not shared publicly. Agency estimates from feedback via clients are that the Sunday Herald Sun circulation might not be much above 125,000.
News Corp has transitioned its print business to digital over the past couple of decades. It has gone from zero digital subscribers to digital revenues accounting for 43% of News Corp global news media segment revenues in the last quarter of calendar 2025, compared to 39% in the prior year, representing 41% of the combined revenues of the newspaper mastheads.
The company has been successful in transitioning readers to digital, but the growth is slowing. The company reported earlier this month that the latest subscriber figures for Australia are 999,000 for all news mastheads as at December 31, 2025, up from 979,000 12 months prior.
Newsagents might get there first
The death of print might be taken out of the publisher’s hands. Printed magazine publishers are facing a similar crunch time too, but that’s a column for another day.
Some newsagents are opting out of the newspaper business and others are close to that decision. It feels like a big call for a retail sector still branded as “news” agents. But one that makes sense when you see the retail data.
Newsagent, blogger and retail marketing leader Mark Fletcher has long tracked the decline of the printed product. As recently as November 2025 he detailed the challenges facing the retailers with a blog headed “At what point are newspapers not profitable”.
Impact of higher prices on advertisers
Last of the believers: Harvey Norman appears on numerous front pages (Mumbrella)
When I speak to agency people about the future of print, they tell me there are only a small number of clients keeping the presses turning.
Those advertisers and their estimated annual investments with News Corp are Harvey Norman ($60m), Chemist Warehouse ($20m) and then JB Hi-Fi, Coles and Woolworths all spending less than $20m annually.
“If Gerry Harvey and Katie Page pulled the plug on print it could be game over,” one buyer told me.
Newspapers have flirted with other ad options, seemingly unsuccessfully. The most recent of those is perhaps shoppable video which doesn’t seem to have worked, according to agency sources. The publishers found themselves up against everybody from Amazon to Temu, and also their print clients’ own online retail operations.
The industry has tried to convert the big spenders to online, but the amounts are just not transferable to a digital product. Or not the one digital product the newspapers seem to be favouring.
I believe that if publishers got serious about their digital replica products the road map could look quite different. At the moment those products are tucked away with just one tab on a crowded home page.
Advocates of the digital version of the printed product enjoy the curation a newspaper offers first thing every day without the hassles and cost associated with securing a printed copy.
For advertisers too, the digital newspaper delivers all the print advertising to a wider digital audience. Just why they are not promoted and instead tucked away is hard to fathom.
Full page advertising still works and publishers should be safeguarding that revenue stream in every way possible.
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So how’s that going for the Nightly, James? They market themselves as having a digital replica of a printed paper. Yesterday they had three paid ads and one house ad in a 38-page digital edition.
I give it to 2030 and News Corp will pull the pin on printing papers in Australia. Factory leases in Melbourne and contracts with Channel 9 newspapers will be up by then. Print figures decline by approximately 10% per year. 150,000 Sun Tele per week now. 80,000 week day Tele. Won’t be much left soon.