ACM announces plans to close four regional print centres
Australian Community Media (ACM) has flagged its intention to permanently close four printing centres in Albury, Ballarat, Canberra and Murray Bridge to “ensure the sustainable long-term future of our highly valued mastheads”.
Two of the sites – Canberra and Murray Bridge – were closed temporarily in April, when the business suspended more than 150 non-daily titles and stood down employees working at both those newspapers and the printing facilities.
The Antony Catalano-backed business cited droughts, fires, floods, and COVID-19 as challenges that have led to “considerable investment, restructure and change”.
“ Mumbrella also understands that ACM contacted a number of employees it incorrectly assumed were eligible for the government’s Job Keeper program, asking for those overpayments to be repaid”
Wow….. one for the old Glassdoor review. Can’t imagine there are lines of media reps out the door wanting to work there!
ABC Radio National had a lengthy discussion piece on ACM and localised competitors 08/07/2020 at about 1500hrs. The assertions being put forward were that the ‘Zombie” ACM titles – where the greater proportion of editorial was syndicated pieces v local coverage – were primarily focussed on profit whereas the smaller, competitor non-aggregated/non-syndicated titles were remaining true to being the voice of and reflecting back the local community. Interestingly NewsCorp QLD are trying to retain local print sales by “dual mastheads”, The Courier-Mail and Bundaberg News-Mail for example, across the top of “localised” editions of the state paper with what appears to be a “wrap” containing wider local news, an apparent strategy to “force feed” subscriptions to state titles. Either way leaves a gap in the market for smaller publishers with less overheads, smaller distribution footprints and lower publishing frequencies to exploit IMO.