The Hunter's newspaper landscape continues to shrink after ACM closed the Cessnock Advertiser, blaming rising cost of newsprint, a lack of government support, and a shift in advertising spending online for the decision.
ACM, one of the largest regional publishers in Australia, has closed the Lakes Mail and Hunter Valley News in recent years and ended the print editions of the Scone Advocate and Muswellbrook Chronicle.
ACM managing director Tony Kendall said in a statement on the Cessnock Advertiser website on Monday that economic pressures continued to weigh heavily on the company's mastheads.
"This decision was not made lightly," he said. "Unfortunately, the rising costs of newsprint and the shift of advertising spending to digital platforms has made the publication unprofitable."
Mr Kendall said affected staff would be redeployed in the company but the impact on the community was regrettable.
"The Advertiser has been serving Cessnock and surrounding towns since 1960, and it has played an important role in telling the story of the area and its people," he said.
"But the distribution model of the free community newspaper is very difficult when the price of newsprint goes up by 80 per cent as it has in recent years."
Cessnock is one of the fastest-growing local government areas in regional NSW and is the gateway to the Hunter Valley vineyards.
ACM and industry group Country Press Australia have urged the federal government to direct more government spending to regional papers.
"The local newspapers serving 36% of the population get next to 0% of the government's advertising spend ... regional Australia deserves better," the groups said in a joint letter published in September and delivered directly to the Parliament House office of every federal MP and Senator.
State Labor committed this year to steering an additional $3 million of advertising to regional papers if it was elected, but Mr Kendall said papers like The Advertiser were yet to see benefits flow from the promise.
"We've been saying for some time now that regional newspapers don't need hand-outs because grants aren't going to help sustain your local paper. Advertising is what is going to sustain your local paper," he said.
"This provides some revenue certainty, but we also think advertising in the most trusted news medium in regional Australia is not a bad thing for governments to be doing."
Mr Kendall said regional cities and towns deserved trusted local news sources like The Advertiser and Cessnock voters "deserve to see a fair share of their hard-earned tax dollars flowing back to their community and the local paper they trust to keep them informed and connected".
ACM is also the publisher of the Newcastle Herald, one of 14 daily newspapers on which the company is relying increasingly for revenue.
"The Herald very much remains the Voice of the Hunter and we are immensely proud of its news-breaking and agenda-setting journalism," Mr Kendall said.
"We'd ask the Cessnock community to please support its trusted coverage of news that keeps the Hunter region strong."
Real estate entrepreneur Antony Catalano and billionaire businessman Alex Waislitz bought more than 160 former Fairfax newspapers, including the Herald, Canberra Times and Illawarra Mercury, from Nine Entertainment for an estimated $115 million to form ACM in 2019.
The new owners have sold off or closed a host of smaller regional titles since the COVID-19 pandemic started disrupting the business the following year.
It has also reduced the Maitland Mercury to a weekly print edition and late last year threatened to close the Port Stephens Examiner unless the state government agreed to spend more on regional advertising.
