Access granted? Twitter is abuzz with rumours Channel Nine’s A Current Affair team has been spotted on Nauru — you know, the place the government desperately wants to remain off-limits to journalists, going so far as to pass draconian legislation to silence anyone who might help them find out what’s happening inside Australia’s outsourced detention centres.

Perhaps Chris Kenny finally got his wish. — Dan Wood

Paper house collapsing. It’s no longer a case of if Fairfax Media will shut the weakly selling, loss-making weekday editions of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, but a case of when judging by reports of private briefings the company’s CEO Greg Hywood has conducted with staff this week. Details of the meetings surfaced in The Australian Financial Review this morning. Interestingly, the AFR story of the briefing was on that paper’s website this morning, but not on smh.com.au, nor did it make it into the six-page SMH business section this morning.

In the AFR report:

“[Hywood] said ‘hundreds of millions’ of printing and distribution costs would come out as the company exited Monday-to-Friday print and moved to a 24/7 digital publishing focus. About 65 per cent of those mastheads’ advertising revenue is generated on the weekend.”

The AFR said Hywood “played down” suggestions that Fairfax would be broken up to liberate sharemarket value claimed to be in its Domain property business (which actually dominates weekend advertising in the papers).

“Mr Hywood also noted the ‘inevitability’ of a weekend-only print model for some mastheads, but said quality journalism had a strong future within the group while a lower cost base and fast growing businesses such as Domain would drive shareholder value,” the AFR reported. — Glenn Dyer

RIP democracy. Vanity Fair reports on Donald Trump’s next business venture:

“Trump is indeed considering creating his own media business, built on the audience that has supported him thus far in his bid to become the next president of the United States … He has also discussed the possibility of launching a ‘mini-media conglomerate’ outside of his existing TV-production business, Trump Productions LLC.”

Such a move seems like a miscarriage of objective journalism. But in the years following US independence, both political parties directly backed partisan newspapers to advance their respective agendas. So really, Dear Leader-style “news” is as American as apple pie. — Dan Wood

And in the US … According to America’s Pew Institute, 2015 brought pressures on the US newspaper industry not seen since the recession. And judging by reports from other countries, this was also a shared experience by newspapers in the UK, Germany, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But America has the biggest newspaper industry in the world, and Pew said in its annual State of the News Media report that average weekday newspaper circulation — print and digital combined — fell 7%, the biggest yearly fall since 2010, as the economy rebounded from the GFC. US newspaper Sunday circulation fell 4% last year.

Pew pointed out that the 7% drop in weekday circulations:

“… was due entirely to print circulation, which declined by 9%, while digital circulation increased by 2%. Sunday circulation, meanwhile, fell 4%, following a 3% drop in 2014. As with weekday circulation, the fall in Sunday circulation was due to a decline in print circulation, which fell 5% while digital rose 4%.”

Pew pointed out that 2015’s fall of 7% was more than double the 3% dip in 2015. “In 2015, print circulation makes up 78% of weekday circulation and 86% of all Sunday circulation. Only three newspapers had more average weekday digital circulation than average weekday print circulation in the same period.” The New York Times, Monday to Saturday, was one of those three. — Glenn Dyer

We’re hiring: digital and content marketing. Crikey is hiring, or at least our parent Private Media. We’re looking for two digital smarties: a senior marketing lead to manage editorial and commercial campaigns across Crikey and our sister sites, plus a content partnerships manager to drive commercial campaigns and overall digital strategy on government affairs title The Mandarin. Our HQ is in the Melbourne CBD but we’ve got offices in Sydney and Canberra too. Apply within!

Front page of the day. The Economist throws its weight against a Brexit …

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