(Image: AAP/James Ross)

There’s a changing of the guard in Australia’s media: long-time Melbourne circulation kingpin the Herald Sun has tumbled way down the rankings. Now, it looks like it’s not only runner-up to local competitor The Age, it’s fallen to fourth spot among News Corp’s remaining Australian mastheads.

It’s the second blow to News Corp’s market supremacy, following the ABC’s leap to displace news.com.au at the top of the Nielsen Digital News Content rankings since the 2020 summer of bushfires. 

The Herald Sun — boasting an audited circulation over twice its competitor with 600,000 copies when it first merged back in 1990 — is down more than three-fourths, with 146,026 subscribers across its print and digital products, according to June 30 internal figures reported by the company to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the company’s internal (and still deeply competitive) ladder, this puts Melbourne a few hundred behind Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Brisbane’s Courier-Mail and well behind the company’s claimed 242,000 for The Australian. 

Nine doesn’t release subscriptions numbers for its mastheads, but both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age had over 165,000 paying digital subscribers in the company’s last burst of transparency two years ago. Throw in The Australian Financial Review and Nine says — in its annual report released this week — that digital subscriptions broke the $100 million barrier last financial year.

The “Don’t Read the Herald Sun” campaigners will be eager to claim credit for the masthead’s fall. They’ve been targeting the paper for its critical coverage of Melbourne’s 2020 lockdown. (No doubt that’s why the Daily Telegraph has been more gentle in its reporting of Sydney’s 2021 lockdown.)

More likely the fall is due to the difficulties that all once-were newspaper companies are finding in building a paying audience online for mass-market tabloid journalism. (A sign of the difficulty is that News Corp has not even tried paywalling its tabloids in the more competitive news markets of London or New York.) 

Internal decision-making hasn’t helped. The Herald Sun’s identity has suffered as it’s been reshaped as a franchise of News Corp’s chain of metropolitan tabloids with common look, shared political approach, syndicated columnists and centralised supplements.

For the Herald Sun, this also involved a shift down-market — with a more aggressively populist take — from the middle market position occupied by its predecessors, the morning Sun News-Pictorial and the afternoon Herald.

The Sun News-Pictorial and The Herald were the twin mastheads of Australia’s first large media monopoly, the Herald & Weekly Times, built by first-generation Murdoch Sir Keith in the 1930s and 1940s and held together on his death (to the deep frustration of his son, then 21-year-old Rupert).

After Rupert finally re-took H&WT’s Flinders Street headquarters in 1987, he attempted to resuscitate the two Melbourne papers, resourcing and reinforcing their middle-market positioning, including launching matching Sunday editions. 

Then, in News Corp’s debt-driven near death in the 1990 recession, the company merged its morning and evening papers in Sydney and Melbourne into the Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph-Mirror. (It had already closed its Brisbane afternoon, The Telegraph, in 1988.)

The Tele dropped the “Mirror” from its title in 1996, but the provocative, hard-news tabloid culture of the afternoon paper, with its crime-sport-culture wars mix, won out in the merged entity. Over the following decade, that culture came to dominate the company’s tabloid chain, at least across Melbourne and Brisbane.

By 2003, the company’s papers were sufficiently aligned to urge in chorus support for Australia’s participation in the invasion of Iraq. Since then, each has moved in step as the company has steadily trekked to its current right-wing populist standpoint.

Now, everything old is new again: as the ABC’s Media Watch reported this week, even the Mirror’s page 3 girls are making a comeback across the papers.

With its national market, The Australian remains well-placed to pivot to a digital-only product. Digital subscriptions already dominate its sales and there are few ads to shed from the print edition. About 80% of the company’s Wall Street Journal subscriptions are already digital-only.

For News’ city-based mastheads, it’s more a zero-sum game. Its financial end of year report says it lost about $150 million in annual revenues when it stopped printing regional and suburban titles in April 2020. With costs saved, seems like it ended up a wash.

Looks like it could be the same result for the metropolitan tabloids.