In a statement on May 15, News Limited explained why they are introducing an 80 cent per copy surcharge (Monday to Friday) to the delivery of newspapers to newsagents in selected areas of South Australia. This statement included:
We aim to continue to deliver newspapers to all areas of South Australia. However, News Limited has been subsidising a number of loss-making routes for many years. For our West Coast and Kangaroo Island routes, we now lose a significant amount of money on every paper we sell. This has become unsustainable and so in order to continue to deliver our newspapers when and where our consumers want them, we have been obliged to add a freight surcharge.
This statement is from a company that has for decades denied newsagents the right to charge an equitable price for the home delivery of newspapers. Despite irrefutable evidence that many newsagents lose money on home delivery, News has, for decades, denied increases in home delivery fees to a level that make them break even let alone profitable.
News has, through its denial of a fair fee for service, forced newsagents to subsidise the home delivery of its products through subsidisation by small business newsagents.
This is the double standard evident in the latest move in SA. The company says it needs to charge the fee to create for itself a sustainable model. If it’s good for the company why has it not been good enough for newsagents?
Okay, the T2020 sessions last year said the company got it and that it understood newsagents needed to be profitable. But what’s happened? How quickly is it moving? The best way it could show good faith with distribution newsagents would be to deliver an immediate increase in home delivery fees to an equitable level, so newsagents did not have to subsidise this activity from their own resources.
What are distribution newsagents doing about this?
Thanks to agitation from a local MP in SA this issue is gaining more attention in the media – including coverage by the ABC. I’ve just done a radio interview on SA radio about the topic. Hopefully, this attention will get News more fairly engaged with newsagents.
I know from prior contact that News would prefer me to raise the matters canvassed here with them and not here. I think the issues raised here are issues for all newsagents. They go back decades. The only solution is for News to immediately permit newsagents to do what it is doing itself – to charge a fee that reflects the actual cost to the business of providing a service.