Ten years. That’s what I think this channel has left.
I’m back from our national conference in Perth. Two and a half terrific days with newsagents, newsXpress members and suppliers to the channel.
Two subjects took up most of the room. Where this channel is heading, and what AI is already doing inside shops.
Where the channel is heading
I’ll put it plainly. I think the newsagency channel, as a channel, disappears inside ten years. It gives me no pleasure to write that.
Australia sits one decision away from the closure of a capital city daily newspaper. Several of them lose money. They’re being held up partly by emotion. News Corp has always loved ink on paper. Kerry Stokes has his attachment to The West Australian. Nobody wants to be the publisher who switches the first one off. That decision is coming anyway.
Print stopped delivering news a long time ago. By the time the paper lands on the counter the story is old. Your customers already know.
Magazines tell the same story in slower motion. Deliveries went from three days a week to two, and now to one. In some places it’s a coin toss whether they turn up at all. Titles we missed used to be couriered out. Not now.
Are Media is publicly up for sale. There’s plenty of talk about a break-up, including Are Direct and possibly XchangeIT. Worth watching closely, because whoever ends up owning the distribution business owns the physical route into our shops.
Stationery keeps drifting to Officeworks. Dollarama buying The Reject Shop means a harder shove from the value end of the market.
And when we make the news, it’s a closure story. Another one bites the dust.
The answer we spent most of our time on
Most of the conference went on what to do about it. We call it decoupling.
Disconnect from being a newsagency. Stop identifying as one. Present as something completely different, ideally something local and yours, rather than another national group’s brand painted over the top of the old shop.
This is more than a cosmetic change. Once you’re not a newsagency, you can sell to people who would never have walked into one, and that’s the whole point.
Three retailers who have already done it spoke to the room. Former newsagents, all of them. They talked about de-identifying, and about how their businesses run now.
AI, live on the big screen
Nobody gave a presentation about AI. We put it on the big screen and worked on real businesses, no script, in front of the room.
One retailer is doing well with clothing and wanted to build it out. In front of everyone we looked at the mistakes being made, then at how to tell a better price and sizing story for the demographic in that town.
Another had already decided to decouple and wanted to know what else to sell. That session produced a series of opportunities needing little capital, and then a four or five page business strategy report.
We spent time on the risks too, on where AI gets things wrong. It’s useful in small business retail, but only with a human checking the work.
What I said to the suppliers in the room
This channel will lose two to three hundred newsagents this year. So think hard about what you pitch.
The smart operators want product that brings more people through the door, and a broader demographic than they have today. Product that panders to the history of the channel has no future.
If you’re not helping retailers reach further than they reach now, you’re worth less to them than the supplier who will. We’re in this together, and the ones who understand that will do well out of the next few years.
I have been called pessimistic before
A newspaper publisher once stood in front of a room and told everyone I was wrong about declining newspaper sales. Magazine publishers objected to me discussing magazine decline at all. Those calls have aged fine.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the traditional Australian newsagency has no future. A business built on lotteries, papers, magazines, stationery and greeting cards, and not much else, is already dead. The owner just doesn’t know it yet.
Now look at a shop leaning into sensory product, Pokémon and other collectibles, and good quality gifts. People walk in for completely different reasons. That business has somewhere to go.
Where we are
newsXpress has 194 members. We’ve never chased being the biggest, and we’re not your average newsagency marketing group. What we have is a group of retailers who want to move, and are moving.
Our focus is a strong back half of 2026, then 2027 and 2028.
Mark Fletcher
mark@newsxpress.com.au
0418 321 338