West heads east

Newsmedia might be in a dog fight with global tech players on advertising economics and the next round of negotiations under the Media Bargaining Code but audiences across the country are changing their consumption habits and it’s underpinning a bullish outlook from the architect of a new Perth-based national digital new masthead.

The West Australian’s editorial boss Anthony De Ceglie points to Roy Morgan readership data and research from ThinkNewsBrands showing large swathes of state-based masthead readers are gypsies from outside traditional state borders seeking diverse content. 

The politics and strategic intent of media moguls aside, Anthony De Ceglie says The Nightly has been the top downloaded news app since launching in late February and was on track to hit 100,000 downloads.

“We're confident that we’ll be there within months,” De Ceglie told Mi3. “We've been number one [in news app downloads] for a while now and if that trend continues, we should be there very soon. We had optimistic KPIs in place and we're really smashing them.”

ThinkNewsBrands CEO Vanessa Lyons said although the arrival of another national news masthead might have bewildered some, The Nightly is tapping live readership trends – the biggest being that a large chunk of the 97 per cent of adult Australians which read news each month are neutral on provenance.

“There’s still a misconception that readers are only from within the state the masthead originates,” Lyons said. “That’s not the case across the board. The Nightly is a great testament to that. When people look at total news publishing and the Roy Morgan readership numbers, a lot of the time they’re calling BS on the figures – but it’s because of this out-of-state stronghold that publications have and The West Australian has already generated from, if you like, the East coast that it makes sense.”

Roy Morgan data for the 2023 calendar year shows 58 per cent of West Australian masthead readers are from outside the state. The figure is 56 per cent for South Australia with Victoria and NSW mastheads on 46 per cent and 48 per cent respectively. Queensland mastheads had the lowest figure  – but still stand at 41 per cent of readers coming from outside the state.   

Lyons said when this readership trend data is coupled with ThinkNewsBrands-commissioned research from Accenture Song-acquired research firm Fiftyfive5, which shows evening news consumption is on the rise and newsmedia audiences are increasing and broadening their content consumption, the case for The Nightly launching was “very strong”.

“Vanessa's data is really fascinating,” said De Ceglie. “It gave us all the confidence we needed in terms of ‘we've got an audience outside of the state [WA] that we can use. And then we can hopefully grow it.”

There was also the “mainstream middle” Australia which The Nightly is chasing. “I'm a broken record about a mainstream middle philosophy, that people have The Australian as too right wing, The Guardian as too left wing, the ABC too left wing... There’s an audience actually craving information but doesn't know where to look right now.”

Also going for The Nightly is that it’s a free ad-supported product versus paywalled alternatives. 

“What we're trying to capture is an audience that is sort of priced out of the market – it might be a crude term but that audience isn't probably reading the AFR or The Australian anymore,” he suggested.

Digital print boom

De Ceglie and Lyons say The Nightly is capturing one other major and perhaps surprising development underway at present globally for newsrooms: surging take-up of digital versions of print editions. 

“It's probably to be honest one of the only datasets I've looked at in my time as editor of The West that is growing year on year on year,” admitted De Ceglie. “We are all in the newspaper industry seeing a very big rise in the popularity of our digital newspapers. So when people say they read The West Australian, one in six of them, sometimes one in five, are reading it on their phone but they're reading page one, page three – they love what we call a digital replica of the paper. And it's happening in every newsroom in the world."

Lyons says digital print edition demand has been rising fast – and now demands sharper data.

“The increase is quite significant and we are starting to measure it because it's such a significant way of consumption. Historical data we don't have – because it's gone so quickly. It’s really another example of how news remains at the centre of Australians' content habits. It's second only to social media for the first thing people do when they wake up.”