A visitor walks into the headquarters of News Corp Australia in Sydney on May 28.
Photo: peter parks/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesSYDNEY— News Corp said it would stop printing more than 100 Australian newspapers by the end of June, closing 36 outright and moving the rest solely to the Internet, in its latest response to media shifts accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.
On Thursday, the New York-based media company said 76 local and regional newspapers in Australia would become online only titles, with 36 closing altogether. News Corp said 375 staff members would be retained across the publications, but wouldn’t confirm how many employees would be made redundant.
News Corp’s 2019 annual report said it had 10,000 employees in Australia across all divisions.
Last month, News Corp suspended printing of many of the affected titles, citing the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on advertising. It said at the time the move was temporary.
“Despite the audiences of News Corp’s digital mastheads growing more than 60% as Australians turned to trusted media sources during the peak of the recent Covid-19 lockdowns, print advertising spending, which contributes the majority of our revenues, has accelerated its decline,” News Corp Australasia Executive Chairman Michael Miller said in a statement.
The majority of the retained employees will be in the northeastern state of Queensland, Mr. Miller said.
The 114-year-old Manly Daily, based in the beachfront Sydney suburb that was represented by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott in parliament until last year, is among the titles going digital only.
News Corp, which owns Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., earlier this month said the coronavirus pandemic had weighed on its latest quarterly result.
As the impact of the pandemic deepened, News Corp laid off hundreds of staffers in Australia and the U.S., including at News Corp headquarters in New York; at the New York Post; and at Move Inc., the operator of realtor.com, a News Corp spokesman said in May.
The company cut jobs at Australian cable TV joint-venture Foxtel, subsequently writing down the value of its stake by $931 million in its third-quarter results.
News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson this month said he would forgo 75% of his cash bonus for the current fiscal year, and Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch will forgo his entire cash bonus. The bonuses of other senior executives will be reduced by at least 20% and the board is reducing its cash compensation, Mr. Thomson said.
However, News Corp said it had experienced strong digital gains at Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones. The Journal has now reached about 3 million total subscribers, a record—more than 2.2 million of which were digital-only subscribers.
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