Mr Giles said his family had been torn over the decision to close and the impact on communities.
“I understand towns are probably fearful of losing their identity,” he said. “The main people I'm concerned for are the 60-plus seniors who love their paper.”
Mr Giles said among the body blows to local papers was the leakage of revenue to social media. “I’ve been trying to tell local businesses that[Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg is taking all our profits over to America.”
The Public Interest Journalism Initiative tracks newsroom closures,mergers and moves to digital-only publication across Australia.
On Friday,it updated its database reporting a total of 213 “contractions” since January 2019.
While suburban and country papers have struggled with declining revenue for some years,smaller independent and family-owned papers have tended to weather the storm better than the big corporate stables of News Corp and Australian Community Media (ACM).
Among the mid-level groups to keep its doors open through the current crisis is the Star group,which has 21 mastheads in the south-east and west of Melbourne and Geelong.
Group managing director Paul Thomas is a fourth-generation local newspaper publisher. He said the smaller independents had survived because “we live and breathe our communities”.
In its centenary year,the Mildura-basedSunraysia Daily was among the many Victorian papers to suspend printing as the households and businesses locked down against the coronavirus.
Now the Elliott Newspaper Group-owned paper and sister publications are gradually reappearing on the streets of Mildura,Kerang and Swan Hill.
Managing director Ross Lanyon is upbeat and hopeful that all his papers will soon return to full print publication.
Nonetheless,he is anxious about life after the federal government’s JobKeeper support package.
And he is scathing about the lack of support to local papers through the pandemic from big national advertisers like Coles,Woolworths,Bunnings and Officeworks.
Like most others in Australian media,Lanyon is hoping for help from the ACCC’s proposed mandatory media code,which would require digitals like Facebook and Google to compensate news media for use of content.
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While the introduction of a code will come too late for the Yarram and Leongatha papers,it may assist other publications that seek to replace them.
The Sentinel Times,based in the neighbouring Bass Coast Shire - the Giles family owns it as well - will now occupy the Leongatha Star office and circulate in the area.
Former Star reporter Matt Dunn has also launched a digital news publication for South Gippsland, The Paper.
“Honestly I think they (papers) play a pivotal role in the local community,” Mr Dunn toldThe Age. “They tell people that ‘this community matters’.”
Whether such an enterprise is viable in the medium to long term is unclear.
“We’ve got the support of local advertisers,” said Mr Dunn. “But there’s no guarantees.”