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Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is preparing to launch a youth-focused, online-only offshoot of its flagship broadsheet The Australian in a bid to attract younger readers to the masthead.
Rupert Murdoch’s national newspaper The Australian is moving into youth publishing.Credit:Len Lamb
Known as ‘The Oz’, the soon-to-be launched outlet will be led by the masthead’s social media editor, Elyse Popplewell, who has spent more than two years building out The Australian’s presence on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn.
The Oz team will also include The Sydney Morning Herald’s former life and style editor, Jenna Clarke, who will work across The Oz and The Australian.
The imminent expansion comes as many quality newspapers, which have in recent years adopted hard paywalls, grapple with ways to attract younger readers.
Australia’s 2021 Digital News Report said more than 50 per cent of people in the Gen Y and Gen Z generations are “light” news consumers, figures which are well below older generations. The report also said 54 per cent of Gen Z labelled social media their main source of news.
Some digital media companies have attempted to cover Australian politics and other hard news topics for younger audiences. But international outlets such as BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post no longer employ journalists in Australia.
There are also digital media companies that run exclusively on social media. One of those is The Daily Aus, an Instagram media outlet that dissects hard news events to people who largely read no other form of news. Its posts use a large font size, simple language and pictures to make it easy to consume and share with friends.
Multiple sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plans aren’t finalised, said The Oz is expected to be a pay-walled product, but there is a possibility it will give access to some content for free when it launches (the current plan is to launch at the end of March, though that date may change). The Australian, which introduced a paywall in 2011, does not allow non-subscribers free access its content. It is a strategy that has since been implemented across major newspapers across the world.
A dedicated podcast is also part of the plan, the sources said. The Australian’s editor-in-chief Christopher Dore declined to comment.