News Corp's local papers bleed subscribers, compounding revenue struggles
The Herald Sun, The Courier Mail in Brisbane and Adelaide's The Advertiser all suffered paid-subscriber losses, while national masthead The Australian was the only paper to grow in successive years, according to new overnight corporate filings.
The local numbers contrast with the company's decision to launch a new state-based print product based in Los Angeles, The California Post, which will be led by the Herald Sun 's weekend editor, Nick Papps, despite helping oversee subscriber losses across the year.
The Herald Sun remains News Corp's largest state-based tabloid, despite losing 1 per cent of its customers, dropping to 153,983 paying subscribers across both print and digital.
It was joined by The Advertiser, which lost 2 per cent of its customers, dropping to 106,969, and The Courier Mail, which also lost 1 per cent, dropping to 144,044, despite being the only print publication in Brisbane.
The Australian continues to grow, now with 335,903 subscribers, up 4 per cent, while Sydney-based The Daily Telegraph was the only major city tabloid to grow its subscriber base after losses last year, jumping nearly 5 per cent to 151,336. However, it still has fewer paying subscribers compared with two years ago.
News Corp posted a strong financial result on Wednesday, impressing shareholders with record profits despite continuing negative revenue trends in Australia. Revenue from circulation, subscriptions and advertising suffered, part of a long-term trend.
News Corp will hope its cost-cutting measures in 2024 has improved its local financial fitness, with its 2024 finances, posted in late last year to Australia's corporate regulator showing a net loss of $43.3 million after tax, compared with a $17.9 million profit the year prior.
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Sam Hawley: It's an idea Elon Musk hasn't fully embraced just yet, and he doesn't want Teslas used for it. Some electric vehicles are already being plugged in to provide power to homes and even to the grid. Today, energy reporter, Dan Mercer, on the revolutionary technology and why the world's richest man is wary of it. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Dan, this idea that electric cars could power our homes is fascinating, really. So I just want you to explain this for us. And to do that, it's good to talk about a guy called Richard Chapman. He is a petrol head, or we call them rev heads, I think. Dan Mercer: Yeah, indeed. He's an English fella, Sam, and he lives in the port city of Fremantle in Perth in Western Australia. Richard Chapman, car enthusiast: Absolutely adored cars ever since I knew what a car was. Dan Mercer: He says he's always loved his muscle cars, but he's also not the discriminating sort. He loves electric vehicles too. Sam Hawley: Yeah, he's the sort of, in my head, he's the sort of person you don't associate with an electric car. Dan Mercer: No, but you know, it's kind of funny. He loves Top Gear, he loves the smell of petrol, he loves a car that makes a lot of noise. He equally loves these things, which are sort of the polar opposite of cars. The opposite of that in many ways. Richard Chapman, car enthusiast: I never thought I'd quite embrace the EV thing so fully, but for me now, and I've still got a three litre V6 sports car but I look at that as like a horse. Like it's expensive, it's loud, it's very inefficient. It actually doesn't go as quick as the EVs, but that's more about sort of the emotion and real passion of something like a horse. Dan Mercer: There's this popular conception that tends to have these two things in completely separate camps. But Richard really does swear by his EVs. He reckons they're just phenomenal to drive and the technology behind them is mind blowing. Yeah, the measure of it in his case is that he has three EVs, Sam. Sam Hawley: It sounds like a lot. All right, and he is, Dan, really well set up for charging all of these EVs that he has. Dan Mercer: He is. He's one of these guys who just loves getting things to work really well, taking them apart and building them back together again so he understands them intimately. So in his instance, he's got a lot of solar on his roof. He's got batteries in his house and he's got tariffs that are really cheap in the middle of the day when there's heaps of renewable energy sloshing around the grid. What he does is he tries to charge the cars during those daylight hours. That way the energy that's powering the cars is dirt cheap. Either it's coming straight from his solar panels or it's coming from the grid during a time when prices are at their lowest. And for the most part, it seems to work. Sam Hawley: Yeah, okay. So he also likes to have his cars basically fully charged most of the time. And while they're just sitting there at night and not being used, he would actually like to use some of their power, right? But not for driving around. Dan Mercer: Not for driving, no. He's got a couple of batteries fixed to the wall of his garage as flagged. He can get by most of the time fairly cheaply. There are occasions though when his solar and those batteries aren't enough. And that tends to be in winter and the shoulder seasons when there might not be that much sun around but his demand for power might be quite high. And there are times too in summer when he reckons he just needs that much power because it's so hot and he has to run the air conditioning around the clock and the batteries aren't enough. At those times, he currently has to buy the power from the grid in the evening when prices unfortunately cost a fortune. Needless to say, that's something he's pretty keen to avoid. And he says the answer to those problems should be right there in front of him in the form of the energy that's stored in his EV's batteries. Richard Chapman, car enthusiast: When the main house batteries have run out, I wanna then be able to draw off of the electric vehicles that I've got hundreds of kilowatt hours sitting there and I wanna be able to use that back again. Sam Hawley: Wow, yeah. So using the car's batteries to power his home. And the EV batteries, they're massive, aren't they? So that is a possibility, isn't it? Dan Mercer: They are huge batteries, yeah. I mean, an average household battery is probably around 10 kilowatt hours of storage. A big EV battery can be 80 kilowatt hours or more. And as Richard notes, if you've got a car with a battery with that much power, even thereabouts, that's enough to run a typical household for days at a time. Richard Chapman, car enthusiast: You could run your house for, God, completely off grid for probably a fortnight on that. Sam Hawley: Wow, okay. So it sounds like a great idea. Why doesn't he just do it? Dan Mercer: Basically because his carmaker won't let him. There are other reasons, but the biggest one is that his carmaker won't let him. Richard has a couple of Teslas and Tesla just doesn't, at this stage in Australia at least, support customers using their cars to run their homes. It's not the only business that's going on. There's a big EV brand that's cool on the idea, but it's arguably the biggest name. Richard told me, there are ways he can hook his car slash cars up to his house. The problem is those ways aren't legally kosher. So if you do it, you void the warranty on your car. And if your EV costs $100,000, say, you're just not gonna do it. Sam Hawley: So why, just explain further then, Dan, why it is that Tesla doesn't want it to happen. Dan Mercer: Yeah, look, to be fair to Tesla, there are legitimate reasons why the company might be reticent. For starters, it's a fledgling technology we're talking about. It seems to lack a broadly accepted industry standard. Then there's just the physical reality of it. If you're discharging and charging your EV battery a whole lot more than you would normally do, a lot more because you're using it as a quasi household system, then that has an effect on the longevity of the battery. Most batteries, including the ones typically used in EVs, degrade over time as they're used more and more. And so Tesla doesn't want to be held liable for a warranty if the battery is being cycled in a way that wasn't envisaged, that wasn't tested, that wasn't guaranteed by their own standards. There are suspicions though that maybe Tesla has ulterior motives. The company famously sells household batteries and consumers are much less likely to buy those household batteries if their car battery can do the same thing. The thing is, Sam, this argy-bargy has big implications because some people reckon the technology in question could change the energy system completely. It has a few different names, including bidirectional charging, two-way charging, reverse charging, vehicle to grid and others. Ultimately though, it boils down to a simple proposition, not only charging EVs so they can be driven around, but discharging them too. Sam Hawley: All right, well then let's now, Dan, step through how this actually works because there are three main ways of using a car's battery for power, for powering a home, for instance. So let's run through those. Dan Mercer: Yeah, indeed. Well, and apologies for this next bit because it's all quite jargony. Sam Hawley: All right, we've been warned. Go forth. Dan Mercer: The first is what's called vehicle to load or V2L. And that's simply using your car to run things like tools from a power outlet in the car. At a high level, there's so-called vehicle to home or V2H, which is where you use the battery in your EV to run your house. That's what Richard wants to do. And there's evidence some people are already doing it in Australia, for example, during blackouts. And then there's the biggest one of all, which is called vehicle to grid. As the name suggests, it involves selling electricity from your car's battery to the grid at times when it's needed. A flip side to that is not only just selling it, but you can also store electricity in the car's battery, take it from the grid when there's too much supply, which of course is a problem that we're dealing with these days with so much solar around. Vehicle to home and vehicle to grid, especially are not straightforward. And there's a mix of hardware, software and regulatory permissions that are required to turn the energy that's stored in the car battery into something that can be put into the grid and used safely. So there's a whole bunch of technical challenges involved. Sam Hawley: But if you could transfer the power from your EV to the grid, you could make money from that, right? Dan Mercer: You could. How much? There's a big question mark. Presumably there'd need to be strong financial incentives for you to wanna do it. But ultimately this is kind of about trying to entice you to provide energy from your EV to the system when the system needs it. You might reasonably wonder what possible difference a few EVs could make to something as big as the grid, right? But eventually there will be millions of EVs on our roads and collectively they'll represent an enormous amount of storage that sits idle most of the time. Being able to tap into that in an efficient way could drastically reduce our need to generate electricity from sources like coal and like gas. Sam Hawley: Okay, and there are some people that think this could be revolutionary. Dan Mercer: In theory, yes. I spoke to Ross De Rango who used to run energy and infrastructure at the Electric Vehicle Council, which is an industry body. He now works as a consultant and Ross says there's, in his words, a big golden pot at the end of the rainbow if Australia can make bidirectional charging work. Ross De Rango, EV industry consultant: So the opportunity is the earlier closure of coal and gas-fired power stations. The opportunity is lower cost electricity for all consumers in the country. The risk of absence of support for this technology is that those benefits will take many more years to materialise. Sam Hawley: All right, well, Dan, this does all sound pretty amazing actually, but as you mentioned, there are car companies like Tesla that aren't playing ball at the moment. I think a few are, but there's a few roadblocks here. Dan Mercer: I'll be fascinated to see what happens with two-way charging, Sam. Ross De Rango, the ex-EV Council guy, says governments will need to take the reins and corral automakers in particular into a position of support for this. Ditto for the poles and wires companies that control the grid. Ross De Rango, EV industry consultant: So the automakers hold one set of keys, the energy networks hold the other set of keys. In order for vehicle to grid to occur, both of those parties need to put the key in the ignition and turn it on. Dan Mercer: We spoke to Federal Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, for this story, and he's certainly keen to see it happen. He was very keen to stress that he would like to see car makers get on board. Chris Bowen, Energy minister: Well, I certainly encourage car manufacturers to get with the programme. Consumers will want this, and I think consumers will march with their feet. If every car in Australia was electric and people were using it to charge their house or their grid, that's equivalent to five snowy hydro schemes, for example. And it's great for consumers because, as I said, it puts consumers more in charge of their resources. The battery in your driveway will, on average, usually be about five times more powerful than the battery in your garage. Sam Hawley: So, Dan, how long do you think it will take before our cars are powering our homes? Dan Mercer: This is a classic example of an idea where there's a disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. You know, I've been reporting on energy for a while now, and it always amazes me how often I hear people say bidirectional charging is going to solve so many of our problems, and it's a no-brainer, so it's just going to happen, wait and see. But that's a big assumption, and there are big assumptions right through energy and the transition we're going through right now. Of course, there are many seemingly great ideas that never come to fruition in energy and elsewhere because they get mugged by reality. If you listen to the likes of Ross De Rango and Chris Bowen, this is a revolution that's coming. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen. It's just a matter of when. Others aren't convinced. They're just not convinced. Apart from the vested interests of some of these car makers, it's hard to imagine electricity retailers, for example, jumping out of their skins at the idea. Why would they want to pave the way for anything that involves them selling less electricity to you? While those poles and wires companies, they move notoriously slowly. They're heavily regulated. They are heavily bureaucratic. One way or another, there is a tidal wave of new storage that's coming to Australia as battery prices fall and as we get deeper into this transition. And a lot of that is going to be in the cars we drive, for sure. If we can figure out a way of tapping into that fairly and efficiently, then, in theory, everybody wins. Just don't know if you should hold your breath waiting for it, though. Sam Hawley: Dan Mercer is the ABC's energy reporter. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead and Sam Dunn. Audio production by Cinnamon Nippard. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.
