This is the text of the opening speech from newsXpress managing Director Mark Fletcher delivered at our national member conference in Perth August 24, 2026. 

This speech makes the case for newsagents decoupling from the newsagency channel - a core focus on newsXpress for its members in 2026.

Here is the opening speech in full:

Good morning.

I would like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we gather today, the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation. I pay my respects to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all First Nations people here today.

Thank you for being here. 

I want to start with respect, because you’ve earned it. You have run hard businesses through hard years. You have carried mastheads to the footpath before dawn. That work matters, and it always will.

But I didn’t come here to tell you what you want to hear. I came to tell you what the evidence says, because I owe you that.

So here it is.

All of the research we have done, and we have done a lot of it, points to one conclusion. The traditional newsagency channel has less than ten years left.

Let me say that again, because it is the reason we are all in this room. Less than ten years.Not the businesses in this room, necessarily. Not the people. The channel. The thing we have called a newsagency for over a century is running out of time.

This isn’t our decision. We’re not pushing it. This is what is happening, based on the evidence.

The newsagency channel has less than 10 years left.

I know how that lands. Some of you are angry – before today, right now, or tonight when you think about it. 

Some of you have heard doom before and stopped listening. 

Don’t take my word for anything. 

I am going to walk you through what is happening right now, in 2026, and then I want to make you a proposal. Not a prediction. A proposal. Something we can do today.

What the evidence says

Start with newspapers. This year, Nine stopped printing its papers in Tasmania altogether. Digital only. They said they had no plans to stop printing anywhere else. We have all heard a company say that before. In regional New South Wales, when a single press closed in Tamworth, it did not just end one daily. It took four independent titles down with it, because they all relied on the same press. That is the pattern. Print does not fade gently. It holds, and holds, and then a piece of shared infrastructure fails and a whole cluster goes at once.

The day a capital city daily stops printing, in Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane, that is the the irreparable crack is the dam wall. Every signal this year says that day is now measured in years, not decades.

Something else we do not talk about enough. Almost every newspaper in this country is now printed by one company. News Corp. They print their own papers, they print Nine's, they print for others. For decades that company kept the presses running partly for a reason that has nothing to do with a spreadsheet: Rupert Murdoch built it, and he loves print. Rupert is ninety-four. The succession is settled. Lachlan has control, locked in for the next twenty-five years, and the next generation will make the print decision the way any modern board makes it: on margin, not on sentiment. 

Once the last emotional reason to keep the presses running is gone, once Rupert dies, that call becomes a number on a page. Because one company prints nearly everything, one decision moves the whole channel at once. We should not assume the presses keep running just because they always have.

In Western Australia, Seven West Media holds an absolute monopoly, but as leadership transitions from Kerry Stokes’ legacy focus to the disciplined, digital-first capital strategy of Seven Group Holdings, physical newspapers will be judged purely on balance-sheet economics. 

When aging printing presses reach end-of-life and escalating regional freight costs outpace circulation, corporate management will not replace heavy machinery or subsidise loss-making weekday runs. The morning paper delivery that built our channel's original foot traffic will inevitably wind down to weekend-only editions before transitioning entirely to digital, meaning our businesses cannot rely on the masthead to bring customers through the front door.

Like with Rupert, when Kerry is gone from the picture change could come fast.

Now, magazines. They are in a mess. Are Media has been up for sale for over a year. They can’t find a buyer. The talk now is of breaking it up. A major publisher collapsed early this year and took Cosmopolitan Australia down overnight. The mass weeklies, the ones that brought customers into your shop every week, are falling faster than anything else on the shelf. The titles that are growing are niche and premium. And the biggest "magazines" in the country by readership are now the Coles and Bunnings catalogues, which never touch a newsagency at all.

Then there is the quiet money. Lotteries. The Lottery Corporation, TLC, restructured this year and now openly describes your counter as a place to sign customers up to digital play, not as the place the sale happens. Digital is already close to half of lottery turnover. And here is the number that should worry us most. On their own figures, a digital sale earns them a margin of twenty per cent. A sale through your counter earns them eight. They keep the commission they would otherwise pay you. They have put a price on getting you out of the way: every one per cent of turnover that shifts from your shop to their app is worth about six million dollars a year to them. That is not a company drifting away from retail by accident. That is a company with six million reasons a year to move every customer it can off your counter and onto its phone.

Understand what we actually lose when that happens. The commission was always thin. The real value was the person walking in the door. The lottery counter was the reason someone came in twice a week, and while they were there they bought a card, a pen, a bar of chocolate. When that customer moves to auto-play on an app, we lose the visit, and every high-margin impulse sale that used to ride along with it.

If you think a big partner would never turn on a loyal retail network, look at what happened this month. Tabcorp raised the weekly fees and cut the commissions on its betting terminals in pubs. Country publicans responded by ripping the terminals out, and the hotel associations say more will follow. Same logic, same playbook. When the digital economics favour it, the partner squeezes the counter. There is no reason to believe lottery retailers are exempt. We should assume we are next, and plan accordingly.

Australia Post, another quiet earner for many of you, has a plan on the table to close post offices and reshape the agency network. Their prices went up again in July. That income line is under pressure too.

Here is the part that should stop us cold. The two income streams that were meant to cushion many while print declined, lotteries and postal services, are being pulled away at the same time. The bridge we were going to walk across is being dismantled while we are standing on it.

The comfortable answer is wrong

For years the advice has been: diversify. Add gifts. Add coins. Add clothing. That advice is half right.

Start with the half that is right. Greeting cards. This is the one they cannot easily take from us. Australians buy half a billion dollars of cards a year. We are the third or fourth biggest card-buying country in the world per person according to some sources. And newsagents still sell more of them than anyone else. More than a third of every card bought in this country is bought from us. It is our highest-margin traditional department, it earns more per square metre than almost anything else in the shop, and it has survived the move to digital better than anything else we sell, because a card handed over with a gift is not something an email replaces. When I say the survival plan is real, cards are the proof.

But do not mistake resilient for safe. Our lead in cards is shrinking. Coles and Woolworths play in this space. Fewer people post a card now that stamps cost what they do, so cards ride with gifts instead of going in the mail. And here is the risk that ties everything together. Most cards are bought in our shops by a destination shopper. Too few are bought on impulse. Impulse card purchases are where we can make much more money. Most newsagents continue to run their card department the old way, as a destination and with the card company responsible. Who owns the shop? You, of course!

As that foot traffic dries up, card sales dry up with it. Cards do not need a competitor to shrink. They just need us to stop being the place people walk into. That is why cards cannot save the old shop on their own. They can only anchor a new one.

Stationery, is the category we handle worst. Stationery was once a quarter of our sales. It is falling, and Officeworks keeps getting bigger, cheaper and more convenient. A three and a half billion dollar business that matches any school list price and beats it, tested cheapest year after year. On commodity stationery, the copy paper, the manila folders, the generic pens, we are competing with a well funded specialist on price and range, and we will lose.

Some of this, though, is on us. Look at the benchmark. Traditional newsagents saw stationery go backwards last year. The stores that transformed the category saw it grow. Same product. Opposite result. So this is not simply Officeworks beating us. Too often we beat ourselves. We drop the price to "win" the sale when the person standing at our counter needed that folder right now and was never going to price-shop it. We give away margin the customer was happy to pay for the convenience. Held as a considered, curated line, stationery still grows. Run as a commodity it dies, and we are the ones running it as a commodity.

Now, some of you have decided the answer is convenience. More drinks, more snacks, more quick groceries. Lean into the corner shop trade. I understand why. Look at the UK though, because the UK ran that exact experiment fifteen years ahead of us and we can see how it ends. Their national newspaper sales have fallen by about three quarters since 2010. As the papers went, so did the standalone newsagent. The ones that survived did not survive as newsagents. They became convenience stores under symbol groups, or rebuilt around parcels and bill payments and the lottery, while Tesco Express and Sainsbury's Local moved onto their corners and undercut them on the very drinks and snacks they were pinning their hopes on. Then there is WHSmith. The oldest and biggest newsagent name in Britain, more than two hundred years old. Last year it sold and walked away from every one of its high street shops. Gone. The name survives only in airports and train stations. The country that invented the modern newsagent has effectively retired it. That is the convenience bet, played out to the end. It did not rescue the British newsagent. It absorbed them.

And if you think competing on cheap is hard now, look at what is coming. Last year Canada's Dollarama bought The Reject Shop, our biggest discount chain, for over a quarter of a billion dollars. By 2027 every one of those stores becomes a Dollarama. They have told us plainly what they will do: lower prices, a better looking store, and roughly double the number of shops over the next decade. It is the biggest shake-up in value retail this country has seen in a generation. This is where it touches us. They are bringing more than cheap. They are bringing premium to cheap: a tidy, well merchandised, properly run value store. The low price end of everything we dabble in, wrap, party goods, basic gifts, seasonal lines, confectionery, cheap stationery, is about to be run far better than we run it, at a scale we cannot touch. If your plan is to be the cheap shop on your strip, understand who you are about to be up against. Officeworks on one side. A re-armed Dollarama on the other. Cheap is not a strategy. It is a trap.

So even our survival plan needs honesty. Some of what we were told would save us will not, and some of what could save us we are quietly mishandling. We will never win on price. We can still win on everything price is not: curation, service, the local, the personal.

The proposal

Now the part that really matters.

If the channel has less than ten years, the worst thing we can do is wait to see who is right. Waiting is a decision. It is the decision to be inside the building when the roof comes down.

So here is what I am putting to you. The single best move we can make, not next year, today, is to decouple from the channel. To de-identify as newsagents. To stop defining our businesses by a word that is losing its meaning, and start defining them by what our customers actually value.

Think about what that word now means to a shopper. Almost every story about newsagencies these days is a closing story. The last one in town. Another one gone. Each of those stories is true, but together they teach the public a lesson: that a newsagency is a business on the way out. That association attaches to the sign over your door whether your own shop is thriving or not. When customers believe a format is dying, they stop building their week around it, and the belief becomes self-fulfilling. 

We are carrying the reputational weight of every closure in the country, for free, on our own shopfronts. That alone is a reason to change the name over the door.

Do not take my word for it. Listen to what the public says about us online, in its own words, when it thinks we are not reading. On one forum an Australian asks, plainly, "Are newsagents still a thing?" On another we are called, and I am quoting, "glorified last minute gift shops". People group us with video stores and milk bars. When an American asked what a news agency even was, the top answer had nothing to do with news. It was "where you buy scratchies and lottery tickets". When someone asks whether they should buy a newsagency, the replies are blunt: a "dying, dead business model", you would be "buying a job" with no capital growth. That is not a competitor talking. That is our own customers and our own community telling us what the word already means to them. The nostalgia is real, and it is kind. People remember the posters and the paper rounds fondly. In the same breath they say they have not walked into one in years. Affection is not a sale. And the affection they do feel is for a good local shop, never for the word newsagency. They will value what we become. They have stopped valuing what we are called.

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. 

I am not telling you to close. 

I am not telling you print is worthless tomorrow, or that you should walk away from good income while it lasts. 

Take every dollar the newspapers, the magazines and the lotteries still pay, but take it knowing what it is. It is a declining annuity, not a foundation.

What must change is the sign over the door, your front window, your social media posts, your in-store experience. T

he identity in the customer's mind, and it has to change while we still have the strength and the cash flow to do it well.

De-identifying means becoming the best gift and card destination in your community. The local retailer people think of first, not the newsagent they visit out of habit. It means the categories that actually resist Amazon and Officeworks, cards, gifts, the tactile, the local, the last minute, move to the front of the shop and to the front of your thinking. It means letting go of an identity the market is retiring anyway, and choosing a new one before it is chosen for us.

You can be anything you want. The best coffee shop in town. The best homewares shop. The best music shop. The best toy shop.

What you are is 100% up to you.

You don’t want to be the best newsagent as they is no value in that.

If you want a place to start that’s comfortable, be the best card and gift shop. Moved to the front of a destination gift shop and merchandised with the gifts they now travel with, they stop depending on the newspaper and the lotto ticket for their footfall and start generating their own. The card is not a reason to stay a newsagency. It is one of the best reasons we can stop being one and still thrive.

The businesses that survive the next ten years will not be the ones that held on to the word newsagency the longest. They will be the ones that quietly stopped being one. Early, deliberately, and on their own terms.

Why now

Someone will ask: why now, why not wait until it is clearer?

Because the businesses that move first move from strength. You still have foot traffic. You still have cash flow. You still have the trust of your community and the best position on the main street. Those are exactly the assets you use to reinvent a business, and they are wasting assets. Every year we wait we have less to work with, and the reinvention gets harder.

The newsagents who leave this decision until the dam wall breaks will be trying to rebuild in the middle of the flood, with less money, less traffic and less time. I do not want that for anyone in this room.

Close

So that is the message, and I will not dress it up.

The channel has less than ten years. I did not choose that number to frighten you. It is where the evidence points.

But your business does not have to have less than ten years. The building is coming down. The people inside do not have to come down with it. We have time, not much, but enough, to walk out the front door standing up, carrying the parts of this business that are worth keeping, and to build something that lasts.

Decouple. De-identify. Do it now, while it is still your choice.

That is the work of the next few days, and I am glad we are doing it together.

Thank you.