Given the number of newsagents who have handed back their home delivery runs this past year, newsagents and publishers ought to get together for a summit to discuss the situation. Since the giving back is occurring more in regional NSW and QLD, the summit ought to be located in either area.
Publishers and representative newsagents ought to talk frankly about the problem, listening to each other and pursuing any idea, no matter how crazy, to chase an economically fair home delivery model.
Unless such newsagent / publisher dialogue is engaged, more home delivery runs will be handed back without a plan.
My understanding is that for newsagents this is about money. I was talking with several last week who handed back their runs because they were losing hundreds of dollars a week. They had the financial data to support their claim. They had approached the publisher in question to discuss operational costs and were ignored. No one wins from a head in the sand approach to what is a real problem for regional newsagents.