Privately-owned Australian regional daily the Shepparton News, established 1877,will go twice-weekly next month as the publisher responds to changing readership patterns.

At the same time, the 162-year-old Riverine Herald in Echucha on the river Murray, will make the change from tri-weekly to bi-weekly.

Announcing the changes last week, McPherson Media Group executive chairman Ross McPherson said that most people read the news online. The publication change takes place from July 14.

Daily news updates will be provided on digital platforms through an upgraded mobile app, newsletters and audio bulletins, with McPherson adding that almost 80 per cent of readers were now on mobile devices on some sort or other.

“We need to provide the kind of service they are looking for,” he told ABC radio.

The connection between Echuca and Shepparton dates to 1877, when Thomas Haslam brought a printing press south by bullock team and established the Shepparton News. Wikipedia notes that it took two days to cross the Goulburn River with the plant on MacGuire’s Punt “two by two”. The paper was acquired by Colin McPherson – a partner in the Victorian Farmers Gazette – in 1888, and updated with a Wharfedale press.

Successive family members owned the paper – more upgrades with a new buildings, a twin Cossar press, and in 1968 the beginnings of a Goss Community web-offset line – with Ross and Chris McPherson famously “buying back the farm” from a 1960s partnership with Age publisher David Syme & Co.

Chris McPherson died in 2015 from prostrate cancer, and a new generation now helps lead the company.

Since 2020, McPherson Media has printed in Wodonga on the Victoria/NSW border, having acquired the double-width Goss Uniliner S 4x1 (double-width, single circumference) pressline there – the first of its kind in the world – from Australian Community Media, which had acquired it from Nine/Fairfax. The Wodonga site had been developed as a partnership between the Mott family's Border Mail newspaper and two other independent publishers.

Pictured: The Wodonga press during a visit by Single Width Users Group members in 2009 (picture GXpress)