Those news delivery trucks heading up and down the highway may soon be carrying more than just papers, following a deal with a distribution company.

News Corp Australia this week announced “its intention to buy” 20 per cent share in National Distribution Services, with which it plans to create a new delivery business.

NDS has already registered the Reach Plus trading name News plans to use.

Publishing operations director Michael Newell said in the publisher’s broadsheet The Australian that News had already stopped deliveries to some regional locations because lack of volume made it too expensive.

Subject to approval from competition regulator the ACCC, the partners plan to launch the service on July 1.

Reach Plus will streamline large-scale deliveries into country towns across Australia, “securing the ‘last mile’ of our supply chain, ensuring that our physical newspapers remain a sustainable and vital part of Australian life,” he said.

Brisbane-based Newell – who joined News Corp with its 2016 acquisition of APN News & Media – said any spare capacity in newspaper trucks would be sold to other businesses.

“What we’re trying to do is find ways to put more things on the vehicles to offset the overall cost, and hopefully we’ll be able to generate enough new work that we can go back into places we’ve stopped going.”

News Corp has become Australia’s dominant newspaper printer, producing not only its own mastheads, but those of Nine Entertainment and some Australian Community Media and Today titles. Principal production sites are in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, in Queensland in Yandina and Townsville, Hobart (Tasmania) and Darwin (Northern Territory).

Last year News renewed its contract to print Nine’s Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Australian Financial Review for a further five years. It is also reported to have signed a new ten-year lease over its premises in Yandina in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.

However, printing of The Age and the Australian Financial Review has now ceased altogether, Nine having had to move production from Launceston to Hobart when ACM closed its print centre there. Nine cited rising production costs and a growing digital audience, with a spokesman saying “more than 90 per cent of subscribers” in Tasmania now accessed news digitally.

The move follows the AFR’s print withdrawal from Western Australia following the 2023 closure of Ive Group’s former Fairfax print centre in Mandurah, and a disagreement with Seven West over printing prices.

Pictured: News’ Yandina print site (photo GXpress.net)