While many spent the recent end-of-year holiday period relaxing and celebrating, Camilla Westerlund spent it coming to terms with the fact a 21-year chapter of her life was ending. 

In January, Westerlund, the founder and managing editor of Business News Australia, announced the publisher entered liquidation. 

Despite efforts to adapt to changes in the industry, she tells PIJI the shift of the “economics of publishing” and lack of access to funding made continued operations unfeasible. 

“I just wish I would have been able to end it the way I wanted it to end. Not this way,” she says. 

Journey from print to the web 

Having worked with Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, then News Corp after moving to Australia, Westerlund found local business stories were being overlooked by the media in favour of large national or international companies.  

So in 2004, she, and a business partner who later left, independently launched Gold Coast Business News magazine to help fill the gap. The following years saw ensuing launches of Brisbane Business News, Brisbane Legal and Queensland Business News, along with the foundation of the annual Australian Young Entrepreneur Awards. 

In 2015, the publications were folded into digital-only Business News Australia. 

Although the new title brought a broader capital city and national outlook, Westerlund says the goal remained the same: to highlight the stories of Australia’s regional innovators and founders outside of the ASX 100, targeting an audience of fellow business owners and entrepreneurs. 

But digital expansion coincided with the shrinking of Westerlund’s team.  

While in print, she says she employed a maximum of about 15 staff, but that number went down as operations were digitalised. 

By the time she announced Business News Australia’s liquidation this year, the team consisted of Westerlund, one full-time journalist, two part-time journalists and an account manager, with contractors brought in as needed. 

Westerlund says circumstances had been “difficult for quite some time” due to changes in the industry’s economics; from becoming reliant on ad revenue, to having that income stream diverted to other platforms, to then trying to convince audiences to pay for online news they were used to reading for free. 

News MAP funding ‘too little, too late’ 

Deals made under the News Media Bargaining Code may have provided relief for some publishers, but others were left out in the cold. 

Although the code incentivised tech giants to make deals with news businesses between 2021 and 2024, the deals were made at the tech giants’ discretion.  

Some small publishers, such as Business News Australia, Croakey Health Media, and Broadsheet Media, alleged this resulted in disparities in funding opportunities in favour of larger news businesses, possibly further entrenching the competitive advantages of the latter. 

Business News Australia was registered as an eligible news business under the code by ACMA, but never received funding from Meta or Google. 

The publisher had received some financial support from organisations such as the Local & Independent News Association (LINA) and ACMA over the years. In December, it was granted $128,700 to be split into annual payments over the next three years under the News Media Assistance Program’s Journalism Assistance Fund. 

But Westerlund says the Journalism Assistance Fund grant was “too little, too late”, and as a small publisher, Business News Australia did not have the resources to constantly lobby digital platforms and the government for more support. 

She feels the proposed News Bargaining Incentive, intended to strengthen the News Media Bargaining Code, will not effect much change as tech giants will still get to choose which news businesses they fund at their own discretion. 

“I think government moves in a very slow pace; I also think that businesses that had [met] the eligibility criteria, they should all have been able to access that funding,” she says. 

“To have small publishers chasing giant international tech platforms, it’s just unrealistic from a resource point of view … Funding should have gone into a pool to have been portioned out by some independent third-party instead. 

“The big players, of course, had the resources to get in and make these deals, and once those deals were done, the platforms … had done as much as they needed to do, and everyone else were just left outside with the door closed … It just became an unfair competitive marketplace.” 

Westerlund is also concerned at the paradox of news publishers going to large businesses and the government with “their hand out” while simultaneously being meant to hold those entities to account. 

“It just can’t be like that, there needs to be someone else in between to keep that independence, [during the lobbying, negotiation and] collection of the money,” she says. 

“It needs to be a third-party organisation for it to be fair and independent.” 

Hope for the future 

With a liquidator currently working to sell Business News Australia’s assets, the future of the publisher is shaky. 

But Westerlund still hopes someone will rescue the title and give it a second chance. 

“For some founders, we were the first organisation to take a deep interest in their stories, and I’m worried that if we disappear, and other media like us do, that coverage disappears as well,” she says. 

“I do believe that Business News Australia, with more resources, can be a successful company … I’m proud of what we built, I’m proud of the journalism that we’ve published, I’m very proud of the Young Entrepreneur Awards and the community.  

“I haven’t completely given up hope that the future for media will be bright and that the challenges will be overcome.” 

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