Anthony DeCeglie on the Nightly: 'There's a demand for quality journalism that's free, mainstream middle'

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade. Today we talk to Anthony DeCeglie, the editor-in-chief of Seven West Media’s Perth-based news masthead operations including The West Australian, Perth Now and the group’s newest text-led news brand - The Nightly.‘There’s nothing more impactful than a front page’: Anthony DeCeglie on why The Nightly is edition-ledToday’s conversation features two players from Australia’s news landscape.At the end of February, the country got a new national news brand - The Nightly, published from the same stable as The West Australian. Although a digital-only product which covers breaking news, The Nightly is centred around an evening edition, complete with impactful front page, and the ability for advertisers to buy full page ads inside.The man who has led the project is Anthony DeCeglie, who also heads up The West Australian. In today’s conversation, he explains the rationale behind the launch, rebuts the theory that the main reason was to deliver greater influence, and reveals that the advertising-supported project has been profitable from the start.Also participating the conversation with Unmade’s Tim Burrowes is Vanessa Lyons, CEO of industry body ThinkNewsBrands. According to Lyons, The Nightly taps into a readership trend of a spike in evening reading.She also points to a wider trend in all the major state-based news mastheads of significant readership from other parts of the country. According to the Roy Morgan Readership data, West Australia’s news mastheads have more readership in the east than the west, with 2.2m readers to 1.6m.“There is a significant amount of out-of-state readership”, says Lyons. “They have the highest out of state readership over any state or territory which is pretty significant. If you’ve got a strong eastern seaboard following, it makes sense.”The conversation also checks in on the progress of Streamer, the community sport video streaming platform launched out of The West Australian last year.And DeCeglie pushes back on reporting in rival title The Australian Financial Review suggesting the launch of The Nightly has sparked internal tensions within Seven West Media.Production on today’s podcast was by the ever-helpful Abe’s Audio. The ringing phone in one of the questions was entirely my fault.Time to leave you to your Thursday. We’ll be back tomorrow with a focus on the retail media landscape.Toodlepip…Tim BurrowesPublisher - [email protected] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unmade.substack.com