Morry Schwartz shares a birthday with Rupert Murdoch – a fact which, he laughingly agrees, might be enough to disprove astrology. The progressive Melburnian is not a fan of the newspaper mogul.

Yet watching Schwartz fondle the dummy edition of the newspaper he is about to launch, it is clear that he shares one characteristic with his more famous fellow Australian. He loves newspapers – the tactile, manufactured, rustling dead-tree artefact. He loves the type, the paper, the layout and the words. He can’t keep his hands off them.

Schwartz, whose fortune has been made in property development, is the owner of the eponymously named Black Inc., a Melbourne-based liberal independent publisher already significant in Australian intellectual life.

And he’s now about to do something so unusual, so audacious, so seemingly against the tide of the times, that some people are questioning his sanity.

Bucking the rampant trend towards digital, and despite many media commentators declaring the death of print, Schwartz will launch a brand new newspaper on 1 March – the Saturday Paper, headed by a largely untried 25-year-old editor.

The Saturday Paper will have a website but is primarily a print product – an old-fashioned newspaper – at a time when the conventional wisdom is that newsprint will never again make money.

Ask anyone in the newspaper business in the western world and they’ll tell you that print no longer makes sense for mass news media. Up to 80% of the cost of newspapers is in printing and distribution – before a single journalist’s salary is paid. Once that was manageable, and profitable, because the physical artefact of the newspaper bound together two businesses – the provision of news and the carrying of advertising, particularly classifieds. Now those businesses are decoupled and media organisations are scrambling towards digital-first publication, because it is faster but most of all cheaper to get content to the reader.

One of Australia’s other notable independent news media publishers, Eric Beecher, told Schwartz he was crazy to launch a “paper paper”. Beecher, a former newspaper editor himself, is responsible for a number of successful media startups and owns Crikey, Australia’s modestly profitable answer to the Huffington Post. But all have been web-based. The cost structure of print simply doesn’t make sense any more, he says.

Yet Schwartz is embracing print.

He has a rationale, but watching him finger the crisp, white stock on which the Saturday Paper will be printed, it is hard to believe that the core motivation is not sheer love of print. As a bright, young teenager growing up in Melbourne he used to haunt the international newsagency, McGills (now closed), waiting impatiently for the latest New Yorker or Esquire to arrive.

“I have wanted a newspaper for more than 40 years,” the 65-year-old says.

Only now, he says, with the media business in crisis, does he spy the opportunity. First, many of the best Australian journalists have been made redundant from the mainstream publishers and are eager for work. Second, the decline of the big publishers has, he believes, left a hole in the market for the intelligent, committed reader.

“I have thought long and hard about what a newspaper is actually for, its core purpose” he says. “We will ditch anything extraneous.”

There will be no cats up trees, no minor crime and very little sport in the Saturday Paper. Rather, each week about 30,000 words of serious, polished writing on politics and culture will be printed and delivered to newsagents and the homes of subscribers in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.

Australia’s other state capitals, he hopes, will come later.

Schwartz is not new to publishing and this is not the first time people have told him he was crazy for launching a new periodical. Black Inc. publishes mainly non-fiction books and the Quarterly Essay, which comes out as a small book, carrying essays of about 30,000 words by Australia’s leading writers on topics of current concern.

In 2005 he launched the Monthly, a magazine of essays and long-form journalism.

The Black Inc. stable occupies an important position in Australian intellectual and political life. The former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd,wrote essays for the Monthly that helped define him in the public mind. A profile of him in Quarterly Essay by the veteran journalist David Marr (now with Guardian Australia) formed part of the mix that brought him down.

The current prime minister, Tony Abbott, was also the subject of a controversial profile by Marr for Quarterly Essay during his run for power.

Schwartz insists that both the Quarterly Essay and the Monthly make money, although he admits he propped them up from the property development part of his business during the economic downturn of 2007-08. He claims the Saturday Paper will be in the black within 12 months.

The immediate impetus for the Saturday Paper – the thing that turned it from long-held aspiration to immediate intent – was an extraordinary meeting between Schwartz and the young man who became his editor, Erik Jensen, just more than two years ago.

Jensen, then just 23 years old, had begun writing as a precocious teenager, submitting freelance music reviews to the Sydney Morning Herald. He was hired straight from school as part of a short-lived attempt by an editor to shake up the newsroom.

Once there he would listen to the senior reporters going through and critiquing each issue of the paper. “It was a great training in the architecture of print.”

Journalistically, his highlights included a prize-winning story on the exploitation of international students, plus he pushed through a crazy summer idea that had prominent Australians drawing cartoons on the events of the previous year.

Jensen wrote to Schwartz at the beginning of 2012, when the editorship of the Monthly was vacant. It was, says Jensen, a “self-aggrandising” letter, although, blushing slightly, he claims not to remember any of the content. Nevertheless, it was sufficient for Schwartz to organise a meeting in a restaurant in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Kirribilli.

There was no alcohol involved – merely Darjeeling tea and espresso – but they stayed talking newspapers until the restaurant closed and they were thrown out. By then they were thrilled with each other and had agreed to launch a Saturday newspaper.

Jensen moved to Melbourne and one of the city’s starchier inner suburbs – “I am the only person on my street who is not a retired paediatrician” – and spent more than a year labouring in secret on the planned paper.

Schwartz says of Jensen: “He understands newspapers but he isn’t institutionalised by them.”

Jensen, now 25, looks as Schwartz must have done 40 years ago. There is the same unlined face, flyaway hair, boyish complexion and magpie mind. Having missed a university education, Jensen claims to have been educated through talking and reading.

He shares Schwartz’s love of print. He does not own a tablet reader or even a television, and he never plays computer games. He is not on Facebook and has a presence on Twitter but is not very active.

He spends his small amount of spare time visiting art galleries and, when he can afford it, buying art. This is another enthusiasm he shares with Schwartz, whose wife, Anna, is one of Australia’s leading art dealers.

Jensen is anxious that all this will make him sound “more antiquated than I am. I have a great affection for technology and the things it makes possible.” Yet he, too, believes this boiling down of the newspaper form, this rethinking of what newspapers are for, can work.

He has organised a stable of about 20 freelancers – a list heavy with the recently redundant senior Fairfax journalists – to write for him.

The paper is also employing four full-time journalists, including one in Canberra.

The pamphlet pitching the Saturday Paper to advertisers claims it will reach “lighthouse” readers.

“They are 35-49. They are image-conscious and environmentally conscious, brand-aware and socially aware. They are creative with a high disposable income … he has a Moleskine and a Netflix account … she subscribes to Vanity Fair and the New Yorker.”

These people, the pitch says, have been abandoned by the current newspaper market. The pitch was leaked and roundly mocked on social media in Australia.

Australia has the most concentrated newspaper ownership in the world, with Murdoch’s News Corp controlling, depending on how you count, between 60% and 70% of newspaper circulation.

In the late 1980s Australian state capital cities each supported two or three daily newspapers. Since then, the population has grown by more than 5 million but, largely thanks to the Murdoch dominance, most of the cities became single-newspaper monopolies in the 90s, before the impact of the internet.

Murdoch also owns the national daily, the Australian, and most suburban newspapers. His preparedness to use his titles to campaign is one of the givens of Australian politics and public life.

The only other Australian newspaper publisher of any size, Fairfax Media, publishes the Age in Melbourne, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times. Fairfax has suffered most from the movement of classified advertising to the web. Family feuds and management missteps added to the woe. The company has been very seriously wounded.

Hundreds of Australian journalists have been made redundant at News Corporation and Fairfax over the past two years, leading to a hollowing out of quality content. There are few places in the Age and the Herald where one can read more than 1,200 words about anything, and the titles are expected soon to cease print publication from Monday to Friday.

Schwartz is not the only one to see opportunity in this generally dismal picture. In fact, there’s a lot happening in media in Australia at the moment.

The Guardian launched its online Australian edition last year and is ahead of its own projections for readers and revenue. The Daily Mail is preparing to launch an Australian website in partnership with the local ninemsn outlet, and there have been a number of local startups as well, including the New Daily, supported by industry superannuation (pension) funds.

But these are all web-only publications, full of talk about what the new media can do – live blogs, interaction with audience and immediate, bang up to date news.

Schwartz accepts, when pressed, that within five to 10 years “most of us will be reading most things online”. The Saturday Paper will exist in both hard copy and digital form and be available on all platforms.

To make up for the fact that it will be printed on Fridays with a Thursday copy deadline, and thus slightly behind the news, there will be an email sent to subscribers on Saturdays bringing content right up to date.

So why bother with paper at all?

Schwartz believes that, particularly on a weekend, people still enjoy sitting back with coffee and a print product. He quotes figures drawn from book publishing. A paperback costs up to three times more than an ebook, yet 85% of people still prefer to pay more for the print version.

Schwartz claims all the adverts in the launch edition of the Saturday Paper are sold, and at full cost – $8,000 for a full page. He has secured the Tasmanian Tourism Commission as his “launch partner” and within days of announcing the impending launch, more than 2,000 people had signed up for an annual subscription. The cover price will be $3 but there are discounts for those who subscribe early.

The dummy version of the paper is undeniably attractive, printed on high-quality, crisp tabloid stock. It carries a front page picture of Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, taken at the time of Murdoch’s statement that caring for the former News of the World editor was his top priority.

The layout is severe and serious though not a radical departure in its architecture from the broadsheet newspapers of old. The front page will carry a single story, spilling inside and running to about 3,000 words. After that there will be five articles of about 1,200 words each.

Schwartz says: “Two might be about politics. One might be business. One might be a serious interview.”



World news will be summed up on a single page followed by an editorial, letters, a page of opinion columns followed by business news, books, film, food, design, fashion and, in the publication’s only nod to sport, a profile of the week’s most significant sporting identity. All this, including ads, in just 32 pages. Schwartz plans a print run of 80,000.

Schwartz and Jensen exude confidence. In separate interviews they both use the same phrase: “It is easier to start a newspaper than to save one.” They are freed of the legacy costs of big newsrooms trying to do everything. They will do only the things a newspaper is really good for.

Will it work? It’s nice to think this could be the start of something old and new – a refinement of the crafted print news artefact just when it seemed doomed by the post-industrial age.

Meanwhile, Jensen has been warned that the first edition will be “awful”. “They say first editions are always stilted and self-conscious. By edition nine it will be OK,” he says.

Australians won’t be the only ones watching.