Gold Coast’s Blank scales back print magazine to focus efforts online

Gold Coast free music and arts street press magazine Blank has announced changes in response to the tight ad market in the local music sector.

The magazine’s team said its mission remains the same, but it needs to ‘roll with the times’.

“We know we have to adapt to stay relevant, effective and sustainable,” they said.

“We’ve spent the last few months taking a deep look at what is important to us, to our local community, to our readers and partners.

“We’ve asked for your input and looked at what’s required to maintain a contemporary media platform, we’ve listened and we’ll be putting some changes in place.

“Dare we say it, we are announcing that we have ‘pivoted’.”

Blank’s weekly e-edition will become the masthead’s flagship, with latest news and features.

A new website will launch on March 1.

It uses a contemporary platform customised for publishing, which “means that we can continue sharing local stories for free, while also increasing our offerings to advertisers and partners”.

The print version due this month, will not return until April.

When it does, it will return on a bi-monthly schedule, with longer reads and more in-depth features and interviews across music and arts, and continues to be distributed to 400+ locations.

Blank was founded in 2013 by Samantha Morris and Chloe Popa.

“We were on a mission to bust the boring old stereotype that our beloved Gold Coast was a cultural wasteland,” the company said.

“As passionate music and arts consumers with a background in community development, we knew nothing about publishing a magazine.

“But we did know the strength of community-driven action and support.”

Blank set up the Gold Coast Music Awards in 2015, going from 400 paying guests in a marquee on the beach to 21,000 viewers when it was recently forced to go online, and won Magazine of the Year for the last two years at the Gold Coast’s regional media awards, The Maccas.

Through breaking stories like the Foo Fighters’ pop-up show at Burleigh Heads that year, it built up to a 30,000 print readership and an additional 35,000 monthly online visitors.

It expanded from the Gold Coast to include Logan, Brisbane and Northern NSW.

Morris, a social scientist and award-winning environmentalist, used the pandemic lock-down to begin work on a book called Sounds Of Paradise.

It explores the live scene on the Coast in the ‘70s ‘80s and ’90s when bands could play to packed houses every night and each venue thrived by actively working at being a community hub.