Sell it or close it, the positions of Fairfax and APN on regional print editions are a contrast in styles.
Not much more than a couple of weeks ago, APN chief Ciaran Davis disclosed plans to sell of the group's Australian regional titles, a disparate string of daily and weekly titles based on what the O'Reilly family bought when News was forced to divest in 1987 (but watch this space).
Now Fairfax Media - whose regional interests down the east coast of Australia dovetail with APN's, and continue south and inland - has the axe out again. Or of course, it may be a scalpel.
Either way, both moves are set to abruptly change the face of regional publishing.
Apart from a "what kept them" decision to turn the Canberra Times into a tabloid, there are community closures, notably of the biweekly Cooma-Monaro Express - which has served its Snowy Mountains patch for 136 years - and the Summit Sun in Jindabyne will disappear, along with their websites.
Queanbeyan's Age is being merged with the city's Chronicle edition, relaunched as a free weekly and its "shopfront office" closed.
Queanbeyan is a contradictory city, just across the river from Canberra and ACT to New South Wales, it had a reputation for delivering to those who lived in the Australian capital, all the things that territory laws prohibited.
Now the cut-down version of its once-proud newspaper will be produced from the Canberra Times office in Fyshwick, where the printing of chunks of Fairfax's metro Sydney Morning Herald are already indicative of rationalisations past.
I'm no fan of the national capital, plonked after federation in the middle of nowhere because politicians from Sydney and Melbourne were unable to agree a more sensible location. But it's somewhere I have seen quite a lot of over years, mostly visiting inlaws and their families.
In his semi-retirement, my eldest brother-in-law moved to a cattle property near Crookwell recently, and I was surprised to see the tiny community mentioned in Fairfax's announcement about staff cuts. Did they really have a presence there... and now what?
In what Fairfax calls "a proposal separate to the Canberra Times announcements", staff from Goulburn, Bowral, Queanbeyan, Yass and Braidwood were "told of a proposal to restructure their respective newspapers and websites" as the NewsNow digital concept rolls on.
Almost incidentally, Fairfax says 12 redundancies are being sought from the editorial and sales teams of the Canberra daily paper, almost a given following the cuts announced for Melbourne and Sydney.
I've just come away from the Publish Asia conference in Manila - and write this balanced on my luggage waiting for the gates to open - and have the positive messages from that still buzzing in my head.
That there is still a future for print "if you know how to work it", and that readers are individuals who value their identity and sense of community. I'm not sure how the residents of Crookwell will respond to the changes being made, but I doubt whether they will take well to being treated as another marketing segment for Canberra-based publishing.
How well Fairfax is doing online and mobile may be academic given the scant mobile data coverage in some of these areas.
Does all this leave a vacuum? You bet, but the sad reality - especially given the opportunities today's technology gives them - is that companies such as Fairfax and APN have lost the flexibility and will to find ways of filling it.