BoxRec

Of the Australian news publications that I have looked at on the Trove website, my favorite is the Sydney Referee, which had some lengthy reports of important Australian bouts. It is too bad that the Referee went out of business during 1939.

- Chuck Johnston

The Sydney Referee was a weekly paper and ceased publication on 31st August 1939. Their demise was probably due to:

- The daily opposition Sydney papers of that era published 2 editions on Saturdays, with a further one specially country edition printed for the mail trains that night. These contained the results and write-ups of the day's sporting results, especially racing, football and cricket, so the readers got their results quicker instead of waiting for the weekly turn around of the Referee, which specialised more in the activities of popular sportsmen, unlike the daily papers.

- The date is also significant as being just after the start of WW2 and a lot of sporting events and competitions were curtailed, so the publishers knew the "writing was on the wall". During WW2, the pressure on space imposed by wartime newsprint rationing, would have led to the Referee's demise anyway.

The fate of the Sydney Referee back in 1939 is no different from the present's media landscape where print today is dominated by the challenges of digital technology whose radical effects is already apparent.