John Armati, entering the newspaper industry towards the end of its golden age, showed in a little over three decades what one man could do with the gifts of flair, judgement and ambition.

Starting in 1962 with a small newspaper group based in Dubbo, in western New South Wales, he built an empire comprising 64 regional newspapers. Embracing the new technology which swarmed in from the 1970s, he transformed his own operations – becoming the first newspaper proprietor in Australia to use visual display terminals - and created a vast magazine printing business. If local newspapers were, in his words, the heart of their communities, he was the heart of the local newspapers. John Armati’s grandfather, Piovico Armati, migrated from Italy, via Dublin, in 1872, settled in Townsville and had a son, Leo, who became a journalist in Townsville in 1903.  Leo, a tough, driven man, went on to enjoy an outstanding career which saw him became editor of the Sydney Sun and overseas managing editor of Associated Newspapers Pty Ltd, based in New York.

He married three times, and from the third marriage, to Patricia (nee O’Conor), John Leo Armati was born in Darlinghurst, Sydney, on July 3, 1940. Leo Armati retired at the age of 67 and decided to buy a regional newspaper. And in 1949 he formed a company, Macquarie Publications Pty Ltd, and bought the then Liberal. John Armati, who had a younger sister, Patricia, was schooled in Dubbo and spent his last years at Cranbrook, a Sydney private school where he excelled at cricket and rugby. In the meantime, Leo Armati expanded his operations launching the Warren Advocate in 1951, the Nyngan Advocate in 1955 and the Cobar Advocate in 1959.

 John finished his schooling with an exceptional pass in the Leaving Certificate. He thought he might like to be a lawyer but in 1959 is father coaxed him back to Dubbo to learn the business, telling him “you’ll waste your life if you go to university”.

“My father gave me a camera and said, ‘Learn how to use it’,” John said years later.

“So I converted the laundry at home into a dark room. My job was to write stories, take the pictures and develop them. At lunchtime we would go home and take the transcripts of tape-recordings of 2CR [ABC Regional radio based in Orange] from my mother and we would go back and put it into the press at 3 o’clock. My father would not pay for a reporter.”