Starting in 1962 with a small newspaper group based in Dubbo, 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 former 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.”

Leo Armati made no exceptions for John In his no-nonsense approach to life. When John became difficult, he sacked him, told him to leave home and find another job. In 1961 John Armati got a job on the staff of the Daily Telegraph in Sydney – helped along by a timely telephone call by his father to a former colleague – and started work as shipping roundsman. Six months later his father told him he was dying of lung cancer and said: “I want you to come home. If you don’t want to, I don’t care.” Leo Armati died in March 1962, and at the age of 21 John Armati was managing director of Macquarie Publications. He also married Suzanne Keogh, with whom he was to have daughters Elizabeth, Sally and Katie.

After negotiations, John’s mother transferred her shareholding in the company, who then took over where his father left off.  “From the day my father died, I started to eliminate opposition,” Armati said. “While I was still young I had an ambition to extend the network. I took advantage of central printing.” In 1964 Armati bought the Nyngan Observer, which had been competing with the Nyngan Advocate, and closed the Advocate. He bought the Cobar Age, which had been competing with the Cobar Advocate, and amalgamated the two papers as the Cobar Age.

In 1965, Armati went to Britain on a Thompson Fellowship in newspaper management issued by the Commonwealth Press Union, and his eyes opened wide. “I came back with a clear view that we had to change with the times or the times would change without us,” he said. “We were enmeshed in hot metal and linotype and they were at the end of the line.” In 1966 he bought the rival Dubbo Dispatch. He added the Mudgee Guardian to the Macquarie group, then sold that newspaper for $100,000 to buy a web offset press. On March 31, 1970, the Daily Liberal, as it then was, was produced for the first time on that press. He also persuaded the director of an engineering magazine based in Sydney to use his press. That was the beginning of Armati’s magazine venture.

Armati could be ruthless and he could be charming. To many employees he could be “the best and worst of bosses”. He was not to be crossed. But he set some journalists on their way who went on with it, including Col Allan, who became editor of the New York Post and, more modestly, this writer. In 1973, Armati amalgamated the Nyngan Observer and Warren Advocate to form the Western Mail. In 1974 he bought the Narromine News. He moved Macquarie Publications to a brand new premises and bought a visual display terminals system for $50,000 and on February 23, 1978, the Daily Liberal became the first daily in Australia to use the terminals for its entire editorial input.

The year 1978 also saw tragedy, with the death of Suzanne. In 1980, worried what would happen to the company and to his three young daughters should he “fall under a bus”, Armati decided to offer a shareholding to a major media organisation. He approached John Fairfax Ltd, proving himself to be the equal of any metropolitan media boffins. He sold 20 percent of the company to Fairfax for $1.75 million. Tom Farrell, Fairfax’s assistant general manager, joined the Macquarie Publications board. Armati served terms as president of Regional Dailies of Australia and of the Australia and New Zealand Web Offset Newspapers Association.

In 1983 Armati bought a new magazine printing press and equipment for several million dollars. “We extended and extended and printed millions of magazines a year,” he said. “We not only did printing for Fairfax, we did the printing for Consolidated Press”. In 1987, Fairfax wanted Macquarie Publications to print some of its magazines. He said he lacked the equipment and Fairfax increased its shareholding in his company to 49 percent to give him the funding. Armati said: “Anyone playing in the big printing league without a very strong affiliation with a major publisher is taking dangerous steps indeed. You just can’t survive in the cut and thrust of it otherwise.”

In Dubbo, eyes were agog at what John Armati was doing, especially when he bought Orbells Cordials, which was flagging, put in a good manager and in two years turned it round and sold it for $2 million profit. In 1984 he bought papers at Young, Cowra, Grenfell, Wellington and Canowindra. At Grenfell, he bought the South West News, which his Young Guardian was competing with, and closed the Guardian. In 1990 Armati sold his printing business to Hannanprint, a Sydney eastern suburbs media group, and with it bought back the 49 percent of the company from Fairfax. In October, 1992, he married a journalist, Kate McDowall. In 1993, Armati bought an opposition newspaper, the Young Times, which had sprung up and amalgamated it with the South West News to become the Young Witness. He also bought the Bega newspaper group, the Goulburn Daily, the Nowra News, the Western Newspapers Group which included the Western Advocate and Central Western Daily.. In 1994, he bought the Mudgee Guardian again, for $2 million.

On October 14, 1995, Armati saw that Rural Press Ltd was about to step up its acquisitions program and he decided to sell.  His adult daughters were not interested in taking on the job full-time and he saw from the Fairfax implosion what could happen in media families. He contacted Brian McCarthy, managing director of Rural Press Ltd and in December 1995, sold it Macquarie Publications, with its 64 newspapers for $68.9 million, a far cry from the $3 million valuation of Macquarie Publications in 1980. Perhaps, in the context of the technological revolution, Armati had chosen the right time to sell. “In the 1970s and eighties and to the middle of the nineties there were enormous changes brought about by technology but the technology that produced such a profit ended up destroying them.”

An extremely successful businessman and media proprietor, John Armati also had a philanthropic side. He gave to the Taronga/Western Plains Zoo, The Armati Bequest to the Dubbo Regional Gallery, the Sydney Children’s Hospital and the Art Gallery of NSW Photography Collection. Armati resettled in Hunters Hill, Sydney, and took to investing. He had a new family, Isabella, born in 1993; Alexandra (1995), Siena (1997) and Leo (1999). In 1997, he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for “service to the newspaper industry in rural New South Wales and to the community”. John Armati died at his home in Hunters Hill on June 4, 2017. He is survived by his widow, six daughters and one son, and three grandchildren.