Where no news is bad news
Many regional, rural, and remote Australians no longer have regular access to impartial local news.
If you live in regional or remote Australia, you’ve learned to do without things that are not readily available outside of the big cities.
It’s not just luxury items. Things you once took for granted – like the services of a local bank branch or post office, or the corner store where you could stock up on essentials and small treats – no longer exist.
In recent years, across much of the country, the “local rag” has become one of those things.
Regional newspapers have been shutting their doors at an alarming rate, converting to online-only status or disappearing altogether.
It’s not just the headline news – local politics, sport, and crime stories – that is missing, but also relevant advertisements and public notices.
Once the glue that kept the community together, local newspapers have become unstuck amid a global trend towards online delivery of news and (often uninformed) opinion that has made them unprofitable for owners, large or small.
In 2020, NewsCorp closed about 100 regional and suburban titles. Those affected included once-thriving daily titles such as The Queensland Times in Ipswich and Morning Bulletin in Rockhampton which are reduced to online entities.
Many newspapers exist in name only, and few of them have reporters living in the communities they are supposed to serve. Others have simply ceased to be.
This year, Australian Community Media, announced it was closing eight titles and making 35 staff redundant across its network of papers. It follows other newspaper closures in 2023.
In April this year, one of the casualties was the 125-year-old Barrier Truth, the last newspaper in the New South Wale mining town of Broken Hill.
In fact, the Public Interest Journalism Initiative (PIJI) has recorded the closure of 166 news outlets in the past five years.
Its CEO, Anna Draffin, told the ABC, “Sixty per cent of those changes have occurred in regional and rural markets, which is disproportionate to the populations they serve.”
In some markets, private operators have started print newspapers or websites, but most of them are modestly sized and employ few people. They don’t have the resources to “hold power to account”. In fact, some of them are directly funded by Local Government.
With many regional and rural radio stations now carrying programs from distant broadcast hubs, employing no journalists in their home territory, genuinely local news is a thing of the past in many communities.
Some of the recent closures have been blamed on the online media giant Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), which has failed to renew deals brokered by the Federal Government in 2021 where it paid news organisations in compensation for news stories appearing on its platforms.
However, they also reflect the unwillingness of the public to pay for newspapers or online news subscriptions amid competing demands on their discretionary spending.
The government is looking at ways to encourage (or force) the likes of Meta and Google to fund local news, with the PIJI and others supporting a “digital levy”.
However, for the moment, many Australians are doing without a reliable and regular source of information about what’s happening in their backyards.
Related reading: ABC, ABC2, PIJI, Nine News
