Treasure your local paper, you never know when you’re going to need it

By Max Stainkamph

May 17, 2023

Connection: Local news is incredibly important for regional communities and should be treasured, writes deputy editor Max Stainkamph. Photo by Rechelle Zammit

Whenever I head somewhere new in Australia and am setting up shop for longer than getting fuel and a sausage roll at the servo, I like to roll into a newsagent or café and pick up the local paper.

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A town with a thriving newspaper feels more alive and connected than one without — especially once you start hitting the size of Benalla or Kyabram.

A regional city — your Bendigos and Warrnambools and Dubbos — with a daily paper feels vibrant, that there’s enough happening to power a paper every day of the week.

These papers are more connected to their communities than your big city papers such as The Age or the Herald Sun, and because of that there’s more community news — generally meaning more good news.

We’ve had a heap of that this week: Monique Preston’s follow-up to a story about a stolen bike resulted in a bike being donated to Heather-Maree Cripps-O’Shea, Notre Dame students and teachers taking part in the World’s Greatest Shave, and amazing photos from the Mothers’ Day Classic at the weekend.

But local media really should shine when the proverbial hits the fan. Shepparton’s seen that twice in the time I’ve been here.

During Shepparton’s August 2021 COVID-19 outbreak, the News was collating every exposure site in the region — often with more accuracy than the boffins at the Department of Health in Melbourne.

During the floods, national journalists would fly in, do a live cross from a flooded doorway in Rochester or Mooroopna and hop downriver.

They were doing their jobs, and doing it well, but they were serving audiences in Melbourne and Sydney, not in regional areas.

The people serving those audiences were local media outlets — the News and the ABC. We were running live blogs, publishing flood projection data when the website went down, and giving up-to-date information for 12 or 14 hours a day for two weeks.

The News has been around in various forms for more than 140 years. Hundreds of other papers around the country have raised the bat at reaching the century mark.

But they need an extraordinary amount of support to stay in business.

Local media is really special.

As I prepare to leave it and head into the wide, woolly world of several months’ travel — and who knows what after that — I’m realising everything I hold dear about it.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Please support it.