The closure of local newspapers in many of the flood-hit towns in northern New South Wales has left some victims invisible and made residents increasingly reliant on local Facebook groups for information.
Rupert Murdoch’s media empire stopped printing the 160-year-old Northern Star newspaper in Lismore last April, 10 months before the worst flooding in history hit the northern NSW town.
The Star was one of at least 20 News Corp Australia mastheads which were absorbed by capital city mastheads. The Star also lost its own website, becoming a page on the Daily Telegraph website as well as going behind a paywall.
The Tweed Daily News in Tweed Heads was to suffer the same fate, merging with the Tele in May 2020, as did the Byron Shire News and the Ballina Shire Advocate.
When the floods hit Lismore in 2017 the paper had a relatively well-resourced newsroom but now reporters on the digital-only mastheads are working with fewer resources after years of cutbacks to staff. This week, as the devastating floods reached residents of northern NSW and south-east Queensland, locals have increasingly been turning to local Facebook pages as traditional sources of news have dried up.
Lived in Lismore during the 2017 #Lismoreflood and reported for the Northern Star. At dawn today messaging friends there, one said she and her brother were standing on their verandah nearly 3m off the ground, waist high in water waiting for the #SES. Devastated for the community.
— AliAprhys (Paterson) (@Alisurfer) February 28, 2022
While the remaining local News Corp reporters and the ABC on the north coast are covering the deluge well, they can’t be everywhere. The ABC’s regional Lismore bureau has a chief of staff, six reporters and two presenters. When there is a major news event, they are joined by TV and radio reporters from the news division as well.
An independent Northern Rivers newspaper, The Echo, has also been on the ground covering the floods for locals both online and in print.
Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (Jeraa) president, Alex Wake, said the ABC’s coverage of Lismore’s floods was “quite gripping” but nearby towns were not receiving the same attention.
“There has been some extraordinarily good reporting from people on the ground, and some heart-wrenching first person accounts,” Wake told Guardian Australia.
“During the flooding I spoke to someone in Murwillumbah who said that all the focus was on Lismore, and nothing on them. Even their postcode wasn’t being read out as being eligible for relief payments. There are no journalists located there, just local Facebook groups.”
The slow disappearance of local news is being tracked by the Public Interest Journalism Initiative’s Australian Newsroom Mapping Project. Last month the project revealed that 6.3%, or 33 local government areas, had no local print or digital news coverage.
“Facebook and WhatsApp groups can be awesome sources of very local information during emergencies from people who know backroads and ways to get around issues,” Wake said.
“They became absolutely vital during the bushfires and now the floods. But they also aren’t run by professionals and not always updated in real time.
“They can degenerate into unseemly battles where mud-slinging and personal grievances come out. They can also post seriously out-of-date information or fake information, potentially causing bigger problems for authorities.”
In Kingscliff, population 11,000, the local Facebook group has more than 30,000 members and is administrated by journalist of 30 years and former editor of the Tweed Coast Weekly Tania Phillips.
Phillips started Kingscliff Happenings in 2015 to fill the gap left by the Weekly’s closure a year earlier, and “because she just can’t help herself”.
This week it has been a constant hive of activity as Phillips has spent countless hours providing safety information, coordinating volunteers and answering locals’ many questions.
It is the same dedication that saw her named Tweed Shire Council’s Volunteer of the Year in 2020.
At the time, she wrote on LinkedIn that the award was recognition “not so much for me but that we need journalism in small towns and regions, that it needs not to be dictated by outside sources and featuring stories from elsewhere to pad it out, but run by communities for communities. That’s how we survive – real journalists. I’m still working on how I feed my family!!”
But not every town is lucky to have someone as experienced as Phillips at the helm.
Wake says she would not want to be a local Facebook administrator right now.
“Imagine someone posting that they were in a life-and-death situation and you’re just a mum sitting at a computer a suburb away with no power to help. The administrators aren’t trained to cope with truly stressed people.”
The vice president of Jeraa, Peter English, told a regional newspaper parliamentary inquiry this week many stories from the recent floods featured “little value added through on-the-ground reporting”, with so few regional towns covered by journalists.
“People are relying on social media for images, both images that are real and things that might not be real,” English said.
“That may have impacted on the [flood-related] decisions they’ve made in terms of leaving their house or staying.”
“The employment of journalists who are embedded in local communities is essential,” English said.
“Only local reporters can understand how local issues impact on their local areas, not someone trying to report remotely.”
This story was updated on 4 March 2022 to add a reference to the independent Northern Rivers newspaper The Echo.
