Most days, Peter Holmes can be found scouring the streets of Orange to fill the pages of the smallest newspaper in Australia.
“I spend a lot of time driving around town getting yarns,” he says from the city of 42,000 in the Central West of New South Wales.
“I look for developments, things closing and opening, scaffolding, vandalism, road works — there’s always something if you keep a keen enough eye out.”
Holmes is the reporter, sub-editor, photographer, fundraiser, marketing manager and graphic designer — in other words, the only employee — at The Orange News Examiner, an online newspaper he launched in January.
Holmes’ childhood dream was to work at the newspaper his family divvied up at the breakfast table each morning — The Sydney Morning Herald. He got his wish when he became a cadet journalist in 1988, and despite working for most of Australia’s major urban publishers since, he says there are rewarding stories to be told in the regions.
“[After the SMH] I got to work for the Sun-Herald, then the Sunday Telegraph — which was the biggest selling newspaper — then I got to work at news.com.au, then at BuzzFeed News, which was at the vanguard of modern digital journalism. But for me, it isn’t like I’ve spent 30-plus years to get to the bottom. For me a good yarn is a good yarn is a good yarn is a good yarn,” he says.
In recent weeks he has written about the rigmarole involved for the local cinema to nab a copy of Grease in the wake of Olivia Newton-John’s death; the drop in the number of local dog attacks; Orange City Council cutting a deal with a Spanish energy giant for renewables; a burst of hail; and KFC running out of potato and gravy.
Then there was a missing woman; a new townhouse and apartment development; the chronic shortage of self-storage in the city; a man who was robbed of his lethal hunting bows and arrows as he slept on his lounge; and petrol in Orange being 27 cents more per litre than down the road in Bathurst.
Last week he wrote a story about the local council proposing to beautify a CBD street with trees and pods for seating. After a handful of phone calls to local businesses, it became clear the idea wasn’t going to fly.
“They were saying it is going to be dangerous, Orange is too cold for half the year and no one will sit in them; the parking spaces were going to drop by a third,” he says. “I called Salvo down at Alfio’s pizza and he said, ‘Mate, this is a complete shitshow.’ He backtracked slightly to say it wasn’t a ‘complete’ shitshow, but I knew I had my lede.”
Holmes works the phones, chats to locals, trawls through social media posts, property listings and council papers, and deals with politicians.
On Saturday he turned up at an auction for a dilapidated old house. Talking to neighbours and the deceased property owner’s family, he uncovered the home’s history and that of its occupant, a 95-year-old woman who had come to Australia from Europe after WWII and built the third house on the street. In the last 20 years of her life, hoarding had gotten the better of her, and the property inside and out was a shambles. She died in March.
“The story went really well, and going well in Orange can mean between 2000 and 5000 readers — but in a city of 40,000 it means it connected,” he says.
The Orange News Examiner has around 14,000 readers a month, all of whom are staying on the page for longer than most commercial sites — six minutes per session on average.
At least 60 regional Australian newspapers have folded since the pandemic began, according to the Public Interest Journalism Initiative.
“It’s pretty dire,” Holmes says, adding that the pervasive “buy local” attitude in the regions didn’t necessarily extend to buying ad space from local media.
Media outlets are forced to choose between filling editorial holes quickly with content such as community events, fundraisers, sporting coverage, weather forecasts and political press releases, or spending time digging and talking to people.
“In the regions councils play a more significant role; a friend described it to me as them being more like a de facto state government, and you need time to wade through council papers and line up interviews and get people to trust you, and the one thing that most journalists don’t have in the regions is time,” he says. “Taking your time with something just becomes impossible and so what you lose is any scrutiny, or the ability to cover an issue in depth, or to write a piece nicely.”
In regional Victoria, the extent of this was seen ahead of the federal election when the ABC found time-poor local publications were copying and pasting politicians’ press releases as news stories. During the federal election The Orange News Examiner held a candidates forum at the Hotel Orange.
Orange is a safe Nationals seat held by former veterans affairs minister Andrew Gee, so convincing all candidates to participate was hard — “getting the sitting member, who was sitting on a 63% two-party preferred vote, was no small feat because there was nothing in it for him”.
The free event was fully booked as people packed into the pub to ask their questions.
Holmes occasionally commissions opinion.
“In May I asked a young trans fella I know in town to write me a piece about being a trans teen in Orange during the federal election, what it was like being used as a target, and it was so articulate and he wrote me a beautiful piece,” Holmes says. “That was something that normally wouldn’t get reported out here.”
The other byline floating around the site is that of veteran journalist and friend David Fitzsimons, who Holmes says pens stories for “extreme mates rates, which start and end with a zero”.
Holmes is a newsperson but he’s had to become a salesperson.
“I have the audience, but I didn’t realise how difficult it is to monetise that audience and to get local businesses to spend $30 or more a week,” he says. “I find it excruciating trying to get advertisers, I’m not very good at it.”
If Holmes was a betting man, which he isn’t (The Orange News Examiner’s two pub advertisers are pokies-free), he would say the newspaper won’t last two years.
“Ultimately, the people and the businesses of Orange will decide whether it survives. It is up to them,” he says.
“I’m going to hold on as long as I can.”
