When I started working at the Bunbury Mail in south-west Western Australia in 2009, it employed five journalists and a dedicated editor to produce one free weekly newspaper and the biweekly Harvey Mail. Some weeks the book would be more than 70% ads. Those numbers sound luxurious now.
Up the road at the Mandurah Mail, up to 80% of page space would be ads. They barely had enough room for stories. You had to compete for space, learn the art of writing brief, and get really good at finding that one hanging word that would bring you in under length. I know people hate it when regional papers are referred to as training grounds, but some truths can’t be helped: there is no better place to learn the job of journalism than a place like that.
This week, Australian Community Media announced that the paper editions of the Bunbury Mail, Mandurah Mail, Busselton-Dunsborough Mail and Augusta-Margaret River Mail would cease printing at the end of April. The printing press in Mandurah will also close. ACM has been trying to sell its Western Australian papers for some time, with no takers. The biggest of the two mastheads, the Bunbury and Mandurah mails, will retain some staff and continue publishing online.
“Unfortunately, the rising costs of newsprint and the shift of advertising spending to digital platforms has made these titles unprofitable,” the ACM managing director, Tony Kendall, said.
I remember now an argument I had with a reporter at the staff Christmas party a few days after I landed in Bunbury. I said I thought all news would move online soon, and that was fine: I read all my news online already, why cling to old media? Enraged, they asked why I’d bothered to try to become a journalist if I didn’t believe in newspapers?
I’ve never been more sad to win an argument. Because although I was right about the money – the rivers of gold had been drying up for some time even then – they were, quite annoyingly, correct about the more important point. You have to believe in local journalism to do it well. A local paper runs on being earnest. Ironic, then, that what first attracted me to the job was the name of the town. What better for a person who had no idea what to do than to go Bunburying?
If you are not being earnest, the community finds you out. You have to get in the debates and go to the meetings and inspect the broken footpaths and read the council submissions and get enraged, really genuinely enraged, that the waterfront redevelopment project still hasn’t been completed.
The trick, of course, is that you have to be earnest to do any kind of journalism well, but local journalism forces you to learn that lesson much sooner. It brings you face to face with your audience and holds you accountable. It also beats the pretension, which exists in all of us who are attracted to a career of transcribing history in real time, right out of you.
One of my first jobs at the Mail was to update and edit the community noticeboard, a gargantuan list of upcoming events and local clubs that people would contribute to via fax. If you got a detail wrong, they’d be right on the phone. As Terry Pratchett, who started his writing career at a local paper, told the Telegraph in 2013: “London journalism can piss in someone’s face and they can’t do anything about it. Try that in local journalism, and someone’s down to complain.”
There is nothing glamorous about the work of putting out a local paper. We laid out the pages for the back half on Monday afternoon and the front half, which was unusually seven pages including page one, on Tuesday afternoon, after writing our stories in the morning. The pages were then printed in A3 and we’d scan for errors and sign it off once we were done. Back half of the book required two signatures, front half three, front page four.
On Wednesday, publication day, after we’d all helped fold catalogues into the papers and gotten inky fingers, a man named Ron, whose job I never understood but seemed to involve a lot of shouting, would go through the paper with a red pen and call out every mistake and misspelt name. Then I would grab the company car and head out to write the Domain section, which involved walking through houses for sale and spending the next two days trying to think of different ways to describe a four-bedroom, two-bathroom new build with open-plan living and dining and an alfresco area for the entertainer.
After work we’d attend whatever function was going and take social photos. It was $2 per photo so if you took 10 you could cover the cost of two beers.
About every second Tuesday evening was spent crying in the carpark, because I was late finishing my news stories and had been rightly yelled at.
I met some of my closest friends – including Kaitlyn Offer, who I had that fight with at the Christmas party – and learned more in the first three months than at four years in university.
Bunbury will be better served than most regional towns even when the Mail’s presses go dark. It still has the South Western Times, a weekly paper that covers the area from Harvey to Augusta, and will have the Mail online. The studios for ABC South West WA are also in Bunbury, and GWN7, the Seven West-owned regional TV news, also broadcasts from there. All these journalists do an excellent job and will continue to do the work of reporting local news.
Other communities are less lucky. According to the latest Australia news data report, produced by the Public Interest Journalism Initiative, there are 32 local governments in Australia without any local print or digital news outlets and four that also don’t have local radio coverage. The list is growing. Sixteen mastheads closed in the last quarter of 2022, 11 of which were attributed to the increase in the price of newsprint. These constant losses are the main reason for the creation of Guardian Australia’s Rural Network, which allows us to tell local stories, from local reporters, in places where the coverage is drying up.
Regional communities deserve local journalism. I hope the Bunbury Mail, in its new form, will continue for many years to come.
