For the past two months, my local community has been gripped by the murder trial of two people over the death of a young mother, Amber Haigh, who disappeared 22 years ago.
Haigh had an intellectual disability and was 19 when she vanished. She left behind her five-month-old son. The father of Haigh’s child, 64-year-old Robert Geeves, and his wife, Anne Geeves, also 64, are on trial charged with her murder. Both have pleaded not guilty. Justice Julia Lonergan has retired to consider the verdict.
It is certainly the biggest criminal investigation to happen in my area in the 30 years I have lived here. As I sat watching the case unfold over the past two months in the supreme court in Wagga Wagga, I mourned not only Haigh’s disappearance but also the loss of local journalists to cover such stories.
It is not possible for a small town paper to have trained journalists watching proceedings every day for an eight-week trial, as the Guardian did. That is why I thought it was so important we cover Haigh’s story. I know from main street chatter that people are reading the coverage and listening to our podcasts.
But the reality is that without funds, trained editors and journalists – not to mention legal protection – the capacity to cover the tougher rounds suffers. This is particularly true of courts, town politics and police stories. Yet these are the guide rails for our communities.
If your local news service does not write up the council meeting, there is little chance of a report in a larger newspaper or TV service unless it is a very big story. Likewise, the local rumour mill may fill the knowledge gap on a court proceeding but the more traditional and (hopefully) more reliable way to separate fact from fiction is the town’s trained media.
The hard copy of the then ACM-owned Harden Express disappeared in the Covid-19 pandemic. Our other paper, the Twin Town Times, does not have the capacity to send a reporter to court in Wagga, 90 minutes away, for two months for a single story. The Wagga Advertiser, also owned by ACM, has covered Haigh’s case most days.
A new funding approach
Local news is front of mind because this month the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation’s (VFFF) generous three-year grant that established Guardian Australia’s Rural Network comes to an end. And what a difference it has made. (The Victorian Rural Network, funded by Doc Ross Foundation, still has a way to go.)
In August 2021 I was appointed the founding rural editor by Guardian Australia editor Lenore Taylor, with specific orders to work from my tiny town west of Canberra (said no editor ever before!). We wanted to see if we could find a new way to cover rural news and listen to rural communities on what is important in their towns. Calla Wahlquist is the current rural editor.
Thanks to the VFFF funding, we set up a small network of contributors to report from their local places as an alternative to the “fly-in, fly-out” city-based journalist trying to understand an issue in a few days.
We now have journalists writing regularly from their rural places, including Michael Burge in Deepwater, NSW, Dellaram Vreeland in Ballarat, Victoria, and Mandy McKeesick in central Queensland.
We have employed five graduates from University of Technology Sydney for a year each in independent country papers. They have also informed research into rural journalism at the university’s centre for media transition.
Looking back, 2021 was a year of promise for the news industry. After many years of declining ad revenue, news companies were flush with an injection of funds from Facebook and Google worth $200m.
The cheques were signed because those companies were trying to avoid being “designated” under the Australian government’s news media bargaining code. Facebook’s owner, Meta, has now announced it will not renew the deals.
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In 2024, the numbers of newsrooms continued to shrink, with a net decline of 177 news services across the country since 2019, according to the Public Interest Journalism Initiative.
Ours is an industry beset by a crisis in funding models, jobs disappearing at Nine and News Corp along with the broader challenges presented by deep fakes and artificial intelligence.
From our own experience at the Rural Network, we have learned there are fewer rural freelance journalists than we expected in spite of the contraction of jobs. It’s very hard for freelancers to make a living in rural places without another income. And that makes responding to a 24/7 news cycle hard for them.
Companies still try to find a way of reinventing the wheel, to make rural news financially viable.
Rural newspapers continue to change hands at a pace. ACM has offloaded country mastheads over the past few years, including a swag in central western NSW to the rising Provincial Press Group, and has ditched the hard copies of a number of Western Australian titles after failing to find a willing buyer.
Sky News Regional broadcasts free to air in eastern states, though it cut back its broadcast footprint to remove Griffith and South Australia last month.
And this month, a longstanding editor of the Cowra Guardian, Andrew Fisher, retired after 40 years in the job. He is an old-fashioned local paper editor in the best sense, a trainer of young journalists in courts, police rounds, council meetings, health and schools. He has covered every local story and town barney you could imagine. He oversaw one of our UTS graduates, Eliza Spencer, who learned a lot under his tutelage.
Who will have that kind of stamina and longevity in local news in future? The answer will affect journalism and democracy for all citizens, not only in Australia and not only in rural places.
But for rural and regional communities, there is an added challenge. That is: how to live with no way of getting basic facts about our communities in the absence of a local news service.