The last print edition of the Centralian Advocate has hit newsstands in Alice Springs, ahead of the local newspaper moving completely online as part of wide-ranging savings made by parent company News Corp.
The newspaper's editor, Anthony Geppa, said it was a sad day for the central Australian community.
"I really do feel it's going to have quite a big impact for our older readers who [have] a routine now to sit down every Tuesday and Friday with a physical copy of the paper," he said.
"I also feel really sorry for all the kids that are going to grow up in Alice Springs now who don't have a chance to see their photo in the paper."
Mr Geppa said last month's announcement took staff by surprise.
Looking back
The outlet began publishing in 1947 and has covered major local stories including the murder of Peter Falconio, the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain and the NT Intervention.
Journalist Bob Watt was working at the Sydney Morning Herald when he moved to the outback to become the Advocate's senior reporter between 1967 and 1979 and editor from 1979 to 1988.
Mr Watt said the newsroom was very noisy in the paper's early days.
"We were right next to an old press which printed a single sheet at a time," he said.
"If we had pictures we had to wait about a week to get them back from Adelaide."
He said covering the incident where a former Connellan Air employee stole a light plane and crashed it into the Connair hangar at the Alice Springs airport in 1977 was a memory that stood out from his time at the paper.
"That was a horrifying story really … it was very bad; very sad," Mr Watt said.
His coverage also included the establishment of the highly secretive United States and Australian joint defence facility, known as Pine Gap.
"In the early days I was actually invited out to look at the early construction," Mr Watt said.
"Of course that was the last time I ever got to go to Pine Gap."
The new Advocate
General manager of the NT News, Greg Thomson, said the decline in the advertising model that funds print journalism was the main reason the printed paper stopped.
"The analysis that was done basically grouped a range of these papers that were either profitable, unprofitable or those that were soon about to become unprofitable," he said.
"The printed edition of the Advocate fell in that latter category."
Six local jobs were lost as a result.
But Mr Thomson said a separate hard copy of red centre news articles would still be available inside the Darwin-based NT News newspaper, on certain days.
"You'll have a dedicated Alice Springs front page each Tuesday and Friday," he said.
"And inside there'll be a minimum of two pages [covering the Alice Springs news], but it will depend on the news cycle as to how many pages we have inside."
