I learned to be a journalist in the suburbs that raised me.
My first newsroom was a community paper. I reported for the Liverpool Champion and the Fairfield Champion, the Fairfax titles that landed in letterboxes across South West Sydney every week.
That is where I learned the craft: how to chase a story, how to check a fact twice, how to sit through a long council meeting and find the one decision that would change someone's street.
Local journalism taught me the most important stories are rarely the loudest. They are the planning decision that reshapes a neighbourhood, the court matter that never reaches the city desk, the small business owner trying to keep the lights on. These are the stories that connect a community to itself.
Those papers are gone.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, dozens of local mastheads stopped printing, and many never came back. News Corp alone halted around 60 local titles.
The papers I cut my teeth on are gone from our letterboxes, and across South West Sydney, one of the largest and most diverse parts of the country, there is now almost no local press at all.
This is not just nostalgia; it is a measurable decline. The Public Interest Journalism Initiative reports that local news makes up 88 per cent of Australia's news outlets, yet over the past five years it has tracked 183 outlet closures, leaving 27 local government areas with no local news at all.
And, contrary to the assumption this is only a problem for the bush, some of the worst losses are in the suburbs of our biggest cities. Places like ours.
So what has replaced the local paper? For most people, the phone in their pocket. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snapchat, X, and a dozen platforms we have not heard of yet.
These platforms have done extraordinary things. They connect us across the world in an instant. We can watch a war between the United States, Israel and Iran play out in real time, then in the very next swipe watch someone plate up an Iraqi breakfast of kahi and geymar, or follow the next viral dance. We move from the global to the deeply personal in a heartbeat, and in many ways that is wonderful.
But here is the catch. Once you pause on a clip, the algorithm decides it knows you and feeds you more of the same until your view of the world narrows to whatever keeps you scrolling.
These platforms are built to hold your attention, not to inform your community. They are very good at showing you the world.
They were never designed to tell you what happened at your council meeting last night.
A democracy is only as strong as the information its citizens can trust, and in the suburbs that raised me, that information is running dry.
That gap matters most for democracy, because local journalism was never only about the council chamber. It told local stories, and connected a decision taken in Canberra or on Macquarie Street to what it meant for a family's livelihood in Fairfield or Cabramatta.
Just as importantly, it shone a light on the people who make a place what it is: in an electorate like Fowler, the Australians of migrant and refugee backgrounds making a real difference through their craft, businesses and enterprise. Those stories rarely reach the city desk, but they are the heartbeat of who we are.
Local journalism also held power to account, reporting on how governments perform from the town hall to the state and federal parliaments, and carrying local concerns back to those in power.
When no one does that work, accountability slips, communities are shut out of the decisions that shape their lives, and into the vacuum flows rumour, outrage and misinformation, the very content the platforms reward.
The loss runs deeper still in a community like Fowler, where more than 60 per cent of households speak a language other than English at home.
Without local journalism, places like mine risk becoming communities that are spoken about, but rarely heard from.
I do not raise this to despair. I raise it because it can be fixed.
The federal government's commitment of more than $180 million to local news and community broadcasting, and its plan to make the digital platforms pay their fair share, are welcome steps. But the design is everything.
If support is measured only by the size of a newsroom, the small, independent, multicultural and community outlets will be left out, and those are exactly the voices our suburbs need most. The goal must be to preserve public interest journalism, not to prop up the biggest companies.
We should treat local news the way we treat roads, schools and hospitals: as essential infrastructure for a healthy society.
A democracy is only as strong as the information its citizens can trust, and in the suburbs that raised me, that information is running dry.
We have the chance to turn it back on. We should take it.
