Broken Hill’s independently-owned newspaper the Barrier Truth has announced its shock closure after nearly 130 years.
Located on the edge of the desert in Far West NSW, the shutdown of the union-run newspaper — formerly the Barrier Daily Truth — is another blow to the mining town, after losing its nightly commercial news bulletin a year ago.
The Truth was Broken Hill’s longest ongoing news provider and had printed more than 33,000 editions.
Barrier Industrial Council president and Barrier Truth board chair Roslyn Ferry confirmed to ABC Broken Hill that the Barrier Truth had shut its doors.
On Tuesday, 15 staff were notified that the paper would not be published in the foreseeable future.
The last edition of the paper was printed on Wednesday.
Ms Ferry said it “broke her heart” to cease operations of the paper.
It comes after social media giant Meta disbanded its News tab on its platform, effectively limiting the amount of news content that could be shared.
Slow creep of closures
For former employee Emily McInerney, who started at the Truth as an 18-year-old cadet fresh out of high school in 2010, it was a very sad day.
Ms McInerney witnessed the slow creep of regional newspaper closures over the last decade.
“[But] when you’re in the newsrooms, you just think about getting out the news,” she said.
Like many regional newspapers, The Barrier Truth struggled during COVID, even shutting its doors at one point.
It was then that “A-grader” — a term used by locals to describe someone born in Broken Hill — Robert Williamson stepped up to the plate.
A self-professed mining man with no background in media, he refused to let the then-daily newspaper close.
“I have contacts in [the mining] industry, so I talked to the mining leaders in Australia and said this town [still] needed a newspaper at that time,” Mr Williamson said.
“I’d never been in the newspaper industry before, but I obviously understand business, so it was a matter of applying those skills and knowledge.”
After putting in place a 12-week business plan, the newspaper returned as a bi-weekly publication coming out on Wednesdays and Saturday.
In late 2023 subscribers saw an increase to their delivery fee of $1.
Ms Ferry said the union had kept up the free service for as long as possible, but the economic climate had made it “more and more difficult to absorb the cost of delivery”.
The newspaper’s budget was further stretched by a drop in subscriptions in the last couple of years, she said.
Then last month, the paper’s local printing press broke down.
From then on, there was the additional cost of printing the paper in Mildura and transporting it three hours to Broken Hill.
Impact of Facebook’s news decision
The number of regional and rural independent paper closures has now reached epidemic proportions, and experts say Meta’s recent decision to remove the News tab on Facebook is unlikely to help the situation.
Caroline Fisher, an associate professor of communication at the University of Canberra, said it was too early to know for sure the impact of the social media giant’s move, but she expected it would not be good.
“Facebook has been de-prioritising news for quite a while, and over the last 12 months, many news outlets have seen a drop off in referral traffic from Facebook,” she said.
Dr Fisher said around 32 per cent of Australians got their news from Facebook.
“There’s likely to be less news for them to bump into, so it will make news avoidance [which is already high in Australia] easier,” she said.
Dr Fisher said as a new chapter in Australian media unfolded, it might be time for the government to step in again.
“Perhaps the removal of Meta support from the news will really push the government to make a bigger commitment to rural and regional journalism,” she said.
For now, as Mrs McInerney pointed out, there was a hole in the media landscape of Broken Hill.
“[The paper] keeps people connected, it keeps the community together.”
The newspaper’s board is seeking further legal and financial advice.
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