It's a sad reality of news coverage that my local community only really makes the front page of the major Sydney newspapers and media when something's going wrong.

It might be bushfires, floods or a traffic jam affecting drivers heading west, but it's rarely a feel-good story.

And once the crisis has passed, the national and metropolitan media circus moves on from my community on the outer fringes of Sydney and there's little interest in what happens next.

Except from local papers. The weekly local paper doesn't disappear from the scene but covers the less sensational but often more profound aftermath.

I say this with no criticism whatsoever of the metropolitan and national media.

In the 1980s, I began a career in radio journalism.

Working in the Canberra Press Gallery and as a correspondent in New York and London, I was one of those reporters who had to move on after the story angles were exhausted.

But my arrival in the 1990s to the Blue Mountains, a region that is sometimes considered "Greater Sydney" by bureaucrats but not by locals, with its own strong sense of community and identity, showed me the value of the suburban and local media that lands on your driveway or you pick up in the coffee shop.

I learnt about my community in those early days through my local paper.

I got to know of the community groups, the small businesses, the sporting achievements, the characters of our towns and villages, the personal tragedies, the issues that worried people and who our community leaders were.

But it was probably the 2013 Winmalee bushfires, where my family and 200 others lost their homes, that cemented for me the absolutely vital role local papers play in connecting community and backing community.

They stayed on the story not just for weeks but for months and years, giving voice to a community as it........

© Canberra Times