I learned to be a journalist in the suburbs that raised me.

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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........

© The Examiner