Western Sydney lost 21 newspapers in a decade. What’s happened in that vacuum?

April 2, 2026 — 5:00am

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The one thing that keeps most people under 40 from deleting their Facebook accounts entirely is, I suspect, that insatiable human urge to jump into the local community group when they hear a helicopter buzzing overhead.

We are built with a desire to know about the world around us. Not just global or national affairs, but local ones too: what is happening on your street corner, when your bins are collected or whether you can safely walk to the shops. Arguably, these matters have a greater impact on your quality of life than many of the decisions made in Canberra.

But extraordinarily, in our hyper-connected era, accessing this type of local information has never been harder. The small newspapers that used to track local decision-making and tell interesting stories about their communities are mostly dead. Across Australia, 30 council areas are now “news deserts”, places with zero local news outlets. Almost all of these are regional – for now – but there’s another part of Australia that is experiencing something........

© The Sydney Morning Herald