Extract from The Guardian
A highly experienced editor will anchor our reporting and set up a team of trusted contributors
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Last modified on Wed 15 Sep 2021 06.22 AEST
One of the greatest frustrations of editing a news site is the stories we’re not able to tell.
Guardian Australia has grown well beyond my initial expectations over the past eight and a half years. We started in 2013 with about 1 million readers loyal to the Guardian’s international coverage. We’re now the fifth most read Australian news site, with a monthly audience of more than 7 million. We started with an editorial staff of about 20. Now we number more than 100.
But when I became editor in 2016 I could see there were subjects where properly informed coverage was often beyond our reach and would probably remain so unless we did things differently. One of those subjects was rural and regional reporting.
How could city-based newsrooms cover the existential debates about water allocation or the impact of increasingly frequent droughts, floods and fires on rural life or food production or ecosystems? How could we stay in touch with the concerns of so many different places across such a vast area? If we were to appoint rural reporters, where should they be located?
Sadly, they are also stories that are often not being told at a local level. Journalism job losses have accelerated during the pandemic, nowhere more so than in regional centres where mastheads have closed and scores of newspaper and television newsrooms have been centralised and stripped of their local content.
The best solution I could devise is Rural Network, the rural and regional project we are finally launching now, funded through a generous three-year philanthropic grant from the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation and in collaboration with University of Technology Sydney’s Centre for Media Transition.
The idea is to expand our reach by appointing a highly experienced rural and regional editor to anchor our reporting and to set up a network of trusted contributors and, we hope, collaborating independent regional news organisations. We think this will give us “eyes and ears” in different places and provide us with insights we would not otherwise get.
I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve appointed Gabrielle Chan as that editor. I’ve worked with Gabi on and off for more than 30 years, in the Canberra press gallery and when she was the politics live blogger in Guardian Australia’s early years. For almost all of that time Gabi has also lived on a sheep and wheat farm in rural New South Wales. She is an authoritative thinker and commentator on rural issues and the divide between rural and urban Australia, bringing her unique perspective to two acclaimed books – Rusted Off: Why Country Australia Is Fed Up and, most recently, Why You Should Give a F?$ck About Farming.
Via the University of Technology graduate partnership we have also employed a reporter, Natasha May. When lockdowns permit, Natasha will begin a posting with the Gilgandra Weekly newspaper – an independent newspaper owned and edited by Lucie Peart – reporting for both Guardian Australia and the Gilgandra Weekly. We’ll gain so much from embedding a young reporter in a regional community and we hope it will give something back to rural and regional news gathering. Natasha is the first of five graduate reporters who will be employed over the life of this project.
As excited as we are about this endeavour, we don’t imagine for a moment that we will be able to tell every rural story. We can’t be hyper-local. We won’t be at every fete or council meeting and we can’t replace the news services so many communities have lost. But we do think that with Gabi and Natasha and a network of contributors we will be able to report on the biggest stories and the most serious issues in a considered way, from the perspective of reporters living and working in the places they are writing about. We expect that our network will tip us off to news and human stories that will resonate nationally and, at times, with the Guardian’s international audiences.
We also want to build a community of rural and regional readers, and of all those interested in the subject, through a Facebook group and a newsletter. We intend to bring rural and regional stories to readers across the country, so people living beyond the cities feel they are being heard, in a way that facilitates debate and discussion.
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