The tiny newspaper defying the media shake-up
It was 1975 when Robert Best saw the job ad in his local paper.
The South Gippsland native had just finished Year 11 and “wasn’t all that keen on school”, so he applied and got a job as a journalist at the local newspaper, The Mirror, instead.
Fourteen years later Best bought the paper.
Now, more than three decades on, he is looking to sell the small country paper, based in the town of Foster, and move on to the next phase of his life after a health scare.
“I’ve been doing it for a long time and I thought it might be a good idea to put it on the market and see if I could sell it,” Best said.
The sale of the paper includes a printing business. Photo: Supplied
The Mirror, circulated in the South Gippsland districts of Foster, Toora, Fish Creek, Yanakie and Welshpool, was established in 1890 and publishes about 1600 copies each Wednesday.
The newspaper is up for sale for $290,000, including a long lease on its 150-square-metre warehouse and retail space, and its five “experienced, fully trained staff”, which includes two reporters. Best says they’ve been getting inquiries “off and on” and are hoping a journalist looking for a change might make an offer.
“I’m hoping one of these journalists in Melbourne will see it – maybe someone who is after a seachange or a tree-change will want to come down here,” he says. “It’s a great part of the world to live in, and it’s a good place to bring up a family.”
South Gippsland is a two-hour drive from Melbourne on the south-east coast of Victoria, bordering on Wilsons Promontory.
With extreme upheaval in journalism, regional papers have been able to survive by being hyper-local and appealing to the loyalty of readers, Best said.
“We’re a good little country newspaper, and they are extremely important,” he said. “We don’t worry about national or state news, we’re all local. You can get national news on the telly or in the dailies. We concentrate on our little area and that’s what they (readers) like.”
A sample of The Mirror’s top stories are published online each week, but the paper appears each week largely as it has for more than a century. It is “showing excellent returns”, with newsagency sales covering the cost of printing.
“Our sales have dropped off a little bit, but we’re an older demographic down here,” Best said. “The younger ones mightn’t be buying the paper, but the older ones still certainly do. I get a real kick out of physically taking the papers to the newsagents each week and there are the regular customers waiting for it.
“There are a lot of local names and photos and stories that people like to read. If you give them what they want then they keep buying it.”
A number of Australian country papers have recently became casualties of journalistic restructuring, including the Cooma-Monaro Express, which closed last year after operating for 130 years.
The former home of the Border Chronicle paper in South Australia is also up for sale with an asking price of $125,000. The building played home to the country paper for 70 years up until last year.
