Opinion

From being threatened by bikies to sitting with grieving mothers: how regional reporting shaped me

The newspaper I started out at is closing – it’s now a lot harder to tell important stories

It seems fantastical now – marching into a newspaper office and demanding a job.

After all, it was my local paper. 

Where I worked I would put five copies of the paper on a cafe table with dog-eared magazines every day and watch it get pulled apart and shared around, loved and complained about in equal measure. 

I knew those stories. I heard those stories. Why couldn’t I tell them?

The Sunshine Coast Daily editorial manager Andy Kippen, a Gary-Oldman type in a Carl Jung costume, seemed bemused but not surprised. He gave me a two-week trial. It lasted six years.

This, the Daily, was one of 112 regional and community newspaper that News Corp has announced it will stop printing. Even by the time I started at the Daily, the golden era had already tarnished. It was the jewel in the crown of then-owner APN, and at one point could be considered a deadly weapon given the weight its real estate ads and classifieds sections carried.

But as the ads dried up so too did the resources, until working 15 hour shifts to fill the paper with less than half the workforce was the norm.

You did it because you loved it. You did it because no one else would. No one else would be covering the Buderim gardening society or the Nambour show, or the Tewantin men’s shed, or the absolute batshit insanity that is local government, but we did.

We covered the local sporting leagues and the neighbourhood fundraisers, and launched campaigns to have potholes fixed.

It was what people wanted to know about. What they talked about over their flat whites. Not Brisbane, or god forbid, Canberra.

I was so green, I could have photosynthesised and was lucky enough to be shuffled under the wing of Carolyn Tucker, veteran investigative reporter, who had found herself in the advertorial section, because when she first started no one had clicked on to who she was. That’s just how small papers work. You could be Peter Harvey or Laurie Oakes but you’ll never be treated with the same reverence as the editor who started at the paper as a cadet and had a contact book that read like the town’s phone book.

It was Tucker who followed a tip about then-Queensland deputy premier Gordon Nuttall having a lunch at a local fancy restaurant with some interesting characters.

That investigation eventually led to his being referred to the state corruption watchdog, and charges for which he was convicted and jailed. The national media quickly claimed credit for the story but regional reporters are used to that.

From her I learned how to keep investigating when things didn’t sit right, even as power screamed at you at 2am. To always pick up the phone. And that accolades and acknowledgement will never matter as much as serving your audience. Inform your readers. Give them the information they need to make their daily decisions. Everything else is just icing sugar – nice, but often brushed off and forgotten about.

Working at a regional paper like the Sunshine Coast Daily means becoming the property of your readers. Faye will have no problem marching into your office to demand to see your university degree because you called her “Fay” in a vox pop. You’ll spend the rest of your career triple checking spellings.

I’ve been called to task at school fetes and the beach, change rooms and supermarkets, and once on a ferris wheel at a country show.

I’ve been threatened by bikies and politicians, shoved and screamed at in front of police stations and courts, and had abusive letters left by my door. I’ve been impersonated and, on at least one memorable occasion, had a dead rat left on my car roof. But I was also privileged enough to be welcomed into lives at their most vulnerable times, trusted with stories that would become part of family tapestries.

Country roads and highways to a regional police reporter are scarred with the lives you know ended there, marked by memories of midnight trips to dark bends and broken trees. Treating those tragedies as just another story becomes impossible when you find yourself reaching for the same yoghurt as a mother grieving her child.

The Daily I left is not the same as the Daily today, but the community it represents is. That it, and so many others, have lost their print voices is a national tragedy. Regional and community newsrooms are not nurseries for would-be metro reporters, although they do offer the best training in the business.

They are thriving ecosystems, staffed by people whose children go to the same schools as their audience, who drive on the same roads they fight councils to fix, who enjoy the same environment they lobby to protect.

They work there because they love their community and want to serve it, the best way they know how – honouring and protecting and telling its stories. That just got a lot harder.

But they’ll still be picking up phones, and still doing their darndest to get words on a page. To the Shirls and Marks and Bills and Raes and Peters, and every other regional newspaper employee putting a paper to bed for one of the final times, we salute you. Send that book off with pride.

• Amy Remeikis is a Guardian Australia political reporter.