Last week WINTV announced the axing of five regional news bulletins across New South Wales and Queensland. Newsrooms will close in Orange, Dubbo, Wagga Wagga, Albury and Hervey Bay. This follows the closure of WIN’s Tasmanian newsroom last August.

It’s yet another blow to local news in an alarming and continuing decline documented by research by the Public Interest Journalism Initiative released on June 16.

The Availability of Local News and Information survey, conducted nationally by PIJI with the Australian Local Government Association, shows the fall to be most alarming in local areas, with news declining 68 per cent in suburbs and 45 per cent in regions.

At least 3,000 journalist jobs have been lost through redundancy alone in the past five years, as part of the failure of the business model that has traditionally sustained journalism, with advertising revenues diverted to online platforms.

Most concerning from PIJI’s point of view is the impact on local communities’ access to information and the scrutiny of local institutions that holds them to account.

These are the tenets of democracy, which is ultimately what suffers when citizens lo longer have access to objective, accurate and relevant information on which to make decisions.

PIJI urges policy makers to engage with this deepening crisis for our democracy and civic society and consider options to sustain public interest journalism.