A report by the Public Interest Journalism Initiative (PIJI) found print news in the Eyre Peninsula has bucked the trend among other regional areas with its extraordinary resilience. PIJI researchers sought to understand not only which news organisations were still serving an audience of 30,000 people, but what they were doing with their coverage.

To help them find out they sampled the entire news output of all print and online news publishers on the peninsula – an area sprawling 170,500km2 and ten local government areas – during the month of February 2023. The researchers reviewed a total 394 stories published by five publications: the ABC Eyre Peninsula, ABC North and West SA, Eyre Peninsula Advocate, The Port Lincoln News and The Port Lincoln Times. Print and radio broadcasts were not included in the sample due to difficulty in obtaining reliable transcripts. They also excluded Whyalla, as the city formed a separate media market for historical, cultural and demographic reasons. Head of Research at PIJI, Gary Dickson, who led the project, says the results reveal a media environment that was successfully delivering high quality public interest reporting on local government, sport, community matters and public services.

Of the news providers, the two major papers – The Port Lincoln Times and start-up paper The Eyre Peninsula Advocate – provided strong coverage from right across the region. The conclusions of the PIJI report provide a sense of how regional media on the Eyre Peninsula is rebounding, despite questions being asked about its future during the opening stages of the pandemic. As the world retreated, tourism collapsed and events were cancelled, causing advertising revenue to evaporate among many mastheads. On the Eyre Peninsula, as elsewhere, Australian Community Media (ACM) responded by closing its regional news newsrooms. The result was a vacuum. Regional television news outfit, Southern Cross News, helped fill the gap although its focus was primarily on Port Lincoln and not the wider region. That station has also recently closed down.