Toowoomba's very own "community" newspaper

What sort of city does The Chronicle think Toowoomba is?

Day after day its sensational front pages and placards describe us as a community of violence and lawlessness and worse.

Our very own community newspaper projects this city and its people as one Australia’s most undesirable places to live.

Its Page 1, Page 2, and Page 3 are loaded with hoons, crashes, crushed cars, rapes, dog cruelty, interference with corpses, city mayhem, shotgun blasts, drug shocks, bare buttocks and racism.

Do you ever stop to wonder what an awful perspective The Chronicle’s incessant shock horror placards and front pages give of Toowoomba? I wonder the collective tourist industry and the Chambers of Commerce are protesting.

The Chronicle claims to be the flagship of the Australian Provincial Newspapers (APN) network – yet the figures published in the Australian Audit Bureau of Circulations show its readership is static and probably crumbling. Average daily sales for the three months to June 30 were only 23,128. For Saturday, sales were 30,838 on average. Which doesn’t say much for sales Monday and Friday.

In 2003, average daily sales Monday to Saturday were reported at 28.000, making it the bigget-selling title in the APN chain stretching from North Queensland to Northern New South Wales.

The Chronicle still commands a monopoly in Toowoomba – no opposition and no avenue for concerned criticism.

This once proud paper lets its community down scandalously on many fronts, the worst being first, its refusal to engage in government and political reporting analysis at any level and second, its refusal to report and analyse the performance of its local politcians at all levels of government, thus deliberately embedding them safely in their electorates.

One of Australia’s great journalists, Michael Gawenda, former Editor in Chief of one of Australia’s greatest newspaper, The Age in Melbourne, last week wrote splendidly about the squalot of today’s newspapers. He could very well have applied his criticisms to The Chronicle.

Gawenda writes:
“One of the great mistakes newspapers have made in recent years is trying to address their weaknesses rather than build on their strengths. So we have shorter stories, bigger headlines, more graphics, more bells and whistles, more tricked-up, overblown pages, more pages meant to look visually rich but which, in the main, look desperate and garish.
“Only newspapers can build a community of readers. What builds that community?
“Well, for a start, a shared sense of what the newspaper is about, what it considers important, interesting, entertaining and thought-provoking. A shared sense of the city, the country, even the world. That's about telling stories - stories from our courts and police force and local councils and businesses and governments and hospitals. No web news site will ever tell such stories.”

This is an extract from Gawenda’s A.N. Smith Lecture in Journalism in Melbourne. It can be read in full on the Sydney Morning Herald www for October 7, 2008.

The Chronicle’s sensationalism sadly overshadows the values of some of its inside pages. I am thinking particularly of the columns of Peter Swannell and Merryl Miller and others. But these values are crushed by the weight of the deliberate sensationalism of its early pages.

Don’t believe me? Just scan through these dominant headlines of the last two weeks … but, first and in case The Chronicle thinks otherwise, this newsletter has been encouraged in this review by many many of its readers – and people who have given up on it.

>> Mum, kids cheat death (with picture of crumpled and crushed car) Page 1
>> Hard lesson for former teacher (charges involve dangerous drugs) Page 3.
Saturday, October 11

>> Young thugs walk free after woman beaten in savage attack. Page 1
>> Police allay fears over shooting. Page 3
>> Alleged brawlers front court Page 5
Friday, October 10

>> Tough times sink major farm group Page 1
>> Soldier faces trial on rape charge Page 3
>> Second torched car stolen from Boonah; Page 5
>> Horror Yarraman crash leaves man dead and women injured. Page 5
Thursday, October 9:

>> Cuts save family $500 a month Page 1
>> Dog cruelty costs owner $5000 Page 3
Wednesday, October 8

>> Teacher goes to trial over interference with corpse Page 1
>> Councillor was respected ‘straight shooter’ Pages 2 and 3
>> Former teacher to face trial. Pages 1 and 2
>> Brazen burglars target business Page 5
Tuesday, October 7:

>> Council shock, Business, community leader dies suddenly. Page 1
>> Blaze a shock for returning owners. Page 2
>> Youth dies in crash after alleged escape from police (wrecked car). Page 3
Monday, October 6:

>> BLACKOUT- City mayhem as power fails: Page 1
>> Fatal sneeze lands truck driver in jail: Page 3
>> Glassing attack earns man three months jail: Page 5
Saturday, October 4

>> Bad kids are getting worse Page 1
>> Bad school kids report shock Page 3
>> Car torched in cruel act Page 5
Friday, October 3

>> Police guard shotgun blast couple Page 1
>> Shotgun attack terrified couple Page 3
>> Holiday ends with rollover (pic crashed car and caravan). Page 4
Thursday, October 2

>> Drug Shock – I saw brazen dealer in action. Page 1
>> Shot fired through couple’s door, Police hunt gunman; Page 2
>> Drug deal out in the open; Expert teams probes crash. Page 3
Wednesday, October 1

>> Crop duster dies in crash (with picture of plane wreckage). Page 1
Tuesday, September 30

>> What a Waste, Millions of litres lot as vandals hit school.
>> NiteLife – Find out who was partying . Page 1
Monday, September 29

>> Serial nuisance bares buttocks at police: Full moon lands a teenager in jail. Brake mix-up, car smashes into shop (with photograph; Page 1
>> Hoon levels old man’s fence (with pictures of damaged fence and car); Page 3
>> Black activist sets new sights on Coon Cheese. Page 5
Saturday, September 27

>> Racism row flares. Black activist seeks $10.000 for hurt, suffering; Page 1
>> Teen speedster grounded. Page 2
>> Hotel ban for unruly three. Page 5
Friday, September 26

Worse still about The Chronicle is that demand for its advertising now crams the paper with full page advertising, so overflowing its main editions that the paper has now taken on a role as distributor for junk mail.

The Chronicle is a regional newspaper monopoly with a massive revenue volume. Its Saturday edition is splendidly printed and produced.

What a pity for Toowoomba that its news content has so deteriorated since the APN takeover – with imported editors, five of them one after the other, none of them with any connection to the city TOGETHER WITH an irrecoverable loss of expert reporting staff who knew a great deal about the exciting community they were part of.

“Do newspapers have a future?” asks Michael Gawenda of The Age. “And how long is that future? Well, I ask you to imagine Melbourne without The Age and the Herald Sun or Sydney without the Herald and The Daily Telegraph. Imagine Australia without The Australian.”

Perhaps the people of Toowoomba should ask themselves whether The Chronicle of today is as much loved and respected as it was in the past. As one reader of this newsletter, a farmer, emailed to me this morning – “In our household, we call it the Chronically ill”. Another long term subscriber who bought the paper for its local news, has cancelled the family's long-time subscription because she feels the graphic detail of crime was too traumatic for her children to read.

If you can imagine a newspaperless Toowoomba, that is in part because of Australian Provincial Newspapers’ failure to produce newspapers that attract the sort of fierce and lifelong loyalty they once attracted.

NEXT WEEK: More analysis of community expectations of the role of its community newspaper.