Peri Strathearn had been working for a newspaper called the Murray Valley Standard for more than eight years when COVID came along: “I found out on April 14, 2020, that I was going to be stood down from my job on April 20, and I launched Murray Bridge News on April 23.”
He didn’t know if his old newspaper would come back, but he knew that in the city he lives in, Murray Bridge, and the surrounding region, there wasn’t any local news serving around 35,000 residents.
“The community still needed information, especially during the early days of the pandemic. So there was a need and I resolved to meet that need by basically continuing to write the story as I was writing, but just on my own platform,” says Peri, who spoke with me recently via Zoom.
He launched on Substack as an email-based publication with a website. Asked about initial investment, Peri responds: “Just my blood, sweat and tears.”
Three weeks after his launch, he introduced a paywall and a subscription model.
“I had hoped that I might be able to get perhaps 250 paying subscribers by the end of that year,” he says. However, support from the community materialized fast, with 250 subscribers in just nine weeks. While he didn’t make much money in the first 12 months, he succeeded in laying a platform for future local community service.
When Substack launched its local news program in 2021, Murray Bridge News was one of only 12 newsrooms across the world that Substack supported with a grant.
“We were very much the smallest publication to receive funding through that program,” he says. “Still, that gave us enough cash in the bank to open an office, hire a part-time journalist and buy myself a functioning car so I can get around to report on things, which helped. And yeah, we’ve had a charmed life since then, really.”
Today, Murray Bridge News relies on diverse revenue streams—they received modest public funding support; various grants from Substack, Meta, and the Walkley Foundation in Australia; “some pocket money” from Google; and support from subscribers and advertisers.
“Our rule is that all of our content is paywalled except for most of it. So in the end, about 30% of our content is paywalled,” he explains. “These are stories that we spend a bit more time researching and reporting, but we don’t paywall anything that’s public interest journalism. So anything about elections or health and safety or police news—you know, things that people need to know—we make it all free to access.”
Still, advertising has been the biggest revenue stream. With subscriptions introduced early on, they’ve worked to build up their advertising base by expanding into different channels. That required moving from Substack to Ghost to allow web advertisement on their site. While advertising is a big revenue for publishers around Australia, small local publishers struggle to get advertisers on board, especially in areas such as Murray Bridge, which don’t attract big business.
“Much advertising revenue goes to Google and Meta, like anywhere else in the world. We have programmatic, we have Google AdSense on our website, which makes us nothing. Most of our ad clients are through direct relationships; we get occasional bookings from media buying agencies, but it’s mostly local clients who we find ourselves.”
Murray Bridge News is registered as a social enterprise, which means they are committed to reinvesting profits into their purpose. And their purpose is to serve the local community, via email and website, a quarterly magazine, a business award, events, and more. This is all done by just two people: in addition to Peri, who serves as journalist and editor, another team member, Jane Intini, is responsible for revenue and events.
“We just generally try to be out and about in the community as much as we can,” says Peri. They use opportunities to meet their readers offline, such as hosting a breakfast event with their local member of parliament or taking photos at social events and publishing them on their website.
Murraylands Business Awards is another event format, a major dinner gala event open to all local businesses or businesses that are based within their readership area.
“It’s all publicly nominated and publicly voted. So there’s a first stage where people will submit their nominations, and then we have a top five finalists in each category. There’s no judging; it’s a popularity contest, but people still get very excited about it.”
Different audience segments are reached through different channels: “Our email edition kind of goes to an older readership, the people who are traditionally most interested in local news and council and things like that. For our social media channels, obviously, our following is younger. And we also publish a quarterly lifestyle magazine as well, just for the people who love print.”
They also operate Murray Bridge News Network, a network of approximately 15 screens in doctors’ waiting rooms, shops, and cafes, where people can see a slideshow of their content.
“The screen network reaches all kinds of people within the community, including people who are traditionally news avoiders. It’s a way of reaching people who might not ever choose to read news online, but they’ll sit in a cafe and order a coffee and they might see what we’re up to.”
The biggest problem facing small independent local publishers in Australia, as in other parts of the world, is a lack of revenue. In addition to other challenges—such as the whims of algorithms on social media platforms, or the unwillingness of a certain cohort of people to pay for online news—independent publishers in particular get bypassed by both the government and by the big corporations, Peri says. “They would rather deal with the large national networks of publications, newspaper chains, and radio chains, rather than dealing with little individual publishers. So that’s been a real major challenge.”
He says that LINA—the Local & Independent News Association, which is a Project Oasis research partner in Australia—is “working to overcome this on a collective basis.”
Murray Bridge News was one of the first two members of LINA. Peri was involved in the meetings that led to LINA being established, and has been on the board of LINA for a couple of years. This year’s LINA summit, which united 120 delegates from all over Australia, was hosted in Murray Bridge.
“I do tend to be quite active in that community of publishers,” he says. “I’m always happy to share what I know and what we’ve learned with other people and steal ideas from them. And I think that’s the way that little independent publishers grow: by working with each other.”
At the end of our conversation, we touch upon politics. Peri talks about how polarization is coming to his community: immigration as a main topic is spilling over from the national level, while the cost of living is making people angry. Local news service is crucial for bringing people together and making space for shared understanding. But to thrive, it needs additional support.
“In a community of this size, ideally, we’d be able to have a three-person team,” Peri concludes.” I’d be happy with that, but I think more support from advertisers and from the government is needed to make that happen.”