Thank you, Southbank News

This is the last time you’ll read our column in the Southbank News, next time you see us in print it will be on a rotating basis in The Melburnian or monthly online.

We are incredibly grateful to Sean Car and his team for generously providing us space in Southbank News since our inception; it has been vitally important to spreading awareness about our organisation, the initiatives we’ve spearheaded and spreading the word about our community-building events and advocacy.

I worked at a community paper in the US for over five years as both an occasional columnist and full-time marketing director, so I know first-hand the toil and pressures of producing a newspaper with lean staffing as Sean Car has managed for not one, but five community papers each month.

In fact, it’s almost Herculean given the quality and breadth of stories the publications have covered, not simply through phone call interviews, but by attending events and sending photographers to document them so readers have a visual of being present as well.

The investment of sending a reporter to a three-hour meeting to produce a thoroughly vetted story takes on new meaning when one realises that just a few reporters were responsible for covering events in five separate communities.

In Southbank, Sean Car and his team took on tough issues from chronicling the devastating economic and social impacts during pandemic lockdowns, to scrutinising high-density growth and poorly regulated infrastructure, and reporting on local crime and complexities of vertical living.

The Southbank News played an important part in our organisation’s initiative to turn most of the granitic sand at the ACCA forecourt into a 900-square metre public park. His reporters were on hand at every step of the process, a complex undertaking that required buy-in from local and state governments, to document and share the evolving story. You can see it coming to fruition at present and we are sure it will be the focus of a story in The Melburnian when the park is finished.

As of late, Southbank News covered a rare opportunity to convert Victoria Barracks into a Prep to Year 12 campus. Their reporting has explored how such an investment would have positive implications beyond education and make up for failures in planning by successive governments in Southbank. A school campus would help reframe Southbank as a place to set up a long-term home, not just somewhere to live for a short period of time. We urge the entire community to get behind this demand that Sean and his team recognise. The Melburnian will be key to championing this important issue across all of Melbourne not just to Southbankers.

Of course, we are sad to see Southbank News go, but it is an inevitable step in the evolution of print media worldwide. We’re grateful that local reporting will continue, just under a new masthead and on a different scale. We dread the day that the only source of timely, localised reporting of events is on social media unvetted and subjectively delivered. Fortunately, there is a way we can help local reporting and The Melburnian thrive: pick up a print copy, read the online edition and share stories with friends. Thank you, Sean, and team from all of us at Southbank3006 for making Southbank a priority.

If you care about our community and the issues that impact on livability in Southbank, please join us at southbank3006.com. •