Rumours of the death of regional news have been greatly exaggerated, according to Lucie Peart.
As managing director of Gilgandra Newspapers, Ms Peart is set to launch the group's fifth masthead in western NSW next month and is not the only one on the hunt for staff.
"We're trying to hire three positions … I think when I put my job [ads] up there might have been 200 other jobs with the title 'journalist'," she said.
"There are lots of jobs for journalists out there at the moment, which is great for our industry, but it just means that our resources are so stretched."
The media industry has been in a state of flux for much of the last decade.
From mass redundancies across legacy newsrooms to the announcement just last week that News Corp would be axing one in 20 staff at its Australian newspapers, the general feeling has been that news, especially in print, would go the way of the dodo.
But the headlines have been masking a parallel trend. While bigger companies closed up regional newsrooms or shifted to digital-only editions, local, community-owned news outlets have seen a small revival.
"Where print editions disappeared, towns have reached out to us as local publishers and said: We want you to come to our town," Ms Peart said.
Rivalling the 'big boys'
Federal and state government grants provided millions of dollars to help shore up regional media following the financial fallout of COVID-19 lockdowns.
It wasn't enough to save many non-daily mastheads, but it opened a door for some smaller publishers to scale up.
As president of the Country Press Association NSW, Lucie Peart saw her colleagues expand across multiple states.
"COVID did us a little bit of a favour in that it knocked down a bit of our competition," she said.
"One of the groups in our CPA network is probably rivalling some of the big boys for the sheer number of mastheads."
The difficulty now is finding reporters to keep up with this growth spurt.
The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) estimated 3,000 journalism jobs were lost between 2011 and 2017.
In addition to the huge disruption this caused for the industry, it painted an unappealing picture for many considering a career in media.
Senior Lecturer at Charles Sturt University Jock Cheetham has noticed a perception among some parents and students that journalism doesn't have much of a future as a career.
He disagrees.
"In 2022, I had quite urgent requests from people who just couldn't find staff from all kinds of regional areas," he said.
"The demand for junior to mid-level staff last year was really high, but the supply was not there."
Another factor that seems to be impacting the supply of available journalists is competition from the corporate world.
The New Beats Project, a study looking at the five-year aftermath of redundancies across media, found many left journalism for public relations-type roles and were unlikely to come back.
In a book, Journalists and Job Loss, produced as part of the project, writers stated:
"While many of our participants were moving back and forth between public relations roles and journalism across the life of the survey, in 2017, none of those who we classified as working in a PR role expected to work in news media again."
'People still want the news'
The CPA and Meta's Newsroom Sustainability and Digital Transformation Fund is helping local newsrooms grow more confident in the digital space.
While Facebook pages and websites are growing in popularity, managing editor of the Condobolin Argus Anne Coffey said advertisers were not yet confident in making the digital jump.
"Our digital footprint is growing but readers are still not prepared to pay for digital," she said.
But securing revenue isn't the biggest concern for the future. Finding, and keeping, the next generation of news makers is what keeps Ms Coffey up at night.
"I'd like to retire and sell the business but there isn't anyone really who can take over," she said.
"And people still want the news so I'll keep going while I can."
