Guardian Australia expands reporting teams – here’s why
Guardian Australia is expanding its coverage of state news via a new section of its homepage in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.
Each state now hosts a larger reporting team and geo-targeted local content relevant for readers on the ground.
This comes at a time where local news reporting in Australia’s regional areas is extremely limited, despite often being the only source for local news according to the recent parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s regional news services.
The expansion, which is being funded by the Google News Initiative, will allow a team of nine to extend the Guardian’s rigorous, progressive reporting of state politics and issues such as education, health, transport and energy. A team of nine journalists and editors have been hired to deliver the coverage, with hopes to expand to more states in future.
Guardian Australia managing director, Dan Stinton, MD, told Mumbrella: “It’s important to realise that The Guardian was already growing strongly in Australia, so the deals with the platforms have simply accelerated the investment that we would have made in subsequent years into a shorter time frame.
“This has significantly increased our journalism output across text, podcasting and video, while enabling us to distribute our content more effectively, which has resulted in a substantial increase in our audience. This has directly boosted both our reader support and advertising, but there’s still a lot more we can achieve, so we are planning on much more growth in the future.”
Guardian’s associate editor, State News, Conal Hanna said: “Guardian Australia’s newly appointed state correspondents will help drive the expansion. They are Michael McGowan in New South Wales, Benita Kolovos in Victoria, and Ben Smee in Queensland. We are hoping to expand the program to other states and territories in future.”
App readers are unfortunately unable to change their state at this time, however this functionality is coming.
While not all states are part of the initial launch, readers in any state can keep across the latest news in their state by bookmarking the following topic pages
App readers can also add these topic pages to their home screen.
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