Illawarra Mercury Wollongong Australia

The Illawarra Mercury has been around for a while. Since 1855 in fact. To put that in perspective, that’s 70 years before the establishment of the Port Kembla Steelworks, for which the Wollongong region is now synonymous. So does longevity in the newspaper business matter? You bet it does. It’s a sign of commitment, of relevance, of value, and an indication of how the Mercury has been able to adapt to changes across more than a century and a half and maintain the loyalty of generations of readers. We must be doing something right.

In those early days founder Thomas Garrett and his father John were committed to community advocacy as much as providing a conduit for news and information. Campaigning for better roads, John said that unless residents demanded attention, the region would be reduced to “a system of primitive barbarism”. He also reported heavily on the courts saying readers would “do right, when they know if they do otherwise it will be recorded in the columns of the Mercury”.

More than 160 years later, the Mercury continues to lead community campaigns, and while the state of the roads remains a prominent issue, the paper has taken up many other causes in recent times, the continued downgrading of the health system among the most prominent. There is no doubt that newspaper journalism is at its most effective when fighting for its community. As for court reporting, Garrett’s observation remains the same, no-one wants to see their names appear in our court coverage.