The New England Times was originally planned to be launched a year ago, before the federal election. It has been a long and winding road, but I am so very pleased to be formally launching the sites today and with the enormous response we have had in our ramp up period the past few weeks.
The New England Times is not a typical news business. For starters, we’re a not for profit, with social good objectives that are focused on giving the New England the quality, detailed news that the community needs and deserves. We still need to make money, but that goes to paying journalists to produce quality news… not to fund the lifestyle of some media mogul that lives somewhere else.
The origin of the New England Times was a strategy that I wrote in late 2021. The phoenix strategy, as I dubbed it, was drawing on the multiple surveys and other research I had done on the New England and a number of towns within the region, looking at the psychology and attitude of New Englanders with regard to politics, business, the future of their towns, and many other issues. It had three pillars to give the New England back her voice, heart and soul, reconnecting the region with a common identity and driving all of our communities towards a vibrant future.
There was an unmistakable thread through the research that was a bit murky and ill defined, yet was always there. It was a level of pessimism, or being a bit down, combined with mistrust of neighbours and leaders. This murky negative sentiment lingered, just below surface level, in most areas of the New England. Asked directly, people would say they loved where they lived and liked the people in their town, but the underlying depression seeped out in responses to the indirect questions and discussions.
After doing what’s called a grounded theory analysis on 6 years worth of surveys, focus groups, interviews and other data, it became clear that this theme of underlying pessimism was undeniably linked to one thing: the collapse of local media, and the consequential lack of information. It makes sense when you think about it – when people don’t know what’s going on in their town or their region, they doubt that anything is happening. When they don’t hear from local leaders, and/or there’s no independent reporting they can rely on to tell them the facts and not the spin, they don’t trust their leaders.
So of course, given the near complete collapse of local media throughout the New England, people were a bit down. Combined with the attacks from outsiders (thanks Barnaby!), and the continued loss of services from doctors to schools to banks to retail stores, that ‘feeling a bit down’ sentiment was settling in to a deep region-wide depression that our communities were doomed.
Those communities that had a tiny hyper-local paper like Narrabri, Guyra or Uralla weren’t as down as other centres, but the lack of connection with the bigger region, the loss of that identity as New Englanders, was really uniform.
So, that’s where the idea of the New England Times came from. Named in honour of a feisty publication that was one of the region’s first papers in the mid 1800’s, the New England Times has a clear mandate to reconnect the region and tell people what’s going on, and provide a platform for lively debate and discussion. Give New Englanders the information that they need and news they deserve, and give the New England back her voice.
But that’s not all we’re doing. Revived local media will give the New England back her voice, but we still need to revive her heart, and her soul.
To give the New England back her heart, we need to revive pride in the New England. This was, historically, always a region that people were proud to be a part of, it was different and better somehow, with rich traditions and so much to offer. Pride in our region predominantly comes from our products – what we make – and our community events – what we do (as well as the media reflection of those things, which is why the media comes first). So phase two of the strategy will be to establish a regional marketing organisation, that links all our wonderful events from the Country Music Festival to the Celtic Festival, Seasons of New England to Grazing on the Gwydir, and everything in between, into a single rich tapestry of what it means to be ‘New England’. This planned organisation will support existing events and the establishment of new events to fill up a whole year long calendar of activity around the region. Importantly, through the development of a regional brand, we can extend that idea and ownership of New England to products and businesses. So that anything made and done in the New England can be branded and sold as ‘New England’ – something special, better, different.
The third pillar of the strategy, and the most important one, is to give the New England back her soul by ensuring the health and wellbeing of our people and communities. Literally. A registered charity called New England Vital will be established, using any profits generated from the media company and the marketing company to subsidise and provide vital services and support throughout the New England. Whether it be access to bulk billing GPs, community transport, childcare, or affordable community spaces, it will be a community driven vehicle to get it done, led by a board of independent community leaders as all good charities should be. New England Vital will be designed to step up and keep our communities strong in whatever way is needed, and stop our great region being at the mercy of all levels of government who have failed us time and time again.
Parts two and three of the strategy will take a little time to become reality, as we need to take this one step at a time. But that’s the bigger picture.
Of course, I am disappointed that having presented this strategy to a number of stakeholders back in 2021, that it was cherry picked for the Armidale Regional Council’s plans. ARC has repeatedly demonstrated they couldn’t organise a beverage in a brewery, and their track record of discouraging business and destroying local events is seriously impressive… so yeah, no thanks. Hopefully IPART stops them from increasing rates to pay for the development of a regional brand and all the other things that they have no business doing, and they can focus on failing at road building.
We’re going to do this as a community. Together, for each other, for the New England.
Enormous thanks to three people who have been crucial to getting the idea this far: the amazingly talented journalist Tom Plevey, our business journo Morgan Kenyon who has just taken the lead on our advertorials and advertising and is so amazing to work with, and my long, long, long term friend and colleague Ingrid Rothe and her team at Vivid, without whom the original strategy would never have gotten on paper.