About Tasmanian Times

Tasmanian Times

Tasmanian Times is an independent online news platform based in Hobart, publishing at tasmaniantimes.com since 2002. Founded and edited for most of its life by former Mercury journalist Lindsay Tuffin, it became one of Australia's earliest and most distinctive experiments in online independent journalism: a lightly moderated forum where Tasmanians could publish news, opinion and comment outside the reach of the state's concentrated mainstream press. During the long and bitter battle over the Gunns pulp mill in the Tamar Valley, it was the indispensable alternative news source for a community that felt locked out of its own newspapers.

Overview

Tasmanian Times operates as an open publishing platform with a Tasmanian focus, carrying reader-contributed articles, commentary and debate across politics, environment, arts and community affairs. Its founding philosophy was anti-censorship to the nth degree: in an era before social media, it offered a place to publish with few filters and to argue through comment threads, at a time when no comparable outlet existed in the state. The site's significance lies less in conventional reporting than in its function as a public square. For Tasmanians campaigning on forestry, planning, integrity in public life and other causes that struggled for airtime in the mainstream press, logging on to the site became a daily ritual — a place to read the unabridged version of what politicians and corporations were saying, to vent, to organise and to find the stories the newspapers would not touch. Its readership was never mass-market, but its influence repeatedly travelled well beyond its pages, with international outlets including France's Le Figaro picking up its stories of Tasmanian controversies.

History

The site was founded in 2002 by Lindsay "Linz" Tuffin, a former journalist with Hobart's Mercury newspaper who had grown disillusioned with the constraints of the mainstream press. Tasmania's media landscape made the venture both necessary and precarious: the state's three newspapers — the Mercury, the Examiner and the Advocate — were widely perceived as speaking with one voice on the issues that mattered most, particularly forestry. Tuffin set out to bypass that consensus entirely, creating an alternative approach to media that gave voice to those struggling to get airtime or with access to none.

The timing placed Tasmanian Times at the centre of the defining Tasmanian political saga of the 2000s: the campaign by timber giant Gunns to build what would have been the biggest pulp mill in the southern hemisphere in the Tamar Valley. The site became the go-to website for campaigners on both sides of a fight that dominated Tasmanian headlines for over a decade. In February 2006, just before a state election was called, Tasmanian Times ran the story that everybody in the media knew but no one would touch: an account alleging that the premier of the day had received kickbacks from a construction company subsidiary of the monopolistic logging company, in connection with political favours around the pulp mill proposal. Whether or not readers accepted every allegation, the episode captured the site's role — publishing what the mainstream would not, and forcing debate into the open. Tributes after Tuffin's death recalled that with all three state newspapers openly supporting both Gunns and the mill, it was hard to get an unbiased and accurate account of the air and water quality, pollution, forestry practices and health questions the proposal raised; Tasmanian Times was where those side issues were aired in full.

The site's journalism earned recognition beyond the activist community. Greens leader Bob Brown praised Tuffin for exposés of what he called the corrupt, bigoted and downright nasty figures blighting Tasmania's future, saying the site had put a brighter light in the cavern of politics and business. Academic researchers took notice too: a 2006 study examined the site as a case study in independent news websites, and Tuffin appeared on a 2010 Melbourne Writers Festival panel on innovators and citizen journalists online. The psephologist Kevin Bonham contributed detailed election analysis to the site, giving it a reputation for serious electoral coverage alongside its campaigning edge. When the community campaign finally prevailed and Gunns went bankrupt, the site's central mission receded, but it continued as a forum for Tasmanian debate. Tuffin remained a vivid Hobart character — arriving at the 2016 Tamar Valley Writers Festival, where he appeared as a guest panellist, in full leather bikie gear on his motorbike — and his death in 2024 prompted warm tributes from across Tasmania's political and cultural life, including from the Tasmanian Greens MPs who credited him with pioneering independent online media in the state.

Content and Programming

The site's content has always been a hybrid of contributed journalism, opinion and open comment. Tuffin published pieces from regular contributors and one-off writers, alongside his own reporting and commentary, and the comment threads beneath articles functioned as Tasmania's most freewheeling political forum. Coverage centred on the issues the mainstream was perceived to neglect or soft-pedal: forestry and the pulp mill above all, but also planning decisions, government integrity, environmental regulation, and the arts and cultural life of Hobart. Electoral analysis, notably Kevin Bonham's detailed Legislative Council and state election coverage, gave the site a psephological depth unusual for a small independent outlet. The editorial stance was openly sceptical of power — of governments, of Gunns and the forestry industry, and of the media consensus — and the site's willingness to publish allegations and documents that others deemed too risky was both its distinction and its controversy. Supporters described it as an essential public service; critics saw recklessness. What is not in dispute is that it changed what could be said in public in Tasmania.

Coverage and Audience

Tasmanian Times serves Tasmania, with Hobart as its base and its concerns. Its audience during the pulp mill years comprised environmental campaigners, concerned residents, journalists mining it for leads, politicians monitoring the debate, and ordinary Tasmanians seeking an account of their state's affairs outside the newspaper consensus. The site's influence was disproportionate to its traffic: stories broken or amplified there travelled into the mainstream press, into parliament and overseas. The Poll Bludger, the influential election-analysis blog, deferred to its Tasmanian Legislative Council coverage as the definitive online commentary. For readers who felt the state's media ran on silence and fear — in the phrase of one tribute — the site was a rare venue where dissent could be published and debated in the open, anonymously or under an alias if necessary.

Ownership

Tasmanian Times was founded, owned and edited by Lindsay Tuffin from 2002 until his death in 2024, a one-person operation in the classic mould of the early independent web. It had no corporate owner, no newsroom staff and no paywall; its economy was Tuffin's own labour and the voluntary contributions of its writers and commenters. That independence was the point: answerable to no proprietor and no advertiser of consequence, the site could publish what it chose. The model was sustainable only through the founder's dedication, and the site's future after his passing is the open question facing many founder-led independent publications. The name itself carries history: an earlier Tasmanian Times, a tri-weekly newspaper published in Hobart by Donald Macmillan from 1867 to 1870 and now digitised on Trove, lends the modern site a lineage its founder would likely have appreciated — another small, independent Tasmanian paper speaking outside the consensus.

Digital Presence

The tasmaniantimes.com website is the entirety of the publication's platform: a straightforward, text-led site built for reading and commenting rather than multimedia display. Its archive, stretching back to 2002, constitutes a remarkable primary source for the political and environmental history of Tasmania in the 2000s and 2010s — the pulp mill years, in particular, are documented there in a fullness found nowhere else. The site's pages are preserved in the Australian Web Archive, ensuring that record survives regardless of the site's future. Distribution has always been direct: readers came to the site itself rather than encountering its journalism through social algorithms, a relationship that predated and outlasted the social media era. For a publication founded on the belief that Tasmanians deserved an unfiltered press, the website remains the artefact — two decades of open publishing from the island's most stubborn independent voice.