About Mackay and Whitsunday Life

Mackay and Whitsunday Life

Overview

Mackay and Whitsunday Life is a free weekly print newspaper serving the Mackay and Whitsunday regions of North Queensland, published by Core Publishing and Events as the flagship title of the Life Publishing Group. It appears in print each week and as a free digital edition online, in a colourful A4 format built around community news, sport, entertainment and local achievement. The paper circulates from the city of Mackay through the Whitsunday coast — Airlie Beach, Cannonvale, Proserpine and Bowen — and inland to the rural and coal-mining districts behind the coast. It describes itself, in its Queensland Country Press Association member profile, as "your weekly voice in print", an explicitly positive and non-political platform for local stories. The title in its current combined form dates from September 2021, when the group's two original weekly papers, Mackay Life and Whitsunday Life, were merged into a single publication. It is one of a small number of locally owned print newspapers launched in regional Queensland after the major chains withdrew from print in 2020, and it remains in weekly publication: content monitoring recorded fresh Mackay and Whitsunday Life items, including a gig guide for 27 February 2026 and Bowen Turf Club's confirmed 2026 racing dates, in February 2026.

History

The Life Publishing Group began as a magazine publisher and had been operating for about thirteen years by late 2024, according to its own published accounts. Its move into newspapers came in 2020, the year News Corp Australia's mid-2020 restructure closed or ended the print editions of fourteen regional Queensland newspapers, among them Mackay's Daily Mercury, which had served the city as a daily for generations and continued only as a digital subscription product. Into that gap, the group launched two free weekly papers, Mackay Life and Whitsunday Life, one for each half of the region. In September 2021 the two were combined into Mackay and Whitsunday Life, a merger recorded in the Public Interest Journalism Initiative's Australian Newsroom Mapping Project report for February 2022, which noted the combined title as a news magazine put out by Core Publishing and Events. The publishing group expanded the same model north and south in the following years: Burdekin Life was launched in 2023 for the Ayr and Home Hill district, and Hinchinbrook Life followed in November 2024 for the Ingham district, alongside the group's bi-monthly magazines Core Life and Tripping Magazine. In May 2024 Mackay and Whitsunday Life won Best Free Newspaper in Queensland at the Queensland Country Press Awards, an award accepted on the night by the group's founder, Bec Douthwaite, and its editor-in-chief, Rachael Smith. The following year the paper, under its Whitsunday Life name, won the Regional Game Changer award at the 2025 Whitsunday Business Awards, whose citation credited the group with proving that local print media is still deeply valued in regional communities, and described it as having grown in five years into an award-winning, sustainable and innovative regional media company.

Programming and Content

The paper's editorial formula is deliberately community-centred and upbeat. Its publisher describes it as an inspiring, non-political platform containing uplifting stories and supporting community causes, and its regular contents include local community news, sporting achievements and results, entertainment coverage, restaurant reviews, a gig guide, public notices and creative and business profiles. Monitoring of its output in early 2026 shows that mix in practice: bowls club reports from Wangaratta and Airlie Beach, planning coverage for the Whitsunday Writers Festival, a recreated iconic festival at the Airlie Beach Hotel, profiles of local creative practitioners, heritage sporting features and the paper's weekly gig guide. School, club and council news from across the two regions fills out each edition, and the full-colour A4 production — sharp imagery on vibrant paper stock, in the publisher's words — is designed as a showcase for the region's lifestyle, covering what the publisher calls the city lights of Mackay, the vibrant Whitsunday coast, the verdant rural districts and the coalfields. Editor-in-chief Rachael Smith has summarised the group's editorial philosophy as a belief that community news should be uplifting: there to connect the community, document local history as it happens and become a source of local pride.

Audience and Reach

The combined Mackay–Isaac–Whitsunday statistical region counted about 181,000 people at the 2021 census, including 37,152 in the Whitsunday Regional Council area, and the paper's distribution is built to span that whole footprint, from Mackay's suburbs to Bowen in the north and the mining towns of the Isaac hinterland. Print copies are free to pick up at multiple local distribution points across the region, and the digital edition is free to read on desktop, tablet and phone. Audience figures published for the group as a whole — and presented here as its own claims — give a sense of the operation's scale: accepting the 2025 Whitsunday Business Awards, the Life Publishing Group was credited with printing more than 22,000 copies a week across its three weekly newspapers, with 25,000 unique website visitors and 18,000 social followers. No audited circulation figure for Mackay and Whitsunday Life alone is published. The paper operates in a market that has become notably competitive since 2020: alongside it, Mackay gained the independent Mackay Local News and Mackay Regional News, and News Corp later returned the Daily Mercury to print as a weekly edition, so the free Life title now competes with both independent and chain-owned print rivals for the region's readers and advertisers.

Digital Presence

The paper's website, mackayandwhitsundaylife.com, carries its news and features and hosts the free digital edition of the print paper, which readers can page through on any device; the publisher promotes the digital paper as a free-to-subscribe replica matched to the print product. Its stories are picked up by national news aggregators — NewsLocker's Mackay pages carried Mackay and Whitsunday Life items dated February 2026 — and the title maintains an active social media presence, with the group's social following put at 18,000 in its 2025 awards citation. The title is a member of the Queensland Country Press Association, whose member directory profiles it.

Ownership and Organisation

Mackay and Whitsunday Life is published by Core Publishing and Events Pty Ltd, the company behind the Life Publishing Group, an independent, locally owned publisher headquartered in the Whitsundays. The group was founded by Bec Douthwaite, and its newspapers are led editorially by editor-in-chief Rachael Smith. The registered owner named for the masthead on the Australian Communications and Media Authority's Register of Eligible News Businesses is Core Publishing and Events Pty Ltd, the same company recorded against its sister titles Burdekin Life, Mackay Life, Whitsunday Life and the group's Cassowary Coast title, The Observer. The group's newsroom produces the three Life weeklies and its two bi-monthly magazines from its Whitsunday base, and it is a member of the Queensland Country Press Association and Country Press Australia. It is not connected with News Corp's Daily Mercury or with the other independent Mackay titles.

Contact and Availability

Mackay and Whitsunday Life is published weekly and is free: print copies are available from distribution points across Mackay, the Whitsunday coast and the region's rural and mining towns, and the full edition can be read free online at mackayandwhitsundaylife.com, where the paper also publishes its news between editions. Readers and advertisers deal with the Life Publishing Group through the website and the paper's social channels.