About Tennant Creek Today

Tennant Creek Today

Overview

Tennant Creek Today is a weekly newspaper serving Tennant Creek and the wider Barkly Region of the Northern Territory, one of the most sparsely populated newspaper markets in Australia. It was launched on 3 October 2024 by the Today News Group, an independent regional publishing group, and it restored a locally focused print voice to the Barkly only weeks after the region's previous weekly closed. The Public Interest Journalism Initiative (PIJI), which tracks changes in Australian news production, recorded Tennant Creek Today as a new outlet effective 3 October 2024 and described it as a new weekly newspaper published by the Today News Group covering the Barkly Region.

The paper publishes in print for the Tennant Creek community and reproduces its editions as digital editions on its website, tennantcreektoday.com.au. It works in conjunction with its sister paper, The Centralian Today of Alice Springs, which the Today News Group launched a year earlier. The publisher says the two papers aim to produce, in its own words, "objective, apolitical news with a hyper-local mantra" for their Central Australian communities. In a region where the nearest metropolitan newsrooms are hundreds of kilometres away, Tennant Creek Today is the only newspaper produced specifically for the Barkly, with the Darwin-based NT News the only other newspaper covering the region, according to PIJI's assessment at the time of the launch.

History

Tennant Creek Today is a young newspaper, and its history begins with a gap. Until August 2024 the Barkly's local weekly was the Tennant & District Times. PIJI's Australian News Data Report for October 2024 records that the Tennant & District Times closed on 16 August 2024, leaving the region without a local masthead. The same report announced the arrival of its replacement: Tennant Creek Today began publishing on 3 October 2024, roughly seven weeks later, under the Today News Group.

The launch followed a path the group had already proven in Alice Springs. Alice Springs lost its local newspaper, the Centralian Advocate, in June 2020, when News Corp Australia ended the title's print publication after it had served the town since 1947. The town then went more than three years without a local paper. A group of Alice Springs locals, led by businesswoman Libby Prell, established the Mparntwe Alice Springs Community Foundation in May 2023 — the first community foundation in the Northern Territory — with the explicit aim of attracting a newspaper back to the town. The foundation committed to buying a page of advertising in each weekly edition of a new paper to give it a threshold of support. After discussions with the Today News Group, the Centralian Today was announced in June 2023 and its inaugural edition was published on 31 August 2023.

That Alice Springs experiment — a commercial independent publisher working in partnership with a community foundation — was documented in an academic study published in Media International Australia, which examined how the town's residents responded to the return of a local newspaper. The study noted the paper was praised for its sport and positive community coverage, while also recording the practical difficulty of staffing a remote newsroom: at the time of the research, the Centralian Today's editor was working from South Australia. Tennant Creek Today, launched thirteen months after its Alice Springs sister, extended the same model north to the Barkly, giving the Today group two weekly mastheads in Central Australia.

Programming and Content

Tennant Creek Today's editorial territory is the Barkly: the town of Tennant Creek itself and the pastoral stations, roadhouses and Aboriginal communities spread across the surrounding region. Its coverage, as the publisher describes it, is built around the everyday life of that community — local government through the Barkly Regional Council, schools, health services, police and court matters, mining and pastoral industry news, sport, and the community events, funerals and celebrations that fill a small remote town's calendar.

The editions the paper publishes online show this hyper-local mix in practice. Its digital edition of 21 May 2026, for example, carried a feature by reporter Jasmin Afianos about a newly published book capturing the life of a Warumungu man, Teddy Plummer — the kind of local-life story, grounded in the town's Aboriginal heritage, that rarely appears in Territory-wide media. Tennant Creek is a town where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people made up 55.3 per cent of residents at the 2021 census, and the paper's pages reflect that readership: coverage of Indigenous community life, culture and organisations sits alongside council and industry news as a core part of the mix rather than a specialist sideline.

Because the paper is produced within a small publishing group, it also draws on the resources of its sister title. The two Today mastheads in the Territory share the group's production systems and can carry material of Central Australian interest across both papers, while each maintains its own local front page and community focus. The publisher describes the editorial aim as capturing "the essence of this important part of Australia, delivering news that truly matters" to people in the Barkly.

Audience and Reach

Tennant Creek Today's audience is small in number and vast in geography. The Barkly Regional Council puts the Barkly Region's area at 322,713 square kilometres — comparable to the size of a European country — with a population of almost 7,400 people. Tennant Creek, the region's main town and service centre, recorded a population of 2,949 at the 2021 census, with a median age of 33. Roughly ninety per cent of the region's people live in or around the Tennant Creek township, with the remainder spread across communities such as Elliott, Ali Curung, Alpurrurulam and Ampilatwatja and hundreds of pastoral properties, many of them a day's drive from the paper's office.

That geography shapes the paper's role. For cattle stations on the Barkly Tableland, for roadhouse operators along the Stuart and Barkly highways, and for Aboriginal communities across the region, a weekly paper produced in Tennant Creek is one of the few media outlets that reports on the Barkly Regional Council, the local hospital and schools, and regional issues such as roads, mining development and land management from the community's own vantage point. The region's economy rests on cattle, mining — Tennant Creek grew up on the 1930s gold rushes and the area is still promoted as the "golden heart of the Territory" — and government services, and the paper's readership is drawn from all three.

No independently audited circulation figure for Tennant Creek Today has been published, and the paper's reach should be understood in the context of its market: a weekly whose potential print audience is measured in the low thousands, extended online through its digital editions, which can be read anywhere by former residents and by the many people with family and work ties to the Barkly.

Digital Presence

The paper's website, tennantcreektoday.com.au, is the centre of its digital operation. Rather than a conventional rolling news site, the site is organised around the print product: its "All Digital Editions" archive presents complete editions of the paper to read online, an approach suited to a readership spread across enormous distances and to former locals who have moved away. The archive demonstrates the paper's continuity — an edition dated 21 May 2026, carrying locally reported features across multiple pages, is among those published there — and new editions are added as the paper appears each week.

The website also connects Tennant Creek Today to its sister masthead. The digital editions bring the Tennant Creek paper together with the Centralian Today under the group's Central Australian banner, so a reader who follows one Territory title can move to the other. Community organisations use the paper's channels as well: the National Trust of Australia's Northern Territory newsletter of September 2026, for example, thanked the Tennant Creek paper for the local newspaper coverage it gave the Trust's Tennant Creek branch activities. The Today News Group's own website profiles the paper alongside The Centralian Today, presenting the pair as the group's Central Australian newspapers.

Ownership and Organisation

Tennant Creek Today is published by the Today News Group. The group is an independent Australian regional publishing business that has grown by launching and acquiring community newspapers, frequently in towns where an earlier paper had closed or was under threat. According to industry reporting by GXpress, Today News Group developed as a group of related regional publishing companies, often with local people involved, supported by the experience and systems of Star News Group and its associated businesses. Its associated companies include SA Today, which publishes mastheads in South Australia and the Northern Territory, and the group's leading figures include fourth-generation newspaper publisher Paul Thomas — whose family owns the Pakenham Gazette in Victoria — and media strategist Damian Morgan.

Within the Northern Territory, the group's footprint consists of The Centralian Today in Alice Springs and Tennant Creek Today. The Alice Springs paper operates in the distinctive partnership described above, in which the Mparntwe Alice Springs Community Foundation supports the title by purchasing a weekly page. Academic researchers who studied the Centralian Today's first year described the Today News Group as an independent Australian media company and documented both the community's high expectations of the paper and the group's difficulty recruiting journalists to work in remote Central Australia — challenges that shape how a small group staffs a paper like Tennant Creek Today as well, with editorial work shared across the group's offices and its sister newsroom.

Contact and Availability

Tennant Creek Today is published weekly in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory, and serves the town and the Barkly Region. The current edition and an archive of past digital editions can be read on the paper's website at tennantcreektoday.com.au, where readers can also find the publisher's contact details for news tips, advertising and subscriptions. The paper's publisher, the Today News Group, profiles the title on its own website at todaynewsgroup.com.au. Community groups, sporting clubs and businesses across the Barkly can contact the paper through the website to submit news and events for publication. Print copies are distributed in Tennant Creek and around the region the paper covers.