About The Cobar Weekly

The Cobar Weekly

Overview

The Cobar Weekly is the local newspaper of Cobar, a mining town in the far west of New South Wales, and the community newspaper of record for Cobar Shire. First printed on 6 February 1986, it is an independently published weekly that has served the town and its surrounding pastoral and mining districts for four decades, reaching the 40th anniversary of its first edition in February 2026. Since the closure of its historic rival, The Cobar Age, in November 2012, the Weekly has been Cobar's only local newspaper. It publishes in print each week and maintains a website, cobarweekly.com.au, carrying local news and funeral notices. The paper is a member of Country Press Australia, the industry association for independent country publishers, and its masthead is listed among the constituent publications of the Australian Press Council in that body's September 2026 register. Media monitoring recorded the Weekly publishing stories in March and August 2026, confirming it remains in active operation.

History

Cobar's newspaper history stretches back to The Cobar Herald, established in 1879 by T. A. Mathews, a figure better known as the "King of Louth", when the town was booming on copper. The Herald changed hands several times, owned and edited in the 1890s by Hannay and Munro, and by the late 1920s it was known as the Western Age, under owners George Cornelius Maliphant and Sidney Frank Anderson. The Western Age continued until 1963, when the name was changed to The Cobar Age, which published for more than a century before its last edition appeared on 7 November 2012. The Cobar Weekly began in a different era: its first issue was printed on 6 February 1986, giving the town a second, community-focused paper alongside the long-established Age. For more than two decades the two titles published side by side, the Weekly building its identity around close-to-the-ground community coverage.

The Weekly itself reported the end of the older line, publishing an account of the Age's closure under the headline "Loss of a newspaper ends more than a century of history" on 31 October 2012. From that point the Weekly carried the full responsibility of recording Cobar's public life. It has continued through the cycles of the mining industry on which the town depends, including the operations of local copper and gold mines, droughts, and the COVID-19 period, and in February 2026 it passed forty years of continuous community publishing since that first 1986 edition.

Programming and Content

The Weekly's pages are devoted to the life of a small outback mining community. Council affairs, mining industry news and employment, health services and visiting specialists, and the concerns of pastoralists in the surrounding district are recurring themes. In March 2026, for example, monitoring services recorded the paper reporting on a group of visiting medical and allied health students who were welcomed to Cobar and given a favourable impression of the town, a story typical of its attention to the recruitment and retention of health professionals in remote communities.

Community and sporting coverage is extensive. The paper reports local golf, bowls, rugby league and the Cobar picnic races; an August 2026 story recorded by monitoring services covered a double win for a local trainer at the picnic races meeting, complete with presentations by the Cobar Miners Race Club president. It covers events such as the Grey Mardi Gras festival, school activities and the work of local organisations. In March 2025 the paper's editor, Sharon Harland, was master of ceremonies at an International Women's Day morning tea hosted in Cobar by Aurelia Metals and the Cobar Business Association, at which local businesswomen spoke about building enterprises in the town and about gender inequality in sport and a girls' motorsport mentoring program, an illustration of the central place the paper and its staff hold in the town's civic life. The Weekly also carries funeral notices, a record-keeping function of particular importance in a small and close-knit community, and its journalists have shared the stories of Cobar residents with wider audiences. When the Outback Outloud podcast, a collaboration between Signal Creative and Outback Arts, recorded a series in Cobar in 2021, Weekly staff member Leonie McCosker joined the workshops to talk about her experiences growing up in the town, where, as she put it, the town common was her playground. The paper remains a first point of contact for organisations visiting the district: when the Regional Architecture Association held its "Reflections" gathering in Cobar in September 2026, bringing practitioners from across Australia to discuss town revitalisation, housing and climate, its president spoke with The Cobar Weekly about the event.

Audience and Reach

The Weekly's audience is the population of Cobar and Cobar Shire, a remote local government area in far western New South Wales centred on the mining town at the crossroads of the Barrier Highway and the Kidman Way. It is classified in the Public Interest Journalism Initiative's news-mapping research as a local print outlet serving the Cobar community. Readership extends to the farming and station families of the surrounding district and to former residents who follow the paper's website from elsewhere. As the town's only newspaper since 2012, it functions as the principal published record of local government decisions, community sport, births, deaths and milestones for the district.

Digital Presence

The paper's website, cobarweekly.com.au, publishes local news stories and funeral notices and serves readers beyond the town, including the district's widespread station population and former residents. The site has carried the paper's reporting for many years; its stories from the early 2020s, such as coverage of the opening of the Cobar Sound Chapel, remain part of the town's published record. Monitoring services continued to detect the paper's stories online in 2026, including its March 2026 report on visiting medical students and its August 2026 picnic races coverage, and in September 2026 the Regional Architecture Association reported speaking with The Cobar Weekly during its gathering in Cobar, evidence of the paper's continuing role as the town's working newsroom.

Ownership and Organisation

The Cobar Weekly is an independently published community newspaper. It belongs to Country Press Australia, the association representing independent country newspaper publishers, whose submission to the 2024 Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society listed The Cobar Weekly among its 44 New South Wales member mastheads. The paper also adheres to the standards framework of the Australian Press Council, whose September 2026 list of constituent bodies includes The Cobar Weekly among the mastheads published by its publisher members. The newsroom is small and locally based; Sharon Harland was identified as the paper's editor in March 2025, and staff such as Leonie McCosker have represented the paper in community projects. No parent media company is publicly associated with the title, and none is asserted here.

Contact and Availability

The Cobar Weekly is published weekly in print in Cobar and distributed through the town and district. Its website is cobarweekly.com.au, which carries local news and funeral notices and provides the paper's contact point for news tips, advertising and community announcements. In the early 2000s an archived New South Wales government register listed the paper at PO Box 43, Cobar NSW 2835, with the telephone number (02) 6836 2616; its current contact details are published on its website.