About The Hills Echo

The Hills Echo

Overview

The Hills Echo is a free community newsmagazine serving the Hills district of Brisbane's north-west — the suburbs of Arana Hills, Ferny Hills, Everton Hills, Bunya and Ferny Grove, in the City of Moreton Bay just beyond Brisbane's city boundary. It is published monthly by Echo News, an independently owned local media company, as one of three sister mastheads: The Hills Echo, The Eatons Echo for the Eatons Hill and Albany Creek area, and The Everton Echo. The company says the three publications together produce 45,000 copies per month.

The Echo brands itself a "community newsmagazine", and the description fits its format: a glossy monthly built around the people, clubs, schools, businesses and events of a defined suburban district rather than hard daily news. Editions run to more than forty pages, mixing community stories and profiles with local listings, event guides and advertising from the district's traders. The Hills Echo is listed among Queensland mastheads in the Australian Press Council's register of publisher-member publications dated September 2026, and its publisher continues to produce monthly editions of all three Echo titles — the Everton Echo's December 2025 edition and the Eatons Echo's June 2025 edition were both published as online flip-books, and Hills Echo content was still being syndicated to news aggregators as recently as December 2024.

History

Echo News dates its own service to Brisbane's north-west back to 1992: in the company's words, it "has been a trusted source of local news in the north-west districts of Brisbane since 1992", publishing independent and unbiased news intended to strengthen people's connections with their communities. The Hills Echo grew out of that local publishing base in the Hills district, the cluster of leafy, family suburbs that developed along the Samford Road corridor after the Second World War.

By 2013 the paper was established enough to appear in the district's civic life: the Ferny Hills Progress Association's Hills District and Bunya Garden Competition that year listed The Hills Echo among its sponsors, with an address at 21 Kolora Crescent, Ferny Hills — in the heart of the neighbourhood it covers. Over time the single Hills title was joined by companion editions for adjoining catchments, The Eatons Echo to the north and The Everton Echo, so that Echo News's print stable came to cover a contiguous belt of Brisbane's north-western suburbs suburb by suburb.

The three-title structure remains the group's model today. Each magazine keeps its own nameplate and community identity — the Hills Echo for the Arana Hills–Ferny Hills district — while sharing production, listings and advertising across the Echo News platform. In recent years the print editions have been matched by a growing digital operation: editions are published online as flip-books, and the group has added a business directory, an app and a weekly community podcast to the magazines.

Programming and Content

The Hills Echo's editorial formula is deliberately positive and parochial. As its publisher describes the three Echo magazines, each "celebrates the incredible people, places, businesses, clubs and organisations within their corresponding communities". In practice that means profiles of local achievers and volunteers, reports from the district's schools and sporting clubs, coverage of community events and festivals, council and development news affecting the Hills district, and seasonal features — its December coverage, for example, rounds up the district's Christmas markets and carol events across Arana Hills, Ferny Hills and neighbouring suburbs.

A local listings section is shared across all three Echo magazines, so a Hills Echo reader sees the trades, services and community notices of the wider north-west district as well as their own suburb. The magazines give community groups, clubs and businesses a standing invitation to showcase their monthly news, views and stories, and reader contributions form a significant part of the mix — the model of a newsmagazine written substantially with, as well as for, its neighbourhood.

Echo News states that, as an independently owned publisher, its magazines "reflect the views of the local community in an unbiased and non-political manner", and that its content aims to be, in its words, "local, intelligent, inspiring and important". The tone is that of a community noticeboard with editorial polish: school fetes and sporting triumphs sit alongside small-business features and the practical information — markets, classes, club fixtures, church and Probus club news — that suburban readers use to organise their month.

Audience and Reach

The Hills Echo is delivered free across its district, a settled suburban area of family homes, bushland reserves and village shopping centres about twelve kilometres north-west of the Brisbane CBD. Arana Hills, Ferny Hills, Everton Hills and Bunya form its core catchment, with Ferny Grove and the Samford valley fringe adjoining. The district is popular with families and retirees, and its readers are the households that the paper's advertisers — real estate agents, trades, cafés, medical and professional services in the local centres — want to reach.

Echo News puts the combined monthly production of its three print magazines at 45,000 copies per month, a figure the company publishes for its own titles; no independently audited circulation for The Hills Echo alone has been released. What the number indicates is scale: across the Hills, Eatons and Everton catchments, the Echo magazines are letterboxed to a substantial share of homes in Brisbane's north-west corridor each month, and the same content is extended online through the group's website, email campaigns and social channels. The paper's appearance in the Australian Press Council's September 2026 register of member mastheads confirms it remains an active, accountable publication within that market.

Digital Presence

The Hills Echo's digital home is the Echo News website at echo-news.com.au, which carries the group's news and community content for the north-west districts and presents its three print titles. Monthly editions are published as page-turning flip-books through FlipHTML5, so the December 2025 Everton Echo and the June 2025 Eatons Echo can be read in full online exactly as they appeared in print, and Hills Echo articles are distributed to news aggregation services as well.

Around the magazines, Echo News has built a small local media ecosystem. The Echo Directory, at echodirectory.com.au, is its online directory of local and loyal advertisers, promoted within the magazines' pages. The group produces "Talk of the Town", a weekly community podcast hosted by Von and Steve that shines a light, in its own description, on the stories that matter most in the north-west suburbs — local businesses, remarkable individuals and the places that make the community unique — and invites listeners to nominate stories. An Echo News app has also carried the group's publications and community content to mobile readers. For a three-title suburban publisher, the result is a print-and-digital platform in which the monthly magazine remains the flagship and everything else amplifies it.

Ownership and Organisation

The Hills Echo is published by Echo News, an independently owned local media company based in Brisbane's north-west. The company emphasises its independence: it describes itself as "proudly independently owned" and locally staffed — "we just don't talk about being local, we are local, we live it everyday", as its own profile puts it. Echo News is the publisher member behind its three mastheads, The Hills Echo, The Eatons Echo and The Everton Echo, all three of which are listed under its name in Queensland in the Australian Press Council's September 2026 register of constituent publications.

The organisation is a compact suburban publishing house: a small team produces the three monthly magazines on a shared cycle, along with the group's website, directory, podcast and social media. Editorial and advertising are handled within the group, and community contributors — clubs, schools and associations filing their own reports — supply a share of the content, keeping the papers closely tied to the organisations they cover. The company traces its presence in the district to 1992, making it one of the longer-lived independent suburban publishers in Brisbane's north.

Contact and Availability

The Hills Echo is published monthly and distributed free to homes and businesses across the Hills district, including Arana Hills, Ferny Hills, Everton Hills, Bunya and Ferny Grove. Current and recent editions can be read online through the Echo News website at echo-news.com.au, where readers can also find contact forms for news tips, community contributions and advertising. Story ideas for the group's "Talk of the Town" podcast can be sent to podcast@echo-news.com.au, and local businesses can join the Echo Directory through echodirectory.com.au — the directory team invites enquiries on 0466 607 045. Community groups and clubs in the Hills district are invited to submit their monthly news and event details through the website for inclusion in upcoming editions.