About The Monaro Post

The Monaro Post

Overview

The Monaro Post is an independently owned weekly newspaper published in Cooma, in the Snowy Monaro region of southern New South Wales, by the Monaro Media Group. Founded in 2006, it is the only newspaper operating in Cooma, a status it has held since the closure of its historic rival, the Cooma-Monaro Express, in 2016. The Post publishes in print each Wednesday, supported by its website at monaropost.com.au, and covers local news and sport across the Snowy Monaro and into the South Coast hinterland.

The paper is the flagship of a small local media group that also publishes tourist and special-interest magazines. In its submission to the federal parliamentary inquiry into Australia's regional newspapers, dated 28 January 2022, the Monaro Media Group described the Monaro Post as "the only weekly regional newspaper covering this region", a description consistent with the fate of its competitors: the Express closed in 2016, and ACM's Bombala Times, published in the south of the region, ceased operations in 2021. The Post's continuing operation is directly evidenced in 2026: a news story from its edition of Wednesday 22 July 2026 was reproduced in a local member of parliament's newsletter, and the Australian Press Council's constituent bodies list of June 2026 includes The Monaro Post among its publisher members' titles.

History

The Monaro Post is a twenty-first century foundation, not a continuation of the Monaro's nineteenth century press. Cooma's newspaper history is much older than the Post: The Manaro Mercury, and Cooma and Bombala Advertiser began publication in 1861 and ran until 24 December 1931, when it was absorbed by the Cooma Express. That lineage, through the Cooma-Monaro Express, belonged to the chain publishers who dominated country New South Wales, latterly Fairfax Media's Australian Community Media division.

The Post's own story begins in 2006. The Monaro Media Group Pty was established on 17 August 2006, and the new paper was launched in Cooma that year in direct competition with the Cooma-Monaro Express. Contemporary reporting noted that most of the staff of the new title had come from the chain-owned older paper, giving the startup an experienced local newsroom from its first editions. Wikipedia's entry for Cooma records that the Monaro Post began in 2006 and is independently owned by Gail Eastaway, Tracy Frazer and Louise Platts; the company itself told the 2022 parliamentary inquiry that it has four local residents as shareholders.

For its first decade the Post competed head to head with the Express. The contest ended in 2016, when Fairfax announced on 31 March 2016 that the print editions and websites of the Cooma-Monaro Express and the Summit Sun at Jindabyne would be discontinued as part of a restructure of its Canberra-centred publishing operations. The Express, a paper of some 130 years' standing, closed, leaving the independent Post as Cooma's only newspaper.

In the decade since, the Post has outlasted the rest of the region's chain-owned press. ACM suspended the Braidwood Times in 2020, a title profiled and skipped elsewhere in this project, and ACM's own submission to the 2022 inquiry recorded that the Bombala Times had ceased operations. Against that background the Monaro Media Group's evidence to the same inquiry described a small publisher holding its ground: it reported that its newspaper sales were increasing as people moved to the region, drawn by lifestyle and by employment on the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project, and it described the practical pressures on independent publishers, including the loss of ACM's Canberra and North Richmond print plants, which forced the group to move its printing to SpotPress in Sydney at a reported 42 per cent increase in printing costs.

Programming and Content

The Monaro Post is a general local newspaper covering the Snowy Monaro's news, council affairs, community life and sport. Its own description, carried by the media database Muck Rack, says the paper covers "all the local news and happenings" in and around Cooma, together with sport "from all codes of football to netball, basketball, cricket, swimming, motocross, golf, rifle shooting, bowls and any other sports we are made aware of". Political coverage is part of the mix: its edition of 22 July 2026 carried, on page five, a report by Nathan Thompson on the NSW Nationals' endorsement of a candidate for the state seat of Monaro ahead of the March 2027 state election.

The paper also performs the statutory and civic functions of a regional newspaper. In February 2023 the Snowy Monaro Regional Council resolved to publicly advertise proposed road names in the Monaro Post as part of the formal naming process, and the region's community organisations treat it as the paper of record: the Monaro Community Radio station 2MNO's annual reporting, for example, catalogues dozens of its stories published in the Post across a year, from Anzac Day service coverage to station news, noting that the Post ran the station's material every week.

Around the newspaper, the Monaro Media Group publishes a stable of magazines described in its 2022 inquiry submission: two tourist magazines, The Snowpost and Your Coastal Life, an annual lifestyle magazine, Innovation, and a biannual farming magazine, Your Farm. The group has also produced special publications in digital flipbook form, including a Monaro Post Anzac feature distributed through Issuu. The farming magazine and the tourist titles reflect the two economies of the paper's territory: the grazing and cropping country of the Monaro plains and the visitor economy of the Snowy Mountains and the South Coast.

Audience and Reach

The Monaro Post's territory, as the Monaro Media Group described it to the 2022 parliamentary inquiry, covers more than 15,000 square kilometres with a population of about 24,000 people, taking in the Snowy Monaro and parts of the South Coast of New South Wales. Those are the company's own figures, given in January 2022, and no audited circulation figure for the paper is published in the sources used for this profile; none is claimed here.

The paper's reach rests on its position as the region's only weekly newspaper and Cooma's only newspaper of any kind. Cooma is the service centre for the Monaro, the gateway town for the Snowy Mountains ski fields and the Snowy 2.0 construction workforce, and the Post's coverage extends through its publisher's satellite offices in Jindabyne and Bombala to the smaller towns of the region. Its publisher told the inquiry that it employed more than 17 staff and contributed more than $600,000 a year to the local economy in wages alone, figures the company offered as evidence of the local weight of an independent regional publisher.

Digital Presence

The Monaro Post publishes online at monaropost.com.au, the website recorded for the outlet in the WorldNM inventory, alongside its Wednesday print edition. Its stories are indexed by the media monitoring database Muck Rack, which maintains a verified outlet page for the paper describing it as a weekly newspaper produced in Cooma. The Monaro Media Group has also used digital publishing platforms for its special publications, including an Anzac feature issued as an Issuu flipbook under the Monaro Post name. Individual Post stories circulate further online when they are reproduced by others: the paper's 22 July 2026 report on the Nationals' Monaro candidate, for example, was republished in the newsletter of the local state member, Nichole Overall MLC.

The paper's own domain was blocked to the research tools used to prepare this profile, so the current presentation of its website should be confirmed by a direct visual check at publish time. Its continuing print operation in 2026 is independently evidenced by the dated July 2026 edition and by its inclusion in the Australian Press Council's June 2026 list of constituent publications.

Ownership and Organisation

The Monaro Post is owned and published by the Monaro Media Group Pty, an independently owned company established on 17 August 2006 and based in Cooma. In its January 2022 submission to the federal inquiry into regional newspapers, the company described itself as "an independently owned media company covering the Snowy Monaro and South Coast areas of NSW" with four local residents as shareholders. Reference listings for Cooma name Gail Eastaway, Tracy Frazer and Louise Platts as the paper's independent owners. The group is not part of either of Australia's two large regional chains, News Corp Australia or Australian Community Media; it began, pointedly, as an independent challenger to the chain-owned Cooma-Monaro Express, staffed largely by journalists from that paper.

The group is headquartered in Cooma, at 59 Vale Street, Cooma NSW 2630 according to the Country Press Australia authorisation application of April 2021, with satellite offices in Jindabyne and Bombala recorded in its 2022 submission. At that time it employed more than 17 staff across its newspaper and magazines. Its publications are the weekly Monaro Post, the tourist magazines The Snowpost and Your Coastal Life, the annual lifestyle magazine Innovation and the biannual farming magazine Your Farm. Since the closure of ACM's regional print plants, the group's printing has been done by SpotPress in Sydney, a change the company told the inquiry had raised its printing costs by 42 per cent.

Contact and Availability

The Monaro Post is published each Wednesday in print in Cooma and across the Snowy Monaro region, and online at www.monaropost.com.au. Its publisher, the Monaro Media Group, is based at 59 Vale Street, Cooma NSW 2630, with satellite offices recorded in Jindabyne and Bombala. Readers and advertisers dealing with the paper deal with a locally owned company whose staff live in the region it covers; the address above dates from an April 2021 industry listing and should be reconfirmed against the paper's current masthead at publish time, together with a visual check of the website.