About Tweed Valley Weekly

Tweed Valley Weekly

Overview

The Tweed Valley Weekly is a free, independently owned community newspaper based in Murwillumbah, in the Tweed Valley of far north-eastern New South Wales, close to the Queensland border. In its own published description, reproduced in business directory profiles of the company, the paper describes itself as "an independently owned, free community newspaper that is distributed throughout Murwillumbah, surrounding rural villages, the Tweed Coast and Tweed Heads", and as "the only locally owned independent newspaper on the Tweed". It is a print-led title: a full edition appears every week, published on Thursdays, and complete recent editions are also posted as digital replicas. The paper is an original local reporting operation rather than a network syndication product — its pages carry its own council, community, arts, business and rural coverage of the Tweed Shire, and third-party records confirm it was publishing continuously through 2025 and into 2026, with editions dated 14 August 2025, 6 November 2025 and 25 December 2025, a further edition cited for 15 January 2026, and local organisations still thanking it for coverage in February 2026.

History

No founding year for the Tweed Valley Weekly is stated in the public sources consulted for this profile — library catalogues, press directories and the paper's own published descriptions do not record one — so none is asserted here. What the documentary record does establish is a publishing history of well over a decade. Tweed Shire Council records from July 2013 list the Tweed Valley Weekly as a Gold Sponsor of the Business Excellence Awards Tweed Shire, and in March 2014 the paper's front page was quoted in the Australian Parliament, where the local member read from its "Children's ward to close" report on the proposed closure of the children's ward at Murwillumbah Hospital. In 2017 the paper carried a run of full-page advertisements for the local marriage equality campaign, copies of which are preserved in the Tweed Regional Museum's collection. Council annual reports for 2020-21 and 2021-22 record that Tweed Shire Council's own weekly newsletter, the Tweed Link, is published in the Tweed Valley Weekly every Thursday, a relationship the council still advertises on its current website.

The Weekly operates in a valley with a long newspaper tradition that long predates it. Murwillumbah's press lineage reaches back to the Tweed and Brunswick Advocate, first published in 1888, which developed through the Tweed Times into The Tweed Daily, published from 1914 to 1949 and now digitised in part through the National Library of Australia's Trove service. Those titles are predecessors in the valley's press history only; they are not earlier incarnations of the Tweed Valley Weekly, and the Weekly makes no such claim in the material published about it. By the time the Weekly was established in the market, the valley's newspaper landscape had been reshaped by the consolidation of its older paid titles, leaving room for a locally owned free weekly serving the whole shire.

Programming and Content

The Weekly's content is built around original reporting on Tweed Shire affairs. Council coverage is a staple: its reporting on Tweed Shire Council's controversial draft conservation zones (C zones) proposal, published in its 1 June 2023 edition, carried statements from the council's Planning Director given directly to the paper and engaged with concerns raised by local landholders. In August 2025 the paper's editor interviewed a serving Tweed Shire councillor ahead of a council meeting, as recorded by the Caldera Environment Centre, and the paper hosts regular columns from community and industry voices — Tweed Shire Council's Tweed Link newsletter appears in it every Thursday, the Far North Coast branch of NSW Farmers has contributed a regular column, and the federal Member for Richmond, Janelle Saffin MP, publishes a column in the paper, with her September 2025 column reproduced on her official website.

Beyond council and politics, the paper covers the valley's community life in depth. Its arts and community pages carried a feature on local textile artist Tina Wilson's knitted works in its 15 January 2026 edition, and in February 2026 the Shepherd's Purse Theatre Company publicly thanked the paper for a write-up of its production in that week's issue. A "Women in Business" feature in February 2026 profiled local businesswomen, and the paper covered the October 2024 community campaign that persuaded ANZ to keep its Murwillumbah branch open part-time rather than close it. Property is a significant strand: the paper publishes a real estate liftout, "The Weekly Real Estate from Coast to Country", and local agencies promote their "Agent of the Week" appearances in its pages. Sport and racing also feature — the paper sponsored the Tweed Valley Weekly Handicap at the Murwillumbah race meeting on 29 December 2025.

Audience and Reach

The Weekly is a free newspaper, and according to its own description it is distributed throughout Murwillumbah, the surrounding rural villages of the Tweed Valley, the Tweed Coast and Tweed Heads — a footprint spanning the whole of Tweed Shire, from the valley floor beneath Wollumbin (Mount Warning) to the coastal strip at the Queensland border. Its role as a shire-wide channel is reflected in the institutions that use it to reach residents: Tweed Shire Council publishes its Tweed Link community newsletter in the paper every week, local members of parliament write columns for its readers, and businesses across Murwillumbah, the villages and the coast advertise in its pages and in its real estate liftout. No independently audited circulation figure for the paper is published in the sources consulted, and the paper itself does not promote one in its directory descriptions, so no circulation number is stated in this profile.

Digital Presence

The paper's website is tweedvalleyweekly.net.au; business directory data also associates the business with the domain theweekly.net.au. Its most substantial digital presence is its edition archive on the publishing platform Issuu, where the Tweed Valley Weekly account posts complete flipbook replicas of its print editions under titles such as "TVW 6 November 2025", "TVW August 14 2025" and "RE TVW 25 December 2025" — the last being its Christmas-week real estate edition. Individual stories from the paper, such as its January 2026 arts feature, are cited online with the Issuu edition and page number as their source, indicating that readers and writers use the digital replicas as the paper's record of publication. The title is also recorded in the Public Interest Journalism Initiative's news-outlet data as one of the news outlets serving the Tweed local government area.

Ownership and Organisation

The Tweed Valley Weekly is independently owned and is not part of a newspaper chain. Its own description, carried in company directory profiles, states that it is "independently owned" and "the only locally owned independent newspaper on the Tweed"; no parent company is named in those profiles, and no proprietor is identified in the public sources consulted, so none is asserted here. The paper is produced from Murwillumbah by a small local team. Its editor in 2025 was Johnathon Howard — local environment organisations recorded him interviewing councillors in that role in August 2025, and his byline (also rendered Jonathon Howard) appears on the paper's council reporting. The paper works to a weekly Thursday print cycle, carrying council, community and commercial content prepared in Murwillumbah for distribution across the shire.

Contact and Availability

The Tweed Valley Weekly is published weekly, in print on Thursdays, and is distributed free throughout Murwillumbah, the surrounding rural villages of the Tweed Valley, the Tweed Coast and Tweed Heads. Its office is listed in business directories at 1/12 Queen Street, Murwillumbah NSW 2484, with the telephone number (02) 6672 4443. The paper's website is www.tweedvalleyweekly.net.au, and full digital replicas of its print editions are available through its Issuu account for readers who miss the print run.