About Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay Star Weekly

Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay Star Weekly

Overview

The Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay Star Weekly is a free community newspaper and web portal — the description the paper itself uses — serving two adjoining local government areas in Melbourne's inner and middle west: the City of Maribyrnong, centred on Footscray, and the City of Hobsons Bay, taking in Altona, Williamstown and Newport. It is one of six Star Weekly mastheads in Melbourne's west and north-west operated by MMP Star Pty Ltd, the Star Weekly arm of Star News Group, alongside the Brimbank & North West, Melton & Moorabool, Northern, Sunbury & Macedon Ranges and Wyndham Star Weeklies. In AAP's submission to the federal inquiry into Australia's regional newspapers the title is classified as a print and digital publication, and a 2025 study of older-adult representation in Australian newspaper advertising, published in Media International Australia, treated it as a weekly tabloid from an independent Australian family-owned media company, sampling its digital editions day by day through the study period.

The title's registration is current. The Australian Communications and Media Authority's Register of Eligible News Businesses carries an entry for MMP Star Pty Ltd dated 12 December 2025 listing "Maribyrnong Hobsons Bay Star Weekly", at the maribyrnonghobsonsbay.starweekly.com.au address, among the company's six registered newspaper mastheads; the Australian Press Council's constituent list of June 2026 also includes the Maribyrnong & Hobsons Bay Star Weekly among the Country Press Australia member publications. Recent publishing is independently visible: a Star Weekly story headlined "Grand Slam title for Woodman", about wheelchair tennis player Jin Woodman, is dated 12 September 2026 and cited as a source in reference works, and a Victorian Environment Protection Authority assessment summary records that notices for a development licence application were advertised in the Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay Star Weekly during a submission period running from 11 February to 11 March 2026 — statutory advertising that only a currently publishing newspaper can carry.

History

The Star Weekly titles are the product of Star News Group's expansion from its historic base in Melbourne's south-east into the western suburbs. The group began in 1909, when Albert Edward Thomas founded the Berwick Shire News and Pakenham and Cranbourne Gazette, and it remained a Thomas family business, trading as South East Newspapers until the Star News Group name was adopted in August 2005. Paul Thomas, the fourth-generation managing director, joined the company in 1992 and took the managing director's role in 2000; as the trade journal gxpress tells it, expansion into Melbourne's western suburbs followed his appointment, and in October 2004 the company launched five Star editions into Hume, Whittlesea and Mitchell Shire, in the city's north. A half share in the Mail Newspaper Group in the Yarra Valley and Dandenong Ranges, and management of that group the following year, filled in the east; the western Star Weekly line, run through MMP Star Pty Ltd, filled in the west.

The Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay paper is the inner-western member of that line, its territory the two council areas named in its masthead. The title's own launch date is not documented in any governing record consulted for this profile, and none is asserted; what the record shows is the paper at work across the 2020s — a full electronic edition of Wednesday 25 August 2021, complete with the Star Weekly's footy tipping competition results and pages of local real estate advertising from Footscray, Yarraville and Altona agents, and an edition of 28 September 2022 in which, as the Victorian Collections catalogue records, a Melbourne Legacy promotional poster celebrating the Geelong Cats' premiership was published. In December 2022 the wider group agreed to buy fourteen regional titles in Queensland and South Australia from Australian Community Media, but the Star Weekly operation in Melbourne's west continued unchanged under MMP Star.

Programming and Content

The paper's news agenda is the municipal life of Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay: two councils, their planning decisions, road and transport works, local business, schools, community groups and sport. Its reporting is routinely picked up by other outlets — Bicycle Network, for example, reported and linked the Star Weekly's account of Maribyrnong council's liveable-speeds proposal, with its figures for new signage and traffic treatments on Ballarat Road, Gordon Street and Churchill Avenue. News monitoring services carry its Hobsons Bay stories — motorists caught in an Altona testing blitz, the Altona Rotary club shooting for a fundraising target, an Easter festival preview syndicated across the Star Weekly network — and its sports pages follow the district's clubs and athletes, from local football and netball to the paper's September 2026 report of a grand slam title for wheelchair tennis player Jin Woodman, one of the west's elite athletes. The 2021 electronic edition shows the traditional apparatus of the suburban weekly in full: a football tipping competition with a published leaderboard, pages of display advertising from local retailers and real estate agents in Footscray, Yarraville and Brooklyn, and community notices. Real estate, motoring, classifieds and trades-and-services advertising fill out the commercial pages that support the free paper.

Audience and Reach

The Star Weekly's readers are the residents of the City of Maribyrnong — Footscray, Yarraville, Seddon, Maribyrnong, Maidstone, Braybrook and West Footscray — and the City of Hobsons Bay, including Altona, Altona North, Williamstown, Newport, Spotswood, Seaholme, Laverton and Seabrook: a combined inner- and middle-western population of well over 200,000 people in two of Melbourne's most densely settled and culturally diverse municipalities. The paper describes itself as a free community newspaper, distributed without charge to its readers. No audited circulation or readership figure specific to this masthead is published in any governing record consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here; the combined figure of more than 500,000 copies a week sometimes quoted for Star News Group is the company's claim for its eighty or so community newspapers as a whole and is not assigned to this title. A scholarly sampling of the paper's digital editions in a 2025 peer-reviewed study, its statutory advertising in 2026, its Press Council membership and its ACMA registration together place it among the recognised working suburban titles of Melbourne.

Digital Presence

The paper publishes online at maribyrnonghobsonsbay.starweekly.com.au, the address recorded for the masthead on the ACMA register, as part of the shared Star Weekly platform that carries each of the six MMP Star titles on its own subdomain. News Locker and similar monitoring services pick up the site's Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay stories as they appear, and the paper's digital editions replicate the print paper — the August 2021 edition survives in electronic form with its tipping results and advertising intact. The research fetcher used for this profile could not retrieve the starweekly.com.au domain directly, so this account rests on the regulator, press-council, government and monitoring records cited; a visual check of the live site and masthead is owed at publish time. The weekday of the current print edition is likewise not pinned by a governing record — the print editions sighted for this profile were Wednesday editions (25 August 2021 and 28 September 2022) — and is flagged for confirmation against the paper itself.

Ownership and Organisation

The Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay Star Weekly is operated by MMP Star Pty Ltd (ABN 46 168 220 399), the company on the ACMA Register of Eligible News Businesses whose 12 December 2025 entry lists this masthead, with its five Star Weekly sisters, among six registered newspaper sources. MMP Star is the Star Weekly vehicle of Star News Group, the Pakenham-headquartered publisher owned by the Thomas family and managed by Paul Thomas, its fourth-generation managing director, who is the contact named on the ACMA entry (03 5945 0666). Business listings for the paper give Star Weekly's office address as Thomsons Road, Keilor Park — the production base the Star Weekly titles share in Melbourne's north-west — and a contact telephone of 03 8318 5777. Editorial production for the Star Weekly line follows the group's centralised model, in which mastheads share services and some content across titles while keeping local reporters on their own patches; the same Star Weekly story can surface in more than one edition, as the Easter festival item carried by both the Maribyrnong & Hobsons Bay and Bacchus Marsh-facing pages illustrates. The parent group publishes around eighty community newspapers and magazines across Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory, and its Network Classifieds Pty Ltd centre at Pakenham handles classified and display advertising services for the stable.

Contact and Availability

The Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay Star Weekly is available free in print across the Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay council areas and online at maribyrnonghobsonsbay.starweekly.com.au, where the current edition and story archive can be read. Business listings record the paper's office at Thomsons Road, Keilor Park, telephone 03 8318 5777; its publisher's registered contact, per the ACMA, is Paul Thomas at Star News Group, telephone 03 5945 0666. Public notices and statutory advertisements for the Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay areas continue to be placed in the paper, as the EPA's 2026 assessment record shows. Details that rest on directory listings rather than a governing record — the Keilor Park street number among them — should be sighted on the paper's own masthead when the profile is prepared for publication.