About Stawell Times News

Stawell Times News

Overview

The Stawell Times-News — recorded in this inventory without the hyphen, as Stawell Times News — is the local newspaper of Stawell, in western Victoria, the town at the gateway to the Grampians that serves the Northern Grampians Shire. It is a genuinely distinct masthead: although it shares its website with the Ararat Advocate on the platform of its publisher, West Vic News Pty Ltd, it is Stawell's own newspaper, with its own Stawell newsroom coverage, and it has continued to be published as a separate title since West Vic News acquired it from Australian Community Media (ACM) in February 2025. That distinction matters, because its stablemate in the same transaction, the Ararat Advertiser, was merged into the Ararat Advocate; the Stawell Times-News was not. The Public Interest Journalism Initiative's record of the change, in its news data changes for the second quarter of 2025, states the position precisely: the Ararat Advertiser and the Stawell Times-News were acquired from ACM by West Vic News in February 2025, the Advertiser was subsequently merged into the company's existing Ararat Advocate, and the Stawell Times-News continues to be published by the new owner.

The paper publishes in print and on the West Vic News digital platform. Its print publication is independently evidenced through 2025 and into 2026: a media-monitoring record preserves a Stawell Times News print article dated 6 June 2025, the Ryerson Index's long-running index of the paper's death notices extends to 9 January 2026, and the title appears in the Australian Press Council's September 2026 list of constituent publications for Victoria. On the publisher's platform it sits under branding that names the company's titles together — "West Vic News — Ararat and Stawell, Grampians to the Pyrenees: Ararat Advocate, Advertiser, Stawell Times-News" — with Stawell stories published under their own Stawell News category through October 2026.

History

Stawell's newspaper tradition belongs to the gold era. The town began as the Pleasant Creek goldfield, and its early press included the Pleasant Creek News, cited in district histories from 1873, and the Stawell News and Pleasant Creek Chronicle; the National Library of Australia holds a Stawell News historical supplement published in 1938 that recalled the settlement's early days at Pleasant Creek, Commercial Street, Deep Lead and the Quartz Reefs. By the turn of the twenty-first century the town's paper was styled the Stawell Times — a letter to its editor, Ian Petersen, in November 2000 was addressed to the Stawell Times — and the combined name Stawell Times-News was in use by 2001, when the National Library's ephemera collection recorded the town's Winter 2001 tourist directory as published by the advertising department of the Stawell Times-News in conjunction with Stawell and Grampians Tourist Information. The exact dates and sequence of the mergers that produced the combined Times-News masthead are not documented in the governing records consulted for this profile, and no founding date is asserted here.

In its later chain-owned era the Times-News was an ACM title: the Australian Associated Press submission to the federal inquiry into Australia's regional newspapers listed "The Stawell Times-News" as a print newspaper in the Northern Grampians Shire within ACM's portfolio. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit regional media, ACM suspended the paper: West Vic News' own submission to that inquiry, dated 28 January 2022, recorded that ACM had closed or suspended numerous publications, including the Ararat Advertiser, the Stawell Times and the Wimmera Mail-Times, as well as shutting its Ballarat printing site. West Vic News, the independent Ararat-based publisher of the Pyrenees Advocate, had responded to the neighbouring suspension by launching the Ararat Advocate on 1 May 2020.

The decisive change came in February 2025, when West Vic News acquired both the Ararat Advertiser and the Stawell Times-News from ACM. In Ararat the company merged the Advertiser into its own Advocate; in Stawell it kept the Times-News masthead alive, and the paper's first edition under the new owner was published on Friday 7 March 2025, as recorded by the Public Interest Journalism Initiative. The Stawell Times-News thus passed from a national chain, which had suspended it, to a small independent publisher based in the next town — the same pattern by which the district's other titles were reshaped in those years.

Programming and Content

The Stawell Times-News is a general local newspaper for Stawell and the Northern Grampians district. On the West Vic News platform its stories appear under the Stawell News category within sections that include Latest News, General News, Council and Politics, Rural and Agriculture, Lifestyle and Entertainment, Our People, Sport, Business, and Opinion and Perspectives. Stawell coverage published in October 2026 illustrates the mix: the Northern Grampians Shire Council's consideration of a $5.4 million loan toward a sports centre, despite the council being debt-free; poker-machine losses across the district approaching $12 million; the Stawell Railway Station Art and Craft Gallery; opinion contributions from Northern Grampians councillors; and extensive local sport, including the Stawell Wildcats basketball association's domestic season and the CKS Swifts' netball campaign.

The paper's print pages carry the traditional matter of the country weekly as well. The Ryerson Index, which indexes family notices from Australian newspapers, records 2,134 death notices published in the Stawell Times-News between March 2008 and January 2026, together with funeral, legal and other notices — evidence of the paper's continuing role as the district's journal of record for family and official announcements. Its June 2025 print coverage included a front-page report on the first residents moving into a new housing estate at Stawell, preserved in media-monitoring records.

Audience and Reach

The paper's audience is Stawell and the Northern Grampians Shire — the town itself, a former gold-mining centre now known as the home of the Stawell Gift footrace and the gateway to the Grampians, and the farming communities around it, including Great Western, Halls Gap and the Wimmera fringe. No audited circulation figure for the paper is published; a commercial media directory, PressPort's MediaDatabase, lists a circulation of 2,185 for the Stawell Times News, a figure recorded here as that directory's undated listing rather than as an audited measure. The paper's standing is better evidenced by the records of its survival: it is one of the Victorian publications listed by the Australian Press Council in September 2026, within the Country Press Australia section, and its acquisition and continuation by a local independent publisher in 2025 — at a time when comparable chain-owned titles elsewhere were being closed or merged — indicates a readership and advertiser base sufficient to sustain a dedicated Stawell masthead.

Digital Presence

The Stawell Times-News publishes online through the West Vic News platform, the website recorded for this profile, theadvocate.net.au, which brings the publisher's mastheads together under the branding "West Vic News — Ararat and Stawell, Grampians to the Pyrenees" and names the Stawell Times-News among its titles. A Country Press Australia authorisation application lodged with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in April 2021 recorded the domain theadvocate.net.au against the Ararat Advocate, and the platform today carries all of the company's mastheads, with Stawell stories tagged to their own Stawell News category and district stories from Marnoo and other nearby communities alongside them. Current operation was confirmed from the platform in October 2026, when Stawell-tagged stories were being published on dates including 15 to 18 October 2026. Some stories on the platform are free to read and others sit behind the publisher's subscription paywall.

Ownership and Organisation

The Stawell Times-News is owned and published by West Vic News Pty Ltd, the independent regional publisher whose publisher is Craig Wilson. West Vic News began as the publisher of the Pyrenees Advocate of Beaufort, launched the Ararat Advocate in May 2020, and in February 2025 acquired the Ararat Advertiser and the Stawell Times-News from Australian Community Media — merging the Advertiser into the Advocate while continuing the Times-News as Stawell's own masthead, giving the company three associated titles across Ararat, Stawell and Beaufort. In its January 2022 submission to the federal regional newspapers inquiry, the company recorded that it then operated two newspapers, provided seven full-time-equivalent jobs across its two communities and kept offices in Ararat and Beaufort; those figures are the company's own, stated as at January 2022. The company's contact address published on its platform is 93a Barkly Street, Ararat, Victoria 3377, with the telephone number 03 5352 2866. The Stawell Times-News appears in the Australian Press Council's September 2026 list of constituent publications for Victoria, through Country Press Australia, confirming its standing as a current publication in its own right.

Contact and Availability

The Stawell Times-News is published for Stawell, Victoria, by West Vic News, whose published address is 93a Barkly Street, Ararat VIC 3377 and whose published telephone number is 03 5352 2866. Readers can follow the paper in its print edition across the Stawell district and through the West Vic News digital platform, where Stawell news is published continuously and a selection of stories is free to read, with fuller access by subscription. For advertising, subscriptions and newsroom contact, the West Vic News platform is the authoritative source of current details. The public business email field for this profile is intentionally left blank, in line with the directory's policy.