About Boorowa News

Boorowa News

Overview

The Boorowa News is the local newspaper for Boorowa, a wool-growing town in the Hilltops local government area of the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. It is a paid weekly newspaper, listed in media directories as publishing on Thursdays, and it appears in print and online for Boorowa and the farming district around it. The paper's own description of itself, carried on its website, stresses its place in the life of the town: it says there is not much which happens around town which is not published in the News, including farming, council and other stories about local happenings.

Since 2023 the Boorowa News has been published by North East Media Pty Ltd, the Higgins family's Wangaratta-based newspaper group, as part of the Regional Media Corp stable of New South Wales and Victorian country titles. It is registered with the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) as a newspaper masthead of an eligible news business, with its registration current in the register updated in December 2025. The paper continues a line of Boorowa journalism that began in 1873 with the Burrowa News, making it one of the longer-running local news services in the Southern Tablelands.

History

Journalism in Boorowa began with the Burrowa News, first published in 1873 by George Eason. Published under the full masthead Burrowa News and Marengo, Binalong, Murrumburrah and Cootamundra Reporter — the old spelling of the town's name, and a roll-call of the settlements it served — the paper reported for the district through the gold-era decades, the federation period and two world wars. According to the State Library of New South Wales catalogue record cited in reference works, the Burrowa News was published until 26 January 1951, and the paper was continued by the Boorowa News.

The Boorowa News therefore dates its own run from 1951, and surviving issues from its early years, such as the edition of 13 March 1953 preserved in newspaper archives, show it performing the classic work of a mid-century country weekly: graziers' association meetings, council business, show society farewells and the comings and goings of district families. The historic Burrowa News has been digitised as part of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program of the National Library of Australia, in cooperation with the State Library of New South Wales, and can be read on Trove.

Through the later twentieth century the Boorowa News passed into the orbit of the large regional publishing chains, and by the 2010s it sat within the Fairfax Media regional network. When Fairfax merged with Nine Entertainment in 2018 and Nine sold its regional newspaper business in 2019 to a partnership led by Antony Catalano and Thorney Investment Group, the Boorowa News became part of Australian Community Media (ACM), where it was grouped with ACM's other western and southern New South Wales non-daily titles.

The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted publication: the Public Interest Journalism Initiative's newsroom mapping records the Boorowa News as temporarily closed from 20 April 2020, when ACM suspended many of its non-daily print titles, and as reopened on 3 July 2020. Its most recent change of ownership came in 2023. In March of that year ACM agreed to sell seven of its paid-sale New South Wales weeklies — the Parkes Champion-Post, Forbes Advocate, Canowindra News, the Grenfell Record, Cowra Guardian, Boorowa News and Young Witness — to the Higgins family's Provincial Press Group, with completion of the transaction anticipated in early May 2023.

Programming and Content

The Boorowa News is a general local newspaper whose content is defined by its district. Its own published description names farming, council and other stories about local happenings as the core of its coverage, and that mix reflects the economy and institutions of the Boorowa district: a superfine Merino wool and mixed-farming region administered, since the 2016 New South Wales council amalgamations, by Hilltops Council.

Council decisions, rural services, agricultural conditions, school and church news, sport and community events form the standing content of a paper of this kind, and the Boorowa News presents itself as a paper of record for them — in its own words, proud of its active involvement in the community. The district's signature annual event is the Boorowa Irish Woolfest, held over the October long weekend and described by its organisers as a celebration of community, wool, farming and rural life; its centrepiece, the Running of the Sheep, sends a flock down the town's main street in a deliberate echo of Pamplona's Running of the Bulls. The festival's organisers note that Boorowa is renowned for its fine Merino wool and that the town adopted the Irish theme in 2000 because of its strong Irish settler connections, including a sister-city link with Clonoulty in County Tipperary. Events of this scale, and the wool industry behind them, are natural front-page territory for the town's weekly paper.

Audience and Reach

No audited circulation figure for the Boorowa News is published, and none is claimed here. Its audience is the town of Boorowa and the surrounding farming district in the Hilltops region — a small, defined community of the kind that country weeklies exist to serve, within reach of Cowra to the north-west and less than two hours' drive from Canberra. The paper's significance to that audience is recognised in its inclusion in ACMA's Register of eligible news businesses, the register maintained under Australia's news media bargaining framework, where the Boorowa News is classified as a newspaper masthead of North East Media.

The paper's reach now also runs through its website, which publishes its local journalism online alongside the weekly print edition, and through its place in a larger regional network: as one of the Regional Media Corp titles it sits alongside sister papers across the New South Wales Central West and Hilltops, including the Cowra Guardian and Young Witness, and the group's Victorian mastheads led by the Wangaratta Chronicle.

Digital Presence

The Boorowa News publishes online at boorowanewsonline.com.au, the web address recorded for the masthead in the ACMA register. Its online presence is part of its owner's wider digital operation: North East Media launched an online division, NEM Digital, in 2018, and the group's stated aim on acquiring the New South Wales titles in 2023 was to deliver, in chief executive Edward Higgins's words, "an effective local print and digital media service" to each community. The historical record of the district's earlier paper, the Burrowa News, is separately available in digitised form through Trove.

Ownership and Organisation

The Boorowa News is owned by North East Media Pty Ltd and is published within Regional Media Corp, the trading entity formed when the Higgins family's Provincial Press Group acquired the seven New South Wales weeklies from ACM in 2023, joined by Narromine Star owners Lucie Peart and Tim Pankhurst. North East Media is one of Australia's older family newspaper companies: it began when W. T. Higgins bought the Wangaratta Despatch in 1921 and the Wangaratta Chronicle in 1937, and it remains owned by the Higgins family, with Edward Higgins — a fourth-generation member of the family — as Regional Media Corp's chief executive and Hartley Higgins having led Provincial Press Group as managing director at the time of the acquisition.

Announcing the purchase, Edward Higgins said the company was pleased to be the future custodian of the regions' long-standing newspapers, and ACM's managing director Tony Kendall said ACM had not actively looked to sell the titles but felt the proposed transaction was in the best interest of the publications. The group is based in Wangaratta, Victoria, prints its own newspapers on its own presses, and operates offices in north-eastern Victoria and Melbourne as well as its New South Wales title offices. No current editor of the Boorowa News is publicly named in the sources consulted, and none is asserted here.

Contact and Availability

The Boorowa News is a paid weekly, available in print in Boorowa and online at https://www.boorowanewsonline.com.au, where its current stories and contact channels are published. In ACMA's Register of eligible news businesses, the registered contact for North East Media's news business, including the Boorowa News masthead, is Edward Hartley Higgins, reachable at ehiggins@nemedia.com.au, with a contact phone number also published in the register.