About Chelsea Mordialloc Mentone News

Chelsea Mordialloc Mentone News

Overview

The Chelsea Mordialloc Mentone News is a free weekly community newspaper serving the bayside suburbs of the City of Kingston, in Melbourne's south-east. Published by the Mornington Peninsula News Group (MPNG), it is the group's edition for the Kingston coastline — Chelsea, Chelsea Heights, Aspendale, Edithvale, Bonbeach, Carrum, Patterson Lakes, Mordialloc, Parkdale and Mentone — and the only one of the group's five free weeklies whose territory lies outside the Mornington Peninsula itself. It appears in print each week and online through the group's shared website, mpnews.com.au, where its reporting sits alongside that of its sister titles, the Frankston Times, Mornington News, Western Port News and Southern Peninsula News.

Although the paper shares a website domain with the Frankston Times, it is a genuinely distinct masthead with its own Kingston territory, its own local reporting and its own place in the industry's records: the newspaper data assembled for the federal inquiry into Australia's regional newspapers lists the Chelsea-Mordialloc-Mentone News as a print title of the Mornington Peninsula News Group whose local coverage area is the City of Kingston, and it appears in Country Press Australia's current member listings. The paper remains in active publication: its reporting on Kingston Council was being cited by other publications through 2025, and Frankston Arts Centre's August 2026 guide for event hirers lists it among the current local print publications recommended for advertising.

History

Kingston's bayside suburbs have a long local-newspaper tradition. The Kingston local history collection records the Mordialloc-Chelsea newspaper of the mid-twentieth century, in whose pages Frank McGuire's 1970 chronicle "How Chelsea Grew Up" first appeared, and through the later twentieth century the district's community coverage came principally from the Leader group of suburban newspapers — the Mordialloc Chelsea Leader among them — which passed to News Corp Australia. The Chelsea Mordialloc Mentone News is a twenty-first-century title created within the Mornington Peninsula News Group rather than descended from those earlier mastheads.

The group's own account dates its establishment to 2006. Its founder and publisher, Cameron McCullough, grew up at Tyabb on the peninsula and bought a newsagency in Hastings at the age of twenty. Concerned that the local paper of the day did not interact well enough with its community, he and his colleagues produced their own: an eight-page newspaper printed on a photocopier, of which they distributed 3,000 copies. When a reader rang to ask how to advertise in it, the commercial model was born, and the enterprise grew organically from there into a stable of zoned editions. In time the publishing business outgrew the newsagency, and McCullough and his wife Melissa closed the shop to concentrate on newspapers full time.

The Chelsea Mordialloc Mentone News was publishing by the middle of the following decade: its coverage of the October 2016 Kingston council election, written by its journalist Neil Walker, records all seven incumbent councillors who stood for re-election being returned, and issues from May 2021 were reporting court and police news from across the Kingston district. Its expansion into Kingston took the group beyond its peninsula base into a settled metropolitan readership. The timing proved favourable more broadly: MPNG's main competitor on the peninsula, the Independent News group, was purchased by Fairfax, declined and eventually shut down — by McCullough's account, around 80 per cent of MPNG's team are former Independent News staff — and in 2020 News Corp moved its Leader community titles, including those serving Kingston and the peninsula, to digital-only publication. An MPNG spokesman responded at the time that the group would "double-down on our efforts to keep locals informed in their absence", and the group's free print weeklies remain the district's print newspapers of record.

Programming and Content

The Chelsea Mordialloc Mentone News covers the full round of community journalism for the City of Kingston. Council reporting is a staple: it reported Kingston's November 2024 mayoral outcome — Brodie Cowburn's account of Georgina Oxley winning a third term as mayor was first published in the paper — and through 2024–25 it followed the Mordi Aquatic Centre in Mordialloc, the most expensive project in the council's history at $87.5 million, reporting both the council's capital-works spending on the project and the questions asked in a public meeting about the council's appointment of the builder ADCO, which had been charged by the Victorian Building Authority in February 2025 over an earlier roof collapse. Those reports were substantial enough to be cited in turn by the Australasian Leisure Management journal's coverage of the project.

Alongside the civic record runs the ordinary fabric of bayside life: level-crossing removals and foreshore questions along the Frankston railway corridor, life saving clubs and sporting clubs from Chelsea to Mentone, school and community-group news, and grassroots sport across the district's football, netball and cricket competitions. Group journalists including Raia Flinos and Brodie Cowburn byline stories for the title, and letters to the editor and community notices complete the mix, in line with the group's founding premise that a community paper should interact closely with the people it serves.

Audience and Reach

The Chelsea Mordialloc Mentone News is distributed free to households across Kingston's bayside suburbs, funded entirely by advertising; as McCullough has explained, all of MPNG's publications are free, so advertising sales are the company's sole source of revenue. Its readership is the settled suburban population of the Kingston coastline, a district of beachside shopping strips, railway villages and newer estates around Patterson Lakes and Chelsea Heights. No independently audited circulation figure for the title is published in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here. The paper's standing is better measured by its institutional recognition: Frankston Arts Centre's 2026 guide for event hirers lists it among the local print publications it recommends for advertising, alongside its MPNG stablemates, and other outlets cite its council reporting as a source.

Digital Presence

The paper's digital home is the Mornington Peninsula News Group website, mpnews.com.au, which carries its stories together with those of the group's other newspapers and magazines, some of it badged for the wider bayside area. Journalists' work for the paper is also tracked by media-monitoring services such as Muck Rack, which records the title among the outlets its journalists write for. McCullough has been candid that digital income remains a small portion of the group's turnover compared with print, and that the group's future is being built on print while using digital as a supporting channel — an unusual but, on the group's own account, commercially successful position in the current suburban media market.

Ownership and Organisation

The Chelsea Mordialloc Mentone News is published by Mornington Peninsula News Group, which describes itself as a locally owned and operated, independent media company established in 2006. The group's founder and publisher is Cameron McCullough. At the time of a detailed published profile of the business, MPNG employed a staff of 26 local professionals — journalists, photographers, designers and sales staff — making it one of the larger employers in its district. Alongside the Chelsea Mordialloc Mentone News, the group publishes the Frankston Times, Mornington News, Western Port News and Southern Peninsula News each week, and two magazines: Peninsula Essence, a glossy monthly lifestyle magazine distributed from Frankston to Portsea, and Peninsula Kids, a quarterly magazine for families. The group's advertising operation is led by a group advertising manager — Anton Hoffman held that role in 2026 — reflecting the advertising-funded model on which the whole enterprise rests.

Contact and Availability

The Chelsea Mordialloc Mentone News is available free each week in print across Kingston's bayside suburbs and online at mpnews.com.au. Mornington Peninsula News Group can be contacted on 03 5974 9000; its group advertising manager's published email is anton@mpnews.com.au. Public notices and community contributions are carried in the paper's print edition and on the group website.