About Milton Ulladulla Times

Milton Ulladulla Times

Overview

The Milton Ulladulla Times is a local news outlet serving Ulladulla, Milton and the surrounding South Coast district of New South Wales, publishing online at ulladullatimes.com.au. It is owned by Australian Community Media (ACM) and is one of the longest-lived newspaper names on the state's South Coast: the district has been served by a Times since 1878. For most of its life the Times was a printed weekly, published on Wednesdays. Its print edition ended in September 2024, when ACM discontinued the weekly printed editions of the title in a round of regional newspaper cuts, but the masthead did not close with the print run. The Times continues to publish original local reporting digitally: a live review of the site in October 2026 found current, locally reported stories under the Times masthead — including arts coverage of the district's EscapeARTfest and of concerts at the Milton Theatre — written by a journalist the paper's own contact page lists on its staff. Its own About page continues to describe a Wednesday publication with a digital print edition. The Times is therefore best understood as a digital-only local newspaper with a weekly rhythm, produced within ACM's South Coast operation and sharing an editor with the South Coast Register at Nowra.

History

The paper began in 1878 as the Ulladulla and Milton Times — its fuller early title was the Ulladulla and Milton Times and South Coast Advertiser — serving the twin settlements of the harbour town of Ulladulla and the inland village of Milton. The original paper consisted primarily of advertising and community news, the standard make-up of a nineteenth-century country weekly, and it was already a fixture of district life within its first decade: the Milton Ulladulla Historical Society records an 1887 episode in which local identity James Warden sued the paper's editor, Alexander Boag, over being called a "Shylock" — a reminder that the colonial country press was read closely and argued with. The Ulladulla and Milton Times continued under that name until 1969, a run of just over ninety years that spanned the district's years as a dairying and timber port.

After a gap of nine years, the title returned in 1978 as the Milton Ulladulla Times, the name it carries today. A rival title complicated the picture in the 1980s and 1990s: the Milton Ulladulla Express, first published in Nowra in 1981, appeared from 1981 to 1988 as the Milton-Ulladulla on the Premier Coast Express and from 1991 again as the Milton Ulladulla Express, until the Times absorbed it in 1998, leaving the Times as the district's single local newspaper. In its independent era the revived Times was printed and published by Paul Poulus for Milton-Ulladulla Publishing Co. Pty. Ltd.

The paper later passed into the Fairfax regional newspaper stable — the network that became Australian Community Media — and was an early mover in that network's digital transition: when the publisher piloted digital subscriptions in 2016, the Milton-Ulladulla Times was one of only two small South Coast websites chosen, alongside the Bay Post at Batemans Bay. ACM itself changed hands in 2019, when Nine Entertainment sold the regional business to a joint venture associated with Antony Catalano and Alex Waislitz's Thorney interests, in a $115 million transaction effective 30 June 2019. The deepest change came in 2024: in late August of that year ACM announced that the Milton-Ulladulla Times would discontinue its weekly printed edition from the following month, in a round of cuts the company attributed to the loss of government advertising and, in its wider statements, to Meta's decision not to renew its Australian news payment deals. The media-data project PIJI recorded the closure of the print edition effective 18 September 2024. Contemporary reporting initially described the paper as being shut, but the masthead survived the print closure: reference entries recorded it still publishing every Wednesday into March 2025, and it has continued as a digital title since.

The paper's long archive is part of the national record: its various editions have been digitised under the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program hosted by the National Library of Australia, making the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Times searchable on Trove.

Programming and Content

The Times covers the Milton-Ulladulla district: Ulladulla and its harbour and fishing fleet, the historic town of Milton, the beachside communities of Mollymook and Narrawallee, Burrill Lake and the villages and farmland of the southern Shoalhaven. Its subject matter is the standard brief of a country weekly — Shoalhaven City Council decisions, development and roads, surf and fishing, school and club news, courts and emergency services, real estate and the visitor economy — together with a strong arts and community-events strand reflecting the district's festival calendar. The October 2026 reporting sighted on the site illustrates the mix: coverage of EscapeARTfest, the district's long-running community arts festival (held since 1995, having begun as the Tabula Rasa Contemporary Arts Festival), and of a Streeton Trio concert at the Milton Theatre, the district's main live-performance venue. The byline on that coverage, Damian McGill, is listed on the paper's own contact page in a sport and journalist role, and his author biography states that he covers stories for the Milton Ulladulla Times.

Like other ACM titles, the site also carries material beyond its own reporting: stories shared across the group's South Coast mastheads — the Times' editor is shared with the South Coast Register, the Nowra-based daily — as well as national and wire content and ACM network features. Readers should expect that blend: original Milton-Ulladulla reporting sits alongside cluster and network material under the one masthead. Births, deaths, marriages and funeral notices, public notices and classified advertising — the traditional service content of a country weekly — remain part of the offering that the paper's digital print edition presents in its weekly form.

Audience and Reach

The Times' audience is the Milton-Ulladulla district in the south of the City of Shoalhaven local government area. Ulladulla itself recorded about 7,275 usual residents at the 2021 census, and the wider urban corridor takes in Mollymook, Narrawallee, Burrill Lake and Milton, with the district's population swelling well beyond its resident base in the summer holiday season, when the beaches and the harbour draw visitors from Sydney — about 225 kilometres to the north — and Canberra. The district has an older profile than the state as a whole (the 2021 median age in the Ulladulla surrounds was 56), which shapes the paper's readership and its emphasis on health services, council services, clubs and community organisations. ACM supports the title commercially through its network advertising operation, which markets the group's regional mastheads to local and national advertisers and offers self-service campaign booking for small businesses; the company reported in trade coverage that its leading subscription sites passed a combined 100,000 digital subscribers, with the Times notable in that story as one of the two small sites where the subscription model was first piloted in 2016. No audited circulation or readership figure specific to the Milton Ulladulla Times is published, and none is claimed here.

Digital Presence

The paper's home is ulladullatimes.com.au, an ACM network site carrying the Times masthead, organised into news, sport, entertainment, lifestyle, noticeboard and classifieds sections, with subscription and log-in functions. Since September 2024 the website has been the paper's primary edition: the printed weekly ended, and the title's weekly publication continues in digital form, with the paper's About page describing a Wednesday publication and a digital print edition that presents the week's paper in page form. The 2016 subscription pilot on the site means the Times was among the earliest small Australian country newspapers to ask readers to pay for digital access, several years before paid subscriptions became the ACM network's standard model. Articles from the site are monitored and indexed by third-party media databases, and Times stories are picked up across the ACM South Coast network. The historic archive is separately available through Trove, the National Library of Australia's discovery service, where digitised issues of the paper's earlier incarnations can be read in full.

Ownership and Organisation

The Milton Ulladulla Times is owned by Australian Community Media, the regional publishing group formed from the former Fairfax Media regional division. ACM passed through Nine Entertainment's hands after the Nine–Fairfax merger of December 2018 and was sold in 2019 to interests associated with Antony Catalano and Alex Waislitz, becoming one of the largest regional publishers in the country, with The Canberra Times, the Newcastle Herald, the Illawarra Mercury and the South Coast Register among its titles. The Times sits within ACM's New South Wales South Coast operation: its editor, Glenn Ellard, is shared with the South Coast Register at Nowra — Ellard is a long-serving Register journalist whose byline also appears across the ACM network — and its contact page lists a small masthead team including Damian McGill in a sport and journalist role and a named sales manager handling local advertising. In its independent era, before the Fairfax and ACM years, the paper was published by Milton-Ulladulla Publishing Co. Pty. Ltd. and printed and published by Paul Poulus; the date of its sale into the Fairfax stable is not documented in the sources consulted, and it is not asserted here.

Contact and Availability

The Milton Ulladulla Times is available online at ulladullatimes.com.au, publishing through the week with its digital print edition appearing on Wednesdays. The paper's website carries its own Contact page naming its editor, journalist and advertising contacts, and readers can subscribe digitally through the site; subscriptions and delivery enquiries across the ACM network are handled through the company's published customer channels. The defunct print edition's back issues, and the runs of its predecessor titles, can be consulted through the National Library of Australia's Trove service. Readers seeking the paper's current office and contact details should use the Contact page on the live site, which is the publisher's own current listing. The public business email field for this profile is intentionally left blank; any email addresses the paper publishes appear on its own site and in its own pages.