About Parkes Champion-Post

Parkes Champion-Post

Overview

The Parkes Champion-Post is the paid weekly newspaper of Parkes, a town in the Central West of New South Wales best known nationally for its radio telescope and its annual Elvis Festival. The paper is published by Regional Media Corp, the independent regional publisher formed in 2023 when Australian Community Media (ACM) sold a group of seven New South Wales country weeklies — the Champion-Post among them — to the Higgins family's Provincial Press Group, operating with the owners of the Narromine Star. Its editor is Christine Little, and the masthead remains an active, staffed local newsroom: its front page was cited in evidence to a New South Wales parliamentary inquiry in 2025, Parkes Shire Council used its columns for statutory public notices in November 2025, its journalists figured in Country Press NSW's 2025 Awards of Excellence, and it is listed in the Australian Press Council's September 2026 register of publisher-member mastheads.

The Champion-Post's lineage runs back to the 1890s, when the Western Champion began publication in the young mining and railway town, and to 1934, when the Champion and the Parkes Post were merged into a single title. It is one of the cluster of long-standing Central West weeklies — alongside the Forbes Advocate, Cowra Guardian and others — that passed from ACM to locally based independent ownership in 2023.

History

Parkes had a busy nineteenth-century newspaper scene. The town's first paper was the Forbes and Parkes Gazette, conducted for many years by H. H. Cooke; it was followed by the Parkes Independent, into which the Parkes Chronicle was amalgamated, and by the Parkes Examiner, which began in 1891 and was edited from 1893 by Alderman Harry Bowditch. The Examiner was renamed the Parkes Post in 1923 and became part of the Champion company in 1926.

The other ancestor of today's paper, the Western Champion, began in the early 1890s under publisher M. J. Little, with Gordon Tidy as editor in the late 1890s. The proprietor who defined the paper's twentieth century was William Giles, who ran the Champion for thirty-three years and had also acquired the Parkes Post by September 1932. The two papers kept separate offices and complementary publication days — the Champion on Fridays, the Post on Tuesdays — before the arrangement was formalised in 1934, when they were merged to become the Champion Post, the title that survives, hyphenated, as the Parkes Champion-Post. The paper's early editions have been digitised by the National Library of Australia under its Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program and are available through Trove.

Through the twentieth century the Champion-Post continued as Parkes's local paper of record while the town grew around the railway, the Northparkes mine and the CSIRO radio telescope. In its recent corporate history the paper was an ACM masthead — one of the Western NSW titles in the portfolio ACM had inherited from Fairfax's regional arm — until the 2023 sale described below took it into independent ownership.

Programming and Content

The Champion-Post is a general local weekly: council and community news, courts and police, schools, sport, agriculture, business, births, deaths and marriages, and the events calendar of the Parkes district. Its role as the district's paper of record is visible in the public record. In March 2025 its front page carried the announcement that a proposed 1.5-billion-dollar energy-from-waste facility for the Parkes Special Activation Precinct had been approved — a story so central to the local debate that it was cited repeatedly, by supporters and opponents alike, in submissions to the NSW Legislative Council's inquiry into the proposal later that year. Parkes Shire Council's November 2025 public notices directed residents to a road-closure advertisement placed in the Parkes Champion Post, with submissions open into December — the routine statutory function country weeklies still perform for their councils.

The paper also covers the event that defines Parkes to the outside world: editor Christine Little's report on the launch of the thirty-third Parkes Elvis Festival program, held at the Cooke Park Pavilion with the mayor and state and federal members in attendance, looked ahead to the January 2026 festival. Regional cooperation within its publishing group shows in its bylines: contributors such as Deidre Carroll file community stories across the Champion-Post and The Grenfell Record, and reporter Annabel Cusack's work appears across the group's Cowra Guardian, Forbes Advocate and Champion-Post alike.

Audience and Reach

The Champion-Post is a paid weekly serving the town and shire of Parkes. The town's population was 9,832 at the 2021 census, within a shire that takes in smaller centres such as Peak Hill, Trundle, Tullamore and Bogan Gate — the district the paper's council notices, school coverage and sporting reports address. Its readers encounter it as both a print paper bought locally and a website carrying its stories beyond the shire.

The quality of its small newsroom is externally recognised. At Country Press NSW's 2025 Awards of Excellence, presented at Yarrawonga in October 2025, Christine Little was commended in the Best Agricultural Photo and Best News Photo categories and highly commended for Best Opinion/Editorial, while the paper's Madeline Blackstock was commended in the Young Journalist of the Year category — a respectable haul for a single-masthead weekly competing against country papers across the state.

Digital Presence

The paper publishes online at parkeschampionpost.com.au, where its local stories appear alongside its print edition; its journalists' work is indexed by media-monitoring services such as Muck Rack, which lists Christine Little as the paper's editor and carries her festival and community reporting. Council notices and parliamentary submissions alike treat the website and the print paper as the district's standing channel for public information.

The deep archive sits elsewhere: the National Library's Trove service holds digitised editions of the paper's ancestors, including the Western Champion, produced under the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program. The masthead's inclusion in the Australian Press Council's September 2026 constituent-body register confirms its standing as a current publication. As with other titles in this project, the live site should be sighted at publication time to confirm the current masthead, subscription offer and office details, none of which are asserted here beyond the dated evidence cited.

Ownership and Organisation

In March 2023 ACM agreed to sell seven paid NSW weeklies — the Parkes Champion-Post, Forbes Advocate, Canowindra News, The Grenfell Record, Cowra Guardian, Boorowa News and Young Witness — to Provincial Press Group, the Higgins family's independent publishing company, whose North East Media division already published sixteen newspaper and magazine titles including the Wangaratta Chronicle. The titles were to be published through a new trading entity, Regional Media Corp, formed with Lucie Peart and Tim Pankhurst, the owners of the Narromine Star. ACM staff were briefed on the sale in March 2023, with completion anticipated in early May that year.

Regional Media Corp's chief executive, Edward Higgins, said at the announcement that the company was pleased to be the future custodian of the regions' long-standing newspapers, and aimed to provide strong local news content reflecting each community's aspirations; ACM's managing director Tony Kendall said the titles sat outside ACM's key markets and that staff would continue to serve their communities under the new ownership. The Champion-Post has done so as part of the Regional Media Corp stable, sharing some reporting across sister titles in the Central West while keeping its own editor and Parkes newsroom. The paper is a member of Country Press NSW and is listed by the Australian Press Council among its publisher members' mastheads.

Contact and Availability

The Parkes Champion-Post is a paid weekly published in Parkes, New South Wales; a Parkes Shire Council notice in November 2025 listed advertising in its Thursday edition, consistent with its weekly cycle. Print copies are sold in the Parkes district, and its stories are published on its website, parkeschampionpost.com.au. Its editor of record is Christine Little. Readers, advertisers and councils placing public notices should use the contact details published on the paper's website and in its print masthead, which are the current public points of contact.