About The Geelong Advertiser

The Geelong Advertiser

Overview

The Geelong Advertiser is a daily newspaper circulating in Geelong, Victoria, the Bellarine Peninsula, and surrounding areas. First published on 21 November 1840, it is the oldest newspaper title in Victoria and the second-oldest in Australia. Owned by News Corp Australia, it was named the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association's Newspaper of the Year in 2009 in the 25,000–90,000 circulation category. Known locally as the "Addy", it appears six days a week and operates as a 24-hour digital publishing organisation alongside its print edition. Its official website is geelongadvertiser.com.au (listed on Wikipedia; the website field is left empty here as it was not load-verified for this draft).

The paper's masthead carries the words "the voice of Geelong", and its editors have long claimed that its history is the history of its city. From the gold rush to the rise and fall of manufacturing, from the birth of the Geelong Football Club to the region's current reinvention, the Advertiser has been the daily record of Victoria's second city for more than 180 years.

History

The Geelong Advertiser was initially edited by James Harrison, a Scottish emigrant who had arrived in Sydney in 1837 to set up a printing press for the English company Tegg & Co. Moving to Melbourne in 1839, he found employment with John Pascoe Fawkner as a compositor and later editor of Fawkner's Port Phillip Patriot. When Fawkner acquired a new press, Harrison offered him £30 for the original press and started Geelong's first newspaper. The first edition, which originally appeared weekly, was published on Saturday 21 November 1840 — edited by James Harrison and printed and published for John Pascoe Fawkner, the sole proprietor, by William Watkins. It carried four pages with advertising on the front and back covers and public notices within, selling for sixpence.

Its first editorial offered a verse invocation to the press that has been quoted ever since. By November 1842 Harrison had become the sole owner. For its first seven years the paper was printed in demi-folio size before changing to broadsheet; in 1858 it retired the original wooden press, adopted new typography, and moved to a mechanised steam press. From 1845 to 1847 it appeared as the Geelong Advertiser, and Squatters Advocate. In 1860 the paper was purchased by Alfred Douglass, though Harrison continued as editor until March 1865, when he left with Daniel Harrison to found the Register; the Register later amalgamated with the Advertiser in August 1869.

The paper did not feature news on the front page until 21 June 1924, when a new printing press was inaugurated — before that, the front page was devoted to classified advertising. Trials of a tabloid-sized paper were made in 2000, when a Sunday edition was printed for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games; the broadsheet size was used until 2001, when the paper changed to the tabloid format it has used since. News Corp acquired the paper in 1987.

The Advertiser claims a central role in two of the defining moments of Victorian history. In 1851 it published the story of the discovery of gold in Ballarat — a few paragraphs on page four announcing that gold had been found — an announcement its editors credit with igniting the gold rush. In 1859 it printed four paragraphs calling for interested footballers to meet at a local pub; from that meeting came the formation of the Geelong Football Club, the second-oldest club in the Australian Football League. The paper celebrated its 175th anniversary in 2015 with a dinner for 200 guests — including business leaders, athletes, and politicians — a souvenir wrap edition in historical format, and a twelve-part magazine series on its greatest stories.

Programming and Content

The Geelong Advertiser covers Geelong and its region with the full range of a metropolitan daily: local government, courts, police, health, education, business, property, and community affairs, alongside national and international news from the News Corp network. Its editors describe it as a campaigning paper, passionately advocating for its region, and its pages have pressed the case for Geelong's interests in areas from infrastructure to health funding.

Sport coverage is dominated by the Geelong Cats in the AFL, the city's beloved football club whose birth the paper claims to have midwifed, along with cricket, racing, and local leagues. The Saturday paper carries GT, the paper's magazine, alongside property, motoring, and entertainment lift-outs. Opinion pages carry editorials, columns, and letters, and the paper's community pages record the clubs, societies, and events of the Bellarine Peninsula and Surf Coast.

The paper's newsroom has chronicled Geelong's economic transformations in real time: the rise of the Ford factory and the Shell refinery, the wool stores and the port, the painful industrial closures of recent decades, and the city's deliberate pivot toward education, health, tourism, and advanced manufacturing. Its court reporters cover the region's justice system, its council reporters hold the City of Greater Geelong to account, and its photographers document everything from Cats grand final triumphs to the Festival of Sails on Corio Bay.

Coverage and Audience

The Advertiser circulates throughout Geelong, the Bellarine Peninsula, and the Surf Coast, serving Victoria's second-largest city and its fast-growing hinterland. Its readers include the manufacturing and logistics workers of the region's industrial base, the health and education professionals of its growing services economy, small business owners, farmers of the Bellarine, and the sea-changers drawn by the coastal lifestyle.

The region is developing rapidly into a hub for new and emerging industries, and the paper's business and property coverage tracks that transformation. Its audience extends to the large Geelong diaspora — former residents who follow the Cats and their home city from Melbourne and beyond — and its digital edition reaches readers wherever they are.

Ownership

The Geelong Advertiser is owned by News Corp Australia, which acquired the paper in 1987. Its ownership lineage runs from John Pascoe Fawkner and James Harrison through Alfred Douglass and a succession of nineteenth- and twentieth-century proprietors to the modern News Corp group. Within News Corp's Victorian operations it sits alongside the Herald Sun, the state's metropolitan daily, while maintaining its distinct Geelong masthead, newsroom, and editorial identity.

As part of Australia's largest newspaper group, the Advertiser benefits from shared national and international reporting, digital platforms, and advertising operations, while its Geelong newsroom produces the local journalism that defines the paper — the council investigations, court reports, and community campaigns that no national masthead could replicate.

Digital Presence

The paper's website, geelongadvertiser.com.au, was relaunched on a faster, more user-friendly platform during the paper's 175th anniversary year, reflecting its operation as a round-the-clock digital publisher. The site carries breaking Geelong news, live blogs, video, and the digital edition of the print paper, with much content behind News Corp's subscription paywall. The paper is active on social media, where its breaking news, Cats coverage, and community stories reach large audiences.

The Advertiser's archive is one of the treasures of Australian journalism: more than 180 years of daily reporting on Victoria's second city, from the gold rush to the present. Digitised historical issues are available through the National Library of Australia's Trove service, making the paper's nineteenth-century editions — including its announcement of the Ballarat gold discovery — searchable for researchers and family historians.