About The North West Star

The North West Star

The North West Star is the newspaper of Mount Isa, the great inland mining city of north-west Queensland, Australia. First published on Thursday, 12 May 1966, it carries the subtitle "All the news for the North-West" and has chronicled life in one of Australia's most remote inland cities for six decades. After a long ownership history that ran from the Joel family through Fairfax Media and Australian Community Media, the paper is now owned by Star News Group, which acquired it in the December 2022 purchase of 14 ACM mastheads across Queensland and South Australia.

Overview

Mount Isa is an anomaly: a city of some 20,000 people set in the arid Selwyn Ranges, more than 900 kilometres from the coast, existing because of one of the world's great ore bodies. The Mount Isa Mines complex — copper, lead, zinc and silver — dominates the city's economy, skyline and conversation, and the North West Star is the paper that records it all: the mine's fortunes, the rodeo, the outback politics, and the daily life of a city that is closer to Darwin and Alice Springs than to Brisbane. The paper serves Mount Isa and the surrounding north-west Queensland region, including the Gulf country.

History

A daily for the mining city, 1966

The North West Star's first issue appeared on Thursday, 12 May 1966. Its predecessors were the Cloncurry Advocate and the Mount Isa Mail, and the new paper inherited their role as the voice of the north-west minerals province. For its first six years it was a daily newspaper — an extraordinary commitment for a remote city, published daily from 1966 to June 1972 — before settling, from July 1972, into three issues a week. From the start it carried a country supplement, the North-West Star Country (to October 1991, then North West Country from November 1991), extending its reach into the surrounding pastoral districts.

The paper marked its community's milestones in special editions: a rodeo supplement in the 8 August 1967 issue, and a Cloncurry centenary souvenir supplement following the 11 April 1967 issue. The Mount Isa Mines Rotary Rodeo — one of the largest rodeos in the southern hemisphere — has been a standing subject of the paper's coverage ever since.

Joel family to Fairfax to ACM to Star

The North West Star belonged for many years to the Joel family, one of Queensland's regional newspaper dynasties, before being sold to Fairfax Media. It passed with Fairfax's regional titles into Australian Community Media (ACM) in the 2019 separation of the business, and in December 2022 ACM sold it — along with the Beaudesert Times, the Goondiwindi Argus and eleven South Australian mastheads — to the Melbourne-headquartered Star News Group. ACM's managing director Tony Kendall said the company had been approached by several parties about its willingness to sell regional titles outside its key markets of New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria and Tasmania, and that an informal sale process had found "a buyer with a strong history in publishing." ACM retained its agricultural titles — Queensland Country Life, the North Queensland Register and South Australia's Stock Journal — while the North West Star passed to Paul Thomas's family-owned Star News Group, whose roots go back to 1909 and which publishes 67 mastheads.

Print hibernation and the present day

Like many regional papers, the Star's print editions were temporarily suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic; ACM's non-daily mastheads, including the North West Star, continued to cover local news online and attract digital subscribers while printed editions halted, resuming print from 29 June 2020. The paper's fortunes in Mount Isa, however, have been complicated. In May 2024 the Mount Isa City Council agreed to invest $100,000 a year for three years to secure community advertising in a new, free, independent weekly local newspaper, the North West Weekly, which resumed publication on 30 May 2024 with a locally based journalist and editor, covering Mount Isa and the north-west region including Cloncurry, Julia Creek, Hughenden, Boulia, Normanton and Karumba. In September 2024 the North West Weekly's editor and publisher, Matt Nicholls, publicly criticised legacy mastheads operated without locally based journalists — naming the North West Star — claiming its website carried barely any locally produced content and that fewer than 200 people subscribed to it. The Star continues as a masthead under Star News Group ownership, but its presence in the city that built it is much diminished from the daily-paper era.

Content

Mining coverage is the paper's defining beat. In June 2013 the North West Star found itself at the centre of the city's biggest story in years when it reported that Glencore Xstrata's Mount Isa Mines was predicting its local copper operations could cease by 2019, after the feasibility study for the Mount Isa Open Pit project — which would have extended the mine's life by 30 years — was deemed too expensive. The paper's Friday edition led with the headline "Is this the end?", and wore the brunt of the public response; an Xstrata spokesperson declined to comment, describing the paper's story as painting a negative picture of the city and the mine's future. The episode showed the paper's central role in the city's conversation: when the mine sneezes, Mount Isa catches cold, and the Star is where the city reads about it.

Beyond mining, the paper covers the outback agenda: the rodeo and campdrafting calendar, cattle and the pastoral industry, Indigenous affairs in the Gulf communities, the Royal Flying Doctor Service, outback racing, local government, courts, health, education and the sporting life of the city — rugby league above all, in a town that has produced some of the game's greats.

Coverage and Audience

The paper serves Mount Isa and the north-west Queensland region: the mining city itself, the surrounding mining and exploration districts, the pastoral stations of the Barkly Tableland approaches, and the Gulf country communities. Its readership spans mine workers and their families, the business community that services the mine, pastoralists, contractors, and the public servants, teachers and health workers of the outback. The city is one of the most isolated urban centres in Australia, and the Star has long been the thread connecting its far-flung readership.

Ownership

The North West Star is owned by Star News Group, the family-owned Melbourne-based publisher headed by fourth-generation publisher Paul Thomas. The group's origins date to 1909, and it publishes 67 mastheads across Victoria, Queensland and South Australia. The paper's ownership lineage runs from the Joel family through Fairfax Media and Australian Community Media to Star News Group, which completed the acquisition in February 2023.

Digital Presence

The paper publishes online as well as in print — its site, northweststar.com.au, was the address cited for the newspaper when its reporting was picked up nationally in 2013. It maintains social media channels for breaking news and reader engagement, where mine announcements, weather events and community issues drive discussion. The paper's six-decade archive, from the daily editions of the late 1960s through the three-times-weekly era to the present, documents the modern history of Mount Isa: the booms and busts of the minerals industry, the rodeo's growth into an international event, and the life of the city the mine built — a record no other publication holds.