About Wimmera Mail-Times

Wimmera Mail-Times

Overview

The Wimmera Mail-Times is a paid newspaper based in Horsham, the regional city that serves as capital of Victoria's Wimmera region. It circulates across one of the largest territories of any Australian country newspaper — from St Arnaud in the east to beyond the South Australian border, and from Patchewollock and Woomelang in the north to Ararat and Edenhope in the south — and it has long described itself, through its publishers, as the region's premier hard-news provider. Since February 2025 it has been published by Wimmera Mallee News Pty Ltd, the Warracknabeal-based local publisher that bought it from Australian Community Media and absorbed its own Horsham title into it.

The paper's frequency is not the tri-weekly pattern recorded in older directories. It published on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays as late as March 2023, was described by its former owner's sales arm as published and delivered twice a week in its final ACM period, and under its current owner its editions are dated Tuesdays: a Tuesday edition of 27 January 2026 and the publisher's own advertising material for February 2026 both document the Tuesday publication day. It remains in active publication — the Australian Press Council's September 2026 constituent list includes the Wimmera Mail-Times – Horsham — and it publishes in print and through the Wimmera Mallee News website.

History

The Wimmera Mail-Times was formed in 1959 by the merger of two nineteenth-century papers: the Horsham Times, which was then 86 years old, and the West Wimmera Mail, a paper founded at Natimuk that had moved to Horsham in 1956. The merged title gave Horsham a single substantial newspaper, and it became the flagship of journalism in the Wimmera for the rest of the twentieth century.

In 2002 Rural Press bought the paper — together with the daily Bendigo Advertiser and the web-fed and sheet-fed printing operations at Horsham — as part of its Victorian expansion; Rural Press's chairman told shareholders the company was "satisfied with their progress" in its stable within months. Rural Press merged with Fairfax Media in 2007, and when Nine Entertainment sold Fairfax's regional arm in April 2019 the Mail-Times passed to Australian Community Media, owned by Antony Catalano and Alex Waislitz. The paper's ACM years were marked by retrenchment. In April 2020 ACM suspended printing of the Mail-Times as advertising collapsed in the pandemic's first wave, standing down staff while digital publishing continued; the paper was back in print by the end of June 2020, but a Horsham resident's submission to the 2021 Senate inquiry into media diversity singled out the stand-downs, and ACM also closed its Ballarat printing site, which had served the region.

The decisive change came in February 2025, when ACM sold the Wimmera Mail-Times to Wimmera Mallee News, the locally owned publisher of the Warracknabeal Herald and a stable of small Mallee and Wimmera weeklies — a change of ownership recorded at 28 February 2025 in the Public Interest Journalism Initiative's news data. Wimmera Mallee News had launched its own Horsham paper, the Horsham Times, in May 2020, in direct response to the ACM suspension; on buying the Mail-Times it merged the Horsham Times into it, returning Horsham to a single paid newspaper of record — under local ownership for the first time in more than two decades. In a neat historical symmetry, it was the second Horsham Times to be folded into the Mail-Times, the first having been its 1959 merger partner.

Programming and Content

The Mail-Times is the Wimmera's hard-news paper: council and courts, state and federal politics as they touch the region, and the fortunes of the broadacre farming economy on which the district runs. Its territory produces a third of Victoria's grain crops and is Australia's largest red lentil producing region, and agriculture — cropping, livestock, water policy including the Wimmera Mallee Pipeline, and farm services — is woven through its news pages. Mining is a second standing theme, from the Stawell gold mine to the Murray Basin mineral sands deposits; a page of the paper's 27 January 2026 edition, for example, reported the conflict between two competing land-use projects at the proposed Warracknabeal Energy Park, where open-cut mining and renewable energy interests had been permitted in principle on the same site.

Sport is the other pillar. When the Public Interest Journalism Initiative sampled the paper in March 2023, sport was its largest category of coverage, ahead of community news and government; PIJI assessed 92 stories from the paper in that sample month and classed 90 per cent of them as public interest journalism, and the same sample recorded its reporting of Horsham Council decisions, school news and the Wimmera Machinery Field Days. Features, lifestyle content, obituaries and classifieds complete the paper, and the publisher's farming publication, the Wimmera Farmer — described as the Wimmera–Mallee's premier farming news provider — is inserted into the Mail-Times for set-piece occasions such as the 2026 Wimmera Machinery Field Days, held on 3–5 March 2026.

Audience and Reach

The Mail-Times is a paid publication, sold and delivered across its wide circulation territory, and it is read as the newspaper of record for the Wimmera and southern Mallee: its circulation runs from St Arnaud to the South Australian border and from the Mallee towns of Patchewollock and Woomelang south to Ararat and Edenhope. Horsham itself, at the centre of the territory, has a population of around 20,000 within a regional market of some 65,000 people. Academic research drawing on 2018–19 industry data recorded a monthly combined print and digital audience of 21,906 for the paper in its tri-weekly ACM era; that figure is historical, and no current audited audience number is published in the sources consulted for this profile. The publisher's own 2026 advertising material claims 50,000 monthly readers online across its combined network of titles, a group-level claim not specific to this masthead.

Digital Presence

The paper publishes online through its publisher's website, wimmeramalleenews.com.au, where the Mail-Times has its own section alongside the group's other mastheads; the Australian Communications and Media Authority's Register of Eligible News Businesses records that section as the paper's registered news source link. The site operates a subscription model in which one subscription covers the group's newspapers. The Mail-Times' own long-standing web address, mailtimes.com.au, still appears in the footer of its printed pages — the 27 January 2026 edition carries it — reflecting the paper's continuity of identity through its changes of owner. Its journalists' work is tracked by media-monitoring services such as Muck Rack, whose profiles record bylines shared across the Wimmera Mallee News stable.

Ownership and Organisation

The Wimmera Mail-Times is owned and published by Wimmera Mallee News Pty Ltd (ABN 89 644 755 386), based at Warracknabeal in the northern Wimmera. The ACMA Register lists the company's registered news sources as the Warracknabeal Herald, Rainbow Jeparit Argus, Dimboola Banner, Hopetoun Courier, the Wimmera Farmer and the Wimmera Mail-Times, with Andrew Ward as the registered contact. The group also publishes Wimmera Mallee Sport, a weekly sports newspaper launched on 9 April 2024, and its papers are printed within the region it serves. The February 2025 acquisition made Wimmera Mallee News the publisher of Horsham's newspaper of record as well as of the small-town weeklies of the northern Wimmera and southern Mallee, with the Horsham newsroom continuing to produce the Mail-Times after the merger of the Horsham Times into it.

Contact and Availability

The Wimmera Mail-Times is available in print across Horsham and the Wimmera and by subscription online through wimmeramalleenews.com.au. Wimmera Mallee News' registered contact is Andrew Ward, on 03 5398 2033, with the published email andrew@wmnews.com.au. Public notices, community contributions and advertising are carried in the paper's print editions and on the publisher's website.