11/01/2024
Big news in local news - best of luck Matt Nicholls in whatever comes next!
CHANGING OF THE GUARD: EDITOR MOVING ON
Good morning. I know it's wet around parts of the Cape so I hope you're safe and dry. I just wanted to deliver the news that I'll be finishing up as the editor of Cape York Weekly in the next fortnight. It was a gut-wrenching decision, but the right one, as I prepare to move to Brisbane to support my wife's career in medicine.
As you're probably aware, I sold the paper to Region Group last year. This was one of the reasons why: I knew that I would have to move to the big smoke in the future and I wanted to ensure that the newspaper I love so much had a strong future.
A new editor will be announced in the next week or so, and I'm really confident that Region will continue to make a strong investment into journalism in the Cape – one of the most remote parts of Australia to have a weekly newspaper.
There's an extra tinge of sadness around the timing of departure because of the flooding in the Far North, which continues to make life hard for our readers in the southern Cape. The job certainly isn't done, so my first piece of advice to the new editor will be to keep reporting on the recovery efforts – we can't afford for those people to be forgotten.
I first moved to Cape York in 2014 and it didn't take me long to fall in love with the place. The people of Weipa became my friends and family and I have lifelong connections from that little mining town, as well as across the whole Peninsula.
When the old paper closed at the height of the pandemic, I thought it was my duty to get a newspaper up and running in the Cape. A region without independent media quickly gets forgotten. With the help of Stretch (accounts) and Gee (ad design) in Weipa, we were able to launch Cape York Weekly in September 2020 and there have been 166 editions produced since.
Importantly, it's free and the hard copy is available in just about every community in Cape York, something that I'm extremely proud of. That couldn't be done without some great advertisers and I thank them so much for helping to pay the bills in what is a tough environment. That support needs to be maintained going forward as Cape York needs to keep its newspaper.
So what's next for me? I'm not actually sure. I'm going to help Region in the background so things transition smoothly. I really want the newspaper to grow in my absence.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you all for the past 10 years. It's been a bloody great journey.
Matt Nicholls
