How does one react to news of environmental vandalism, rampant domestic violence and mutilation of women without anger or distress?

Less than a week after the two major NewsCorp-owned outlets on the Northern Rivers lost their websites and redirected readers via The Daily Telegraph (TDT), sister publications in Queensland announced almost the opposite.

As democracy advocates and journalists around the world did their best to acknowledge World Press Freedom Day on May 3, in regional Australia, The Northern Star was dimming.

Since its inception in 1986 by a bunch of ratbag hippy locals, The Echo has championed the voice of the afflicted, not the comfortable. That should be the aim of every media organisation.

Australians are worried the government is becoming less transparent on key public issues including the misuse of personal data, public funds spent on political campaigns, immigration and climate change. Locally, the Byron Shire Council and the Byron Hospital has similar examples of blocking public access to information.

A decline in the number of journalists covering local news in rural and regional areas means the public is less well informed about and connected to their communities, and is more easily manipulated, a new study has found.

Thirty-one years have passed since Nicholas Shand dreamed up this newspaper and collected a band of similar dreamers to help him make it real. In those 31 years The Echo has grown, like a magic beanstalk, far taller than we ever imagined, and it is now one of the primary institutions of Byron Shire.

You can’t escape that new term post-fact, so let’s grab it in the crotch like Trump and run this topic into the ground as surely he will do with the US of A.