The Centralian Advocate is a bi-weekly paper based in Alice Springs that has been covering hard and soft news from the red centre since 1947.

The striking aspect of the paper is the land area they cover, from Tennant’s Creek in the north all the way down to the South Australian border, it is the biggest ‘small’ paper in the country.

The first thing you notice about the Advocate is how young the team is. The editor, Anthony Geppa, is one of the youngest newspaper editors in the country at 25.

“The nature of work certainly attracts younger journos, the adventure and all the travel tend to attract the younger journos, but we’re not all young - Steve Menzies has been here for 30 + years!

“Unlike working for a metropolitan paper, the journalists here need a few more life skills, it could be a 300km trip for a story, it brings out a different skill set than [working for] most papers,” said Geppa.

Alice Springs is consistently national news, but this has a tendency to focus on the negative. The 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response saw stories of child abuse, drug and alcohol problems become national news.

The 2007 Howard Government policy, which has been reworked by successive governments, is a federal government policy that created restrictions on the sale of alcohol, increased police presence in Aborginal communities and went as far as to give the government the power to take possession of Aboriginal land and property.

The Advocate hasn’t necessarily been one to minimise the coverage of negative press. In 2018, the paper settled out of court a defamation case, after they published a photo of a young Aborignal boy on the front page, in a story about introducing curfews to curb youth crime. The boy's lawyer claimed the paper insinuated he was “a criminal, a delinquent, that he is imprisoned or detained, and that he is contributing to a crisis situation”.

Rather than a criminal, the boy was at Anzac Oval with his family simply peering through a regular chain mail fence when the photographer snapped the photo.

However, there has been a coordinated effort to push more positive stories from Alice Springs since Anthony Geppa took over as editor in 2019.

“We want to be a paper that does positive local stories, because the town does have so many incredible people,”

“Local people doing extraordinary things. We need to focus a lot more on that!

“We want to be an advocate for a better town — it’s all in our name!” Geppa told the Advocate in March, 2019.

Public interest journalism is often seen as the hard hitting news, uncovering corruption and the like, but it doesn’t necessarily have to focus on the negative, local papers play an important role of telling the story of the community it represents.

“By no means do we shy away from telling the tough stories, but we want to show there is more to Alice Springs than alcohol and violence...We have many amazing stories to tell and we want to show the community that Alice can be pretty good” said Geppa.

Alongside the local ABC, the Advocate is one of two major media outlets in the area.

I spoke to the local MP, Dale Wakefield, who famously took her Alice-based seat off former NT Chief Minister Andrew Giles, to find her perspective on the paper.

“Not only do they cover a broad range of issues affecting our town and our people, but they also highlight positive stories of people in our community that may otherwise go unnoticed.

Everyone in Alice Springs reads the Advocate. Our local paper is a big part of our community,” said Wakefield

Due to the limited media outlets, journalists for the Advocate can find themselves reporting national stories for metropolitan papers.

“My background is in sports, so when the England cricket team came down here on the tour, I found myself interviewing [England captain] Alistair Cook for the national papers, which for me was completely unreal” said Geppa.

To give you an idea of how Alice Springs news can quickly become national news, you only need to know about the two major landmarks in Central Australia - Uluru and Pine Gap.

The role of the Advocate is to tell the local angle, for Melbourne readers, Pine Gap is the US satellite surveillance base that invokes well worn arguments about the merits of the US alliance, for Alice Springs, Pine Gap is the source employment for local and around 500 US citizens living in the Red Centre.

That is not to say the merits of the alliance are not discussed in Alice, but to highlight that when the Prime Minister discusses using Pine Gap for military intervention overseas, he highlights the number of local jobs provided by the base.

On his visit to the Northern Territory last year, Prime Minister Morisson told the Advocate:

““This investment is all about keeping Australians safe and putting Australians in jobs,”

In Alice, local news is often national news.

Anthony said the Advocate was uniquely placed to tell the story of Uluru shutting down climbing tourism last year.

“We understood the situation, we knew how the Anangu people felt, it wasn't as contentious here as it was everywhere else” said Geppa.