Angry thread alert.

How do you find out who your local candidates are and what they stand for? Where do you hear the local sporting results? Who digs into the council papers and finds out about an outrageous development? Where is your local fair covered?

Who asks questions?

Your local paper does. Journalists do. And their work is fact-checked and edited in an age when most information on social media is a load of bs contrived to illicit an emotional response. Journalists are paid to find out the truth. (Don’t @ me that’s actually what they do.)

Our whole democratic system relies on citizens having access to reliable, non-partisan information so they can make informed choices.

Journalists keep a check on power, they dig up the dirt nobody wants you to find out; they are paid to be your professional eyes and ears.

Is journalism perfect? No. But it’s all we’ve got.

And it costs money. It’s really expensive precisely because it’s non-partisan.

Right now our regional news media is collapsing, leaving whole towns and regions without a single news outlet. These are now ‘news deserts’.

This is a catastrophe.

Who will ask the questions when all the reporters are gone?

Let me tell you, your social media feed of memes and rumours will not.

Wake up, Australia.