After five years of newsletters, we're still keeping it real, Australia!

It seems like only three different Australian prime ministers ago that Scott Morrison was asked by a reporter at a joint press conference if he had ambitions for Malcolm Turnbull's job.

Throwing a matey arm around the then-PM's shoulder, Morrison declared with a grin: "This is my leader and I'm ambitious for him!"

That was August 22, 2018. Two days later, Turnbull was gone and Morrison was PM.

Nine months later - May 18, 2019 - ScoMo led the Coalition to its "miracle" election win over Bill Shorten-led Labor.

Next week it will be five years since the so-called "quiet Australians" decided to give Scotty From Marketing a go.

How good are memories!

Last week it was five years since we started this little newsletter and thousands of readers decided to give us a go.

How good are anniversaries!

Back then we were called the "Voice of Regional Australia", a daily digest of federal election news and views from key hot seats around the Australian Community Media (ACM) network. We offered campaign trail updates from such trusted mastheads as The Canberra Times, Newcastle Herald, The Land, The Courier in Ballarat, Queensland Country Life and The Examiner in Launceston.

To those of you who joined us for that two-week newsletter experiment leading up to polling day in 2019, thank you. One Black Summer, one global pandemic and at least one full-term prime ministership later, we are still here and still proud to be celebrating life in those spectacular and spacious bits of this wide brown land that are, blissfully, not Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane.

I've said it before and I will say it again: These are by far and away the best bits of Oz - the dinky-di country towns and the idyllic coastal hamlets, the farming, mining and industrial centres that feed, power and build the nation and the large regional cities that more and more of us are preferring to call home.

I don't mind admitting we had no clue what would come of the idea of curating our local news and commentary from around Australia and sharing it with folks from other parts of the country.

The thinking was: we have reporters, photographers and editors covering the election trail up close - not captive on the campaign bus but living in the actual electorate where the carefully stage-managed whistlestop photo-opp will with any luck come unstuck with headline-making hilarity - so let's just surface our local coverage of the travelling circus and serve it up everywhere in an easy-reading format.

You responded by signing up in your thousands.

Post-election - and pre-secret multiple ScoMo ministries - we decided to kick on under the only-so-slightly tweaked name of Voice of Real Australia, with a similar mission: to bring you the stories and faces and voices of the places where 39 per cent of all Australians love to live.

Yes, we thought, this is our newsletter and we're ambitious for it!

Thank you for your support over these past five years. Your interest in exploring news and views from beyond the big metro cities means the world to us. We're grateful for your feedback and encouragement.

Whether you are a subscriber to one of the ACM network's rather excellent local news websites or a reader of this free newsletter who is no doubt just about to subscribe aaaannnnny day now, you're helping us keep it real out here in the real Australia.

READ MORE

We don't mind saying that we're proud of the work our ACM news teams are doing every day, from Katherine in the NT to Canberra in the ACT to all the bush and beach regions in between.

This is work that would not be possible without you. By opening this newsletter, clicking through to read more - and *cough cough* signing up as a subscriber at one of our network's many fine and welcoming internet establishments - you are helping us tell the stories you won't find anywhere else and produce the journalism that communities across Australia depend on to keep them informed and connected.

We should also note that your interest helped spawn our most excellent counterpart in ACM's national newsletter suite, The Echidna, which popped bristling with spiky enthusiasm during the ScoMo-versus-Albo election campaign of 2022 and which continues daily with our esteemed correspondents John Hanscombe and Garry Linnell plus cartoonists David Pope and Peter Broelman.

If you aren't digging in deep every day with The Echidna, better get on that here.

Back in 2019, in the same week we sent out the the first edition of this newsletter, it just so happened that our owner at the time, Nine Entertainment Co - six months merged with the former Fairfax Media - announced that it had sold what we prefer to think of as all the best bits of the former Fairfax group (the regional newspapers of Rural Press Pty Ltd, trading as Australian Community Media) into the private ownership of former Domain boss Antony Catalano and his business partner, Alex Waislitz.

Like our little newsletter, this was the start of an exciting-scary adventure for us at ACM as a new independent voice in Australian media. Our business has certainly faced some challenges since then, the impact of Covid lockdowns and the skyrocketing price of newsprint among them, but we have continued to evolve our storytelling and our products (Videos! Apps! Whatever the heck TikTok is!) to build a digital future for our journalism.

And when a global tech behemoth like Facebook can hoover up advertising dollars that might otherwise help pay for Australian journalism, then withdraw its financial support for non-fake news in its users' feeds and now unleash an artificial intelligence tool to actually fabricate facts, the response of regional Aussies signing up as subscribers for the news they can trust online is a source of continuing encouragement for our teams.

Proudly independent, our network of long-standing trusted news mastheads strives every day to be a voice of reason and reasonableness speaking up for local communities, and speaking out from the sensible centre of what at times seems like a left-versus-right screaming match.

This would not be possible without you, our newsletter readers, and our growing family of digital subscribers and the loyal buyers of our newspapers. You have helped us give real Australians - like those featured in the articles linked below - a voice.

A special note of thanks to our original collaborators on this newsletter: Gayle Tomlinson and Janine Graham, now editor and deputy editor respectively of the Illawarra Mercury; Emily Sweet, now managing editor of The Courier; and our man of newsletters here at ACM, Mitch Vleeskens.

And, dear reader, if you have read all the way here, thank you again. Please extend our reach by forwarding the Voice of Real Australia to a friend. Better still, if you enjoy reading this or articles like the ones below, why not subscribe to your favourite ACM masthead and unlock unlimited shut-up-and-take-my-money-worthy storytelling from our journalists keeping it real around the country. Or did I drop that hint already?