Happy Christmas from Murray Bridge News

Christmas is a time to reflect on the year with gratitude, and as I look back on 2025, I’m grateful for what we’ve achieved at Murray Bridge News – with your help.

We launched the Murraylands Business Awards and hosted the first in what, I’m sure, will be a series of business breakfast events.

We expanded our coverage area for the first time, appointing Zhen Pu as our Mannum correspondent.

We published 872 stories, more than a third of them exclusive to this publication.

None of that would have been possible without the paying subscribers, advertising clients and event sponsors who give us more than 90 per cent of our revenue.

To those of you who have been able to keep us going this year: thank you.

That said, it has been a challenging year for many small businesses in the Murraylands, including ours.

The drought and the high cost of living mean there’s less money to go around in communities like this one, and we were never that well-off to start with, were we?

As we announced last week, we’ve parted ways with journalist Liana Webster, and I don’t anticipate that we will fill that position.

That means it’ll be up to me to write the lion’s share of our stories next year, and edit contributions from Zhen, Glenn, Jane and community members, as well as running the business.

That’s not the position I would prefer to be in, but it’s where we are at the moment.

You might have the impression that Murray Bridge News is quite a successful operation – after all, we publish a magazine, run events and manage a screen network as well as breaking the stories that set the agenda in our region.

But honestly, we don’t do those things because we can afford to; we do them because we need to make money out of them.

As a little independent publication, we rarely get any advertising from governments or big corporations, the folks with enough cash to really make a difference.

In 2026, we’ll be partnering with other independent publishers around Australia in an effort to change that – keep your fingers crossed.

We’re also looking forward to:

• Co-hosting a national news summit in Murray Bridge with the Local and Independent News Association
• Covering state and council elections
• Bringing back the Murraylands Business Awards
• Hosting more breakfast events with exciting guests
• Upholding our reputation as the number-one news publication in the Murraylands

In the meantime, I’m relieved to be heading into a couple of weeks off.

We’ll be back for the week starting on January 5, and will have an email edition for you on the eighth, though I also hope to spend some time working on the back end of the business early in the new year.

I hope you get a lovely break over the next couple of weeks, too, or at least some time with loved ones.

Have a happy and safe Christmas, and may good fortune find you in 2026.

Peri Strathearn
Managing editor