Decent news sources in Brisbane
I wrote this on a Reddit thread, and thought it might be good to share more widely.
The Guardian is good, but doesn’t have many Aussie stories. As far as I can tell, they have a very small amount of journalists here. I used to read it in the UK, so just flipped edition when I moved down here. I pay as a supporter.
I currently pay for The Australian - online weekdays, and the printed paper on the weekend (because it was literally the same price as a pure online subscription). I like the journalism, and their Android app is much less shit now than it was a few months ago, but the politics is awful. A quality newspaper that’s pro-Trump? Whut? That said, the glossy magazine is nice on a weekend.
A subscription to The Australian also means a free subscription to the Courier Mail online. Whoopee. And a free membership to the Wall Street Journal. Which is okay. And some free eBooks. And stuff.
The most sensible Brisbane option appears to be the Brisbane Times. Seemingly free, and isn’t bad. Not too many good longform pieces. I can’t abide the Courier Mail.
In terms of broadcast news, ABC Brisbane is pretty good, though the news bulletins are actually Queensland-wide. I will typically watch the ABC News bulletin on catch-up/iView (tip: search for QLD, it’s almost always the only result). For some reason best known to them, the commercial TV channels don’t appear to make their local news available on catch-up. So I don’t bother.
For the news junkie, a combination of a Fetch TV box (the news package is just $6 a month) and a Chromecast will get you most of the news channels, from CNN to BBC World News and others. Sky News Australia is available for free on the Foxtel Go app - just keep cancelling any signup screens. Al Jazeera English and RT are available for free, live, on YouTube; Euronews and Sky News UK are as well but are geoblocked here for some reason.
Buy a DAB Digital Radio (about $100 from Harvey Norman, Target or JB Hi-fi) and you get a proper 24-hour version of ABC News on the radio (no Parliament or sport). You’ll also get SBSRadio4 which is the BBC World Service, 24 hours a day.
Finally, if you download the PressReader app, that has a lot of good newspapers and magazines from across the world (no Murdoch ones, but many others). It’s stupidly expensive - I think over $30 a month - but if you go to a Brisbane library and connect through their wifi it’s free, and you can download them in their original form, a bit like a PDF.
Brisbane libraries also have free access to Zinio, I think, which is another magazine download service. And in case you’re thinking “I never go near a library”, they’re in shopping centres like Toowong and Indooropilly - the latter one being a complete surprise to me, given it seemingly isn’t signed. You’ll find it past the cinema foyer.