Who is The Spark?

Cat Holloway and Malia Barrele. Cat is an experienced freelance journalist with a background in news reporting, magazine editing, photography and citizen science. Malia is a young video editor, writer and producer navigating to a media future.

What's our agenda?

We want to spark curiosity and encourage connection. That's it.

We are not members of any political party, we don't sit on any committees, we do not promote products (except this site!) We are born and bred Shoalhaven locals.

We are journalists, but we are human and, so, have opinions and passions. You won't have to look hard to find that Cat loves science and nature conservation. But that doesn't mean she can't accurately cover health or industry stories. Malia plays tennis and music but she can still engage with tech geeks and farmers.

How is The Spark produced?

This project is brand new and evolving day by day. So please bear with us and feel free to offer constructive feedback. In time, we hope The Spark will prove popular enough that we can expand our team and the amount of time we can afford to spend working on it. We welcome outside contributions!

We use the open-source Ghost.org platform for independent publishers. Ghost is an all-in-one platform to collect subscribers, send newsletters, publish content, and earn recurring revenue. We do not seek advertisers or editorial sponsors. We want The Spark to be entirely audience-driven and funded.

Why bother doing this? Information is everywhere already.

So, glad you asked! Here's the problem we are trying to solve:

Regional news services, especially newspapers, are dying - and taking communities down with them. Mastheads that remain have dwindling local content and expensive paywalls blocking content from most of the public who are unwilling to pay to flip through page after page of advertising. News is fundamentally about public interest and should not be determined by corporate or political agendas.

Most media is owned by business people whose commercial priorities shape and potentially censor the information that trickles selectively into our communities. Almost all Australian regional news is owned by those who use their outlets for profit over public service. Publishers of The South Coast Register, Australian Community Media, openly promote their global real estate digital media and agent services business, View Media Group, "consumer and business solutions in Australia’s $300 billion real estate transactional market."

Social media has sent traditional news publishing packing. Small communities connect and share information quickly, for free and in a pocket-sized format that people can read, watch or listen to on the go. But that honeymoon might be over soon as platforms like Facebook won't cooperate with media outlets for news to be shared on feeds. Social media content is notoriously inaccurate or incomplete and can be a time-consuming distraction tainted by ranters and influencers.

So, email NEWS letters are back as a means to combine digital multi-media storytelling with old-fashioned journalism to filter out the noise, inform people about decisions that directly affect them and save local news from extinction.

We hope you join The Spark in this important experiment. We're looking forward to getting to know our community and helping our community get in the know.