One year in the Neighbourhood

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Cover Issue 9.jpgNeighbourhood – Sydney’s independent monthly newspaper – is celebrating its first year this month.

Having launched a print publication in a time of media free-fall and digital change, Neighbourhood has broken new ground, by old means.

Says Jonathan Samway, publisher and editor-in-chief, Neighbourhood: “It took some bravery – and maybe a little madness to be free of the predictable formats we saw around us. It demanded integrity and a sense of adventure. If this experience wasn’t going to be special, why bother doing it?”

Neighbourhood marks its first anniversary birthday with a hard-hitting edition, covering local issues such as Australia’s medical cannabis debate, the growing number of homeless ‘sleeping rough’ in the Hawkesbury and claustrophobia in Town Hall Station. It also casts a wider net with stories on Syrian and Rohingya refugee camps, and a comment on the recent London local elections.

Neighbourhood is a hyper-local paper that thinks global. The idea was never to be limited by geography, but to be appreciated as a ‘state of mind’. With a print circulation of 100,000 across Sydney’s inner east, inner city and inner west, and up to four times the amount online, Neighbourhood’s first year has seen incredible growth.

The paper’s website publishes around triple the content of the print publication. There, you’ll find filmed content, podcasts, and animation, and playlists from the likes of The Preatures, Jim Moginie of Midnight Oil and Gareth Liddiard, as well as a series of postcard stories that stretch from Mexico to Broken Hill. It’s a big world. We’re in it.

Neighbourhood cuts across age groups and economic demographics and enhances a feeling of community and dialogue between people. It marks its difference with its interest in having a diversity of voices, rather than adhering to a conventional house style.

Says Mark Mordue, editor, Neighbourhood: “We’re proud of having discovered so many young writers who we believe will form a generation-shifting wave of journalistic and literary talent. And to bring them to light alongside major figures like our London correspondent, the Booker-shortlisted author Will Self, or our culinary critic, the legendary chef Tony Bilson.”

With photographers such as Matthew Abbott and Dean Sewell, whose work you’re just as likely to see in The New York Times or The Guardian, the paper and its website have created a publication that delivers enduring stories and images in a time of ‘fast news’. Connecting to people in Berlin or Chicago as much as Bondi or Chippendale, from 20 years old to 80.

Says Mordue: “In the end, the talk about Baby Boomers vs Gen X vs Millennials can be so much marketing shite when it comes to a bigger, transcending conversation about creativity, politics, where we live – and how we make our future togethe.”

Neighbourhood: one year of ‘unity in diversity’.