The Queensland resort town of Noosa is – as Isobel Coleman says – a “remarkable” place… for publishers as well as residents and holidaymakers.

Recent months have seen the acquisition of recent startup Noosa Today by Victorian group Star News Group and the area – abhorring even a partial vacuum – has spawned yet another new title.

Now in its fourth issue, YLM (or Your Local Magazine) is the brainchild of one-time UK journo Coleman (no relation) and two former colleagues Jo-anne Oertel and Jill Drescher.

Launch of Noosa Today – of which Coleman was a cofounder – had followed the closure of the Noosa Journal by News Corp Australia’s Quest Newspapers suburban division, and of the Weekender glossy, launched by magazine printer Michael Hannan and merged into Quest’s interests with his sale of Federal Publishing to News.

The Journal had been launched by local sustainable-publishing entrepreneur Lindsay Bock to fill a gap when Rural Press (now Fairfax Media) sold its Gympie titles – including the Noosa Citizen, which he had had launched and sold to them – to resident hero APN News & Media, publisher of the Noosa News and Sunshine Coast Daily.

APN is also covering its bets by printing both Noosa Today – and the Real Estate Lifestyle magazine bagged with it, which carries no imprint – and its own titles locally in Yandina, following the closure of its printing sites in Bundaberg and Ballina.

Media locals (and GXpress is a Noosa local) may have been amused by the changes which have taken place at Noosa Today. Gone is the old masthead which looked like a clone of Gannett’s American national USA Today; in are a couple of straps which proclaim, “Your town, your paper” and “Independently family owned”.

Which it is of course; although not as you might imagine from that, locally family-owned. (Is that a claim to which Rupert Murdoch’s titles can aspire, one wonders?)

The family in question is the third and fourth generation members of the Thomas family, who celebrated the centenary of the Pakenham Gazette five years ago, and now “the largest independent Australian family owned newspaper company”, according to their website.

Under Paul Thomas, there has been aggressive growth north of the Victorian border, first with the Albury Wodonga News Weekly in the city where Star partnered two other publishers which are now both owned by Fairfax to establish an “independent” print site. Star and Fairfax are also partners in Melbourne’s western suburbs through a joint venture with MMP, which Fairfax half owns.

Last year, Star bought the Armidale Independent, Tweed Coast Weekly and Port Macquarie Independent in NSW and marched on Queensland, picking up the Southern Free Times in Warwick, and of course, Noosa Today.

And so back to “remarkable” Noosa, where’s Coleman’s YLM is showing she has the measure of the market with a bright 24-page super-A4 product with swimwear model Cheyene O’Leary trying the cover for size… or should that (see homepage picture) be thighs?

I wrote about the churn in the Noosa market five years back, calling in on the Hinterland Voice in Pomona and speculating that publisher Fiona Sullivan might sell it. She has, with the title going online and evolving into the Free State Voice, where it’s not finding a lot of advertising support for an editorial agenda which has moved on from Guatamlaean artifacts, to solving “all Queensland’s debt problems” by closing the stock exchanges, and restoring the death penalty. The former stables from which it was published is now being redeveloped.

And so the churn goes on.

Get the idea? Bock – whose website describes him as “founder of publications in the region including the Noosa Journal, the Noosa Citizen, Cooroy News, Tewantin News and more” – certainly does: He’s keeping a hand in the game with an online newspaper called the Noosa Independent. We’ll watch with interest to see how long it is before that, and the recently deamalgamated shire’s other new publication, find new owners.

Peter Coleman