Producing our bi-monthly newsletter GunSmoke has become a major exercise for our volunteers. Every issue now costs around $8500 to produce and distribute. We are proud that, over 120 issues, our little publication has become well known and highly valued in the Gungahlin community. And we’ve been incredibly grateful for those businesses, community groups and other organisations that have been regular advertisers with us.

But we haven’t been getting enough advertisers to break even for some time now. This has been made harder by the Canberra Times (perhaps understandably) targeting our growing community by starting the Gungahlin News—which many people continue to think is produced by GCC! Although neither the Gungahlin News nor the Chronicle cover all of Gungahlin, we still lost key advertisers to them. When competing against paid Canberra Times advertising staff, it was unreasonable to expect our volunteers to work so hard pursuing new advertisers.

Without adequate support from Gungahlin businesses, we have to cease producing GunSmoke as a print newsletter distributed to every home and business.

The good news though is that we will continue producing GunSmoke regularly—maybe even more often if required—but as a predominantly online newsletter. It’s critical that we can get our complete and unedited messages on important Gungahlin issues out to our community. 

We’ll still get a limited print run for distribution through key locations like shopping centres. But for most people, GunSmoke will be digital from the next edition onwards. With this reduced print costing under $2000 per issue, we should be able to cover costs from our annual government grants.

We will continue to support local community groups and not for profit organisations who will have their notices listed in future editions of GunSmoke for no charge.