UNDER CONSTRUCTION: This is the personal ‘career scrapbook’ website for Australian media man Ash Long.

As we progressively construct this website, you are welcome to explore its collection of stories and photos. Discover details of Ash’s 52-year career in the media in Australia and beyond.

Ash started as a Melbourne Sunday Observer newsboy, aged 12, in September 1969. In the following year, he was publishing his own teenage weekly paper, Scandal.

He became a paid ‘stringer’ (4½-cents per published line) for the Leader local paper group, ‘wagged’ school in the afternoons to work in a Richmond newspaper printery, and worked in the family’s newspaper distribution business.

Ash says that he had the world’s greatest newspaper apprenticeship, where some of the industry’s greatest identities supported his progress. As a teenager he worked as a journalist, publishing hand, at TV station publicity departments, as a syndicated national columnist, and was then recruited at age 21 as a newspaper manager.

In his half-century career, he has had a range of highs and lows, working in TV, radio and print, as one of Australia’s first internet publishers, and over the past two decades he has built a successful print-online media company that includes the Melbourne Press Network of more than 30 weekly newspaper titles.

Throughout his career, Ash has also found time for industry association leadership roles, and significant community service involvements including Rotary and Freemasonry.

Contact Ash by email at ash@Long.com.au