VicNews was already taken

Ashley Geelan has been telling people that VicNews is his, as if the name arrived with him and belongs to his personal mythology.

The public catalogue record says something less convenient.

State Library Victoria has a record for VicNews / Victorian Orienteering Association Inc.. It lists the contributor as the Victorian Orienteering Association, the publisher as “Melbourne : The Association”, and the holdings as running from June/July 1979 through December 1992/January 1993. The notes say later issues had the subtitle “official newsletter of the Victorian Orienteering Association”.

That matters because Geelan’s own line is that his VicNews began in August 1992. On the library record, the Orienteering Victoria use was already old by then. It was not a new name he conjured out of nowhere. It was a title already sitting in the Victorian public record.

What the records show

State Library Victoria: VicNews / Victorian Orienteering Association Inc., published by the Victorian Orienteering Association, with holdings from 1979 June/July to 1992 Dec/1993 Jan.
Trove / National Library of Australia: Geelan’s VicNews : the Victorian news record says it was printed and published by Ashley Stephen Geelan from 1992, with ISSN 1038-6971 and a note that from May 2020 it was published by Geelan Media Pty Ltd.
ISSN Portal: ISSN 1038-6971 currently resolves to VicNews, medium print, country Australia. Archived 2021 and 2023 captures show the same title and record modification date of 23 November 2019.
NLA online record: The online VicNews : the Victorian News record is a 2020- Geelan Media Pty Ltd online resource with ISSN 2652-354X, and says it is also available in print.

The careful version is this: the current ISSN records now point to Geelan’s VicNews records. But the title VicNews itself did not start with him. Orienteering Victoria had a VicNews publication for years before his claimed August 1992 start, and its run overlaps the beginning of his version.

So when Geelan talks as though VicNews is his original brand, the public record gets in the way. The fiction is exclusivity. The name was already in use.

Other uses of the name

I checked for other reliable uses of the name. The one that matters is the Victorian Orienteering Association record, because it is a library record, it predates Geelan, and it overlaps his claimed start. State Library Victoria also records the later title Orienteer Victoria and the other title Vic news for that publication.

The other main public records are Geelan’s later print and online records: Trove’s print record for VicNews : the Victorian news, and the NLA online record for the Geelan Media Pty Ltd online version. I did not find a stronger unrelated modern VicNews use in public catalogue/search results than the Orienteering Victoria one.

The part still worth checking

There is one narrower question still worth pinning down: whether ISSN 1038-6971 was ever attached directly to the Victorian Orienteering Association’s VicNews record before the later Geelan record. I have not seen that on the public State Library Victoria record. What I can verify is the prior title use, the overlap, and the current ISSN records.

That is enough to puncture the big claim. It is not enough to pretend a clean chain of ownership has been proved in either direction. The honest finding is simpler: Geelan did not own the VicNews name from the beginning. Orienteering Victoria was there first.

Geelan Lies