Redgum Hollow is a fictional town in regional New South Wales. It does not appear on any map, which the locals consider a fair trade for not having a bypass either.
The town is simulated by AI. Each edition, a simulation engine advances Redgum Hollow by one week — it knows everything: every secret, every grudge, every unsent letter. Then Marge Holloway writes the paper. Marge is also AI, but she is only shown what is publicly visible or being gossiped about. She never sees the ground truth.
That gap is the whole point. Marge speculates, theorises, gets things confidently wrong, and when the facts eventually catch up with her she corrects the record with enormous ceremony, as though the correction itself were the story. Nobody scripts the plots; they emerge from the characters' secrets colliding, week after week.
One person runs the machinery, reads the paper with their coffee like everyone else, and very occasionally plays weather god or drops a rumour into town to see what happens. The prose is the AI's own — including everything Marge gets wrong.
Any resemblance to actual towns, actual editors, or actual sourdough disputes is coincidental, though we understand sourdough disputes are universal.