This study achieves four objectives: identifies the role of community newspapers in the society ; provides an historical background to Christchurch’ s community news journalism; records the community newspapers in operation in the city; and analyses the news and information content in two selected papers to determine the extent to which they carry out their information dissemination role. The two papers selected for this analysis were The Mail and the Christchurch Star. In analysing their news and information content, the study examines the style of news presentation, the nature of news dissemination as well as the general structure of the news items. The study reveals there is inadequate coverage given to major news areas. For example, in case of Christchurch1, less than 20% of the papers' editorial space was given to areas such as health, local government, education, local economy. On the other hand, about 50% of the editorial content was focused on business, sports and subjects such as arts, entertainment, culture, fashion, gardening etc. It was also apparent from the study that although Christchurch city was the major focus of interest, there was inadequate coverage given to city's satellite towns which are considered to be part of their community of interest.