Krantz, who is 43, has glasses, a goatee and a teflon coating of wry bemusement that allows the eccentricities of Northern Territory life to slide right off him. Originally from Adelaide, he has worked on the newspaper for five years and witnessed some of its finest moments, including the page one story about a sex worker who left Darwin after criminals stole her sex toys ("SCREW THIS TOWN"), the tale of a priapic kangaroo following female joggers ("HORNY ROO STALKS NT WOMEN") and the account of a local buck's party gone horribly wrong ("BEST MAN LEFT BLEEDING AFTER HIT IN HEAD BY FLYING DILDO"). Irresistibly satirical and reliably ridiculous, the NT News has become, as one staffer put it, "the Bearded Lady of Oz newspapers". It is both an observer of and participant in the twilight zone that is the NT, with its toxic frogs and topless car washes, its over-proof humidity and Herculean thirsts, and its undying sense of itself as an internal exile, a lost world to the far north, stalked by slow-blinking public servants and crocs the size of cars. Doubtless there are other cities where people order hot chips while naked ("FAST FOOD IN THE NUDE") or kidnap their neighbour's cat, then return it partly shaved ("CATNAPPERS SHAVED MY PUSSY"), but only the NT News would make it a page one story. It would be tempting to dismiss the newspaper, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, if it weren't for its remarkable success. According to the independent auditing service Enhanced Media Metrics Australia, the NT News is the fastest-growing masthead in Australia, with 2014 figures showing readership spiked 55 per cent in the past year alone. The paper's weekday readership is 67,000, and 70,000 on a Saturday. But the real success has been online, where its audience - 258,000 - is almost double the population of Darwin. Despite only joining Facebook in 2010, the NT News at time of writing already has 190,500 "likes", only slightly fewer than its big-city stable mate, The Australian, which has 219,000. (The Sydney Morning Herald has 374,000.) A good percentage of these readers appear to be from outside the NT, either ex-residents or simply those who enjoy the paper's humour, which sits somewhere between satirical US website The Onion and Sir Les Patterson on a three-day bender. ("We're looking to do a list of reasons to date Territory sheilas," the paper recently announced on Facebook. "If you, or someone you know, have some hilarious pictures of Territory women in their natural habitat, send us a message.")

Particularly illuminating is the paper's Twitter account, where communication is conducted exclusively in capital letters: "THERE'S MORE TO US THAN CROC FRONT PAGES AND WITTY HEADLINES," reads the @TheNTNews profile. "WHEN WE FIGURE OUT WHAT THEY ARE, WE'LL LET YOU KNOW. PS WE LOVE SHOUTING AND BEING SASSY." Social media has been "very important" to the paper's success, Krantz says. "Other papers use their social media to hand down decrees, whereas we want to interact with readers. We also try to have a personality." Krantz will tweet anything: a photo of a man setting fire to another man's hair with an improvised flame thrower ("MANSCAPING, TERRITORY STYLE"), or a picture of actor Ernie Dingo holding a young child in a Darwin shopping centre ("DINGO'S GOT MY BABY"). One of the paper's most popular tweets came off the back of a story on the Guardian Australia website about an Australian man who had surgery to remove a tropical spider after discovering it had burrowed into his stomach. "HEY @GuardianAus," Krantz tweeted. "WE WONT WRITE LENGTHY MIDDLE CLASS THINKPIECES AND YOU STAY AWAY FROM OUR HUMAN SKIN SPIDERS. DEAL?"

All this has made the paper something of an unofficial Territory mascot. "People from the south tend to have a certain image of Territorians," Country Liberal Party Chief Minister Adam Giles tells me, gazing out the window of his office perched high above the Arafura Sea. "The satirical nature of the NT News helps keep that image alive in their minds. It's also been a raging success at promoting us. I don't have to tell people we still have cracker night up here, 'cos when some guy decides to put a firecracker up his arsehole, the paper puts it on their front page." The NT News does occasionally cover serious stories, what Rachel Hancock - editor since 2013 - calls "the dull but worthies". It won a Walkley Award in 2014 for its investigation into Darwin magistrate Peter Maley, who was at the centre of a political donation scandal. (He later resigned.) The paper also claimed the scalp of former deputy chief minister Dave Tollner, who resigned in August after the NT News revealed he had called a gay staffer "a pillow biter" and "shirt lifter". "We've also driven a couple of strong campaigns," says Hancock. "One was against high petrol prices, which resulted in the chief minister calling a petrol summit. Prices have since dropped by about 20 to 30 cents a litre." This brand of journalism used to be fairly common in the NT News, which was founded in 1952 by Darwin businessmen as a counterpoint to the trade union-owned Northern Standard. A sprightly Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in 1960, by which time the Northern Standard had folded, making Darwin what it remains to this day, a one-paper town.

This monopoly, ruthlessly defended by Murdoch, handed the paper considerable power, together with a responsibility that it has borne rather unevenly. In the 1960s, under editor Jim Bowditch, the paper pursued a self-government and social justice agenda, with ample coverage of indigenous issues. (According to Fairfax Media journalist Rick Feneley, a former colleague of Bowditch's, Murdoch visited the NT News in the early '70s and complained to Bowditch about the amount of "black faces" in the paper. "Well, Rupert," said Bowditch, "Aborigines are one third of the population." To which Murdoch replied: "Yeah, but they're not our readers.") In the 1980s the paper lurched to the right, hectoring Canberra and pillorying Aboriginal land rights, before becoming more "laddish" under 1990s editor Bill Murray, formerly of the Melbourne Truth. "Colour stories" had always been part of the paper's DNA - even Jim Bowditch did a UFO yarn, which he later admitted was faked - but the consensus seems to be that matters didn't really get out of hand until the arrival of Julian Ricci, as editor, in 2004. "When I arrived the paper was doing quirky stories, but they weren't on page one," says Ricci, a compact man with a conquistador's beard and a nervous way of talking, as if he's expecting at any moment to be held accountable for some past misdemeanour. "Then one Friday arvo the general manager, Don Kennedy, came in from a long lunch and heard me and my deputy sitting around laughing. Don said, 'You guys seem to think you're pretty funny. Shame I don't see more of that in the paper.' And so we thought, 'Okay, if Don wants funny, we'll give him funny.' " Ricci and his deputy went back to the news list and found a story about how cane toads had evolved to become bigger and stronger than their 1960s predecessors. Ricci pushed the story onto page one and illustrated it by Photoshopping the head of a cane toad onto the body of Superman. "It looked pretty dodgy, really," he says. "But lo and behold, the paper sold like mad. So it was clear what to do if we wanted to sell newspapers." When I ask Ricci for his "greatest hits", he recounts what sounds like an incident report from an asylum for the criminally insane: "There was the story about a guy who police caught filming himself wanking while driving at 150km/h, the talking cat whose seven-word vocabulary included 'f...' and 'prick', the man who claimed he was mugged by a croc, the vandals who broke into a council depot just to piss in the parking inspectors' helmets, the driver who claimed a station-wagon-shaped UFO cut him off on the highway, the dog who ate his owner's g-string, the bloke who robbed a pub after hours and got all his gear off in front of the CCTV cameras before walking out onto a main street in the morning completely starkers clutching an armful of booze ... And that's just off the top of my head."

There is an argument, of course, that Darwin deserves a proper paper; Chief Minister Adam Giles tells me that the business community is always moaning about the lack of serious business coverage. There is also the argument that the paper infantalises its readership, depicting what is arguably one of Australia's most cosmopolitan cities as a bunch of boozed-up, bum-flashing bogans. "It's a comic book," says John Lawrence, barrister and former vice-president of the Northern Territory Bar Association. "It is incredibly crass, and its crassness has been its success." Lawrence says he can "live with the inaccuracies, the crazy headlines and the lack of balance". But deliberately misleading readers is another thing. "They'll run stories about juveniles being arrested and criticise the magistrates for giving them 'a slap on the wrist'. But the Northern Territory jails people at a rate five times higher than any other state or territory in Australia. We beat the US, China and Rwanda. It's a gulag here, so for the NT News to perpetuate the idea that the Territory 'goes easy on crime' is grossly inaccurate." The paper even managed to alienate what might be considered one of its core constituencies: UFO hunters. Darwin-based "ufologist" Alan Ferguson has traditionally been the NT News' chief source of alien stories - until 2013, when he says he was misquoted in a story about alien abductions. The yarn, titled, "UFOLOGIST GETS TO THE BOTTOM OF ALIEN PROBE", claimed aliens had been abducting Territorians and using them in a breeding program. It went on to say that Ferguson had himself been abducted and subject to anal probing, a suggestion Ferguson took exception to. I contacted Ferguson to see if he would talk to me, but he emailed back, saying: "Sorry mate but I have given up doing interviews, especially anything to do with the NT News." In another email he admitted he had indeed mentioned anal probing to the NT News. "I did say the [abductees] cop it up the starfish. But I said straight away, 'Don't repeat that.' " It seems Ferguson thought talk of anal probes would be detrimental to his "work", while the NT News thought talk of anal probes was irresistible to readers. The NT News won. Before arriving in Darwin, I had two assumptions about the NT News. The first was that most people hated it. In fact, most people are quite fond of the paper, in the same way you can't help but be fond of a reprobate younger sibling. "When I first got here, in 1983, I was shocked by it," says Clare Martin, a former ABC journalist who in 2001 became the NT's first ALP (and first female) chief minister. "I just thought: 'What a load of crap.' But one of the paper's real strengths is that it tells you what is happening locally. Plus, the Territory is a very even, flat society: you can't have airs and graces when you have sweat running down your face and legs. And the NT News intrinsically understands that."