FIONA Grahame was one of the Orkney Four who took lying LibDem MP Alistair Carmichael to court in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to unseat him. She is also an entrepreneur, a Green Party activist, sister of MSP Christine, and now has a new role as editor of Orkney’s new alternative “newspaper” The Orkney News.
The online publication, which will go live at the beginning of next month, is community-based and not for profit, and Grahame said it will aim to offer a range of political viewpoints, as well as stories the team believe are not being fully covered in the islands.
“We only have one newspaper in Orkney, The Orcadian,” Grahame told The National. “There have been others in the past like Orkney Today and although that was a good-quality newspaper they tended to cover all the same things.
“Also, we only have one radio station, BBC Radio Orkney, which is only on for half an hour in the morning on weekdays and then a half-hour evening slot in the winter.
“So, a group of us felt that there was space – particularly with online – for a newspaper that would cover stories affecting Orkney that The Orcadian and BBC Radio Orkney maybe weren’t covering or not covering in the same way.
“It is story-driven, so we’re concentrating on small businesses and people in the community who are making a positive difference.”
She said The Orkney News team had been inspired by the success of Independence Live, who describe themselves as “citizen journalists” and livestream events that are not being covered by the mainstream media.
“We’re taking as our inspiration what the guys at Independence Live have done – they just had an idea and it has grown over the years and you can see how it has improved,” said Grahame.
“We thought ‘why can’t we in Orkney come out with something that gets news and features out to people showing the positive side of Orkney life and how things from outside affect it?’ The Orcadian really just covers one side of things and we felt there’s a lot of political opinion out there and there’s a lot of things happening in Orkney that are maybe not given a platform.”
Grahame added that the seven-person team had managed to line up regular political columnists including SNP list MSP Maree Todd. Green MSP John Finnie has also been approached, and Labour MEP David Martin has agreed to write a column “because leaving the European Union is going to have such a huge effect on Orkney”, said Grahame.
She added: “What they put in their columns is entirely up to them – it doesn’t have to be political.
“We have already sold advertising space, so that’s good; we’re a dot-Scot domain because we felt that was important and we’re all just running with the idea.
“It took us two or three months to get to this stage and we felt we needed to have a deadline for ourselves or we’ll always be germinating and never actually producing anything.”
The Orkney News goes live on February 1.
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