
THREE YEARS AGO today I launched what I expected to be a seven-day wonder – it was, after all, quite one thing to work on a hyper-local news website with the support of a large national media company.
It was clearly quite another to attempt to do it as a one-man operation, covering news from every corner of the region with a few national items with particular relevance to our fabulous region thrown in.
Frankly, I expected it to fail. Frankly, the glum part of me still does.
Never did I expect in those early experimental days that we would still be going three years down the line – and I hardly gave a thought to the possibility that the little blue dolphin logo would start jumping up on over 100,000 computers, tablets and phones each month.
The insideMoray ‘experiment’ (should I still call it that?) is not loved by everyone of course – there were times when I threw my toys out the pram as ungrateful readers seemed to complain and moan their way through our free – yes, always has been free, always will be free – daily content.
Here we are though, this is article number 4678 and day in, day out our readers keep on coming back for more, and I keep on churning out tales from the very trivial to the headlining blockbusters that were later nicked by the national press (yes, it does work both ways – not that they would ever admit to that!)
What’s next? Well I really would like to hand the whole thing over someday to someone, anyone, who is willing to do this thing in the uncompromising, bloody-minded and stubborn manner I have. A few have joined the journey – none have lasted more than a few articles, who wants to put all this work in for no reward after all?
I would really like a community group, college, school to take the insideMoray project under their wing, who knows, one day.
For now it is enough that I’m still enjoying the journey, will still welcome the odd helping hand both through writing for the site and contributing to its costs.
But above all it is those 100,000+ readers out there who I really appreciate – the ones who rarely if ever speak, but just keep coming back because they share my love of Moray and appreciate that if someone is stupid enough to hand out his work for free, it’s only right that it should at least be read!
So Happy Birthday insideMoray – and all power to you all, our readers, our sponsors – and thank you for keeping faith with community journalism!