Five years and counting…

It has been a journey running The Edinburgh Reporter website, and after about five years that journey has brought me to a place where I felt the need to have some kind of physical marker or presence to show everyone what we have achieved.

As an online presence up till now it is kind of hard to explain what the site is all about unless people actually read it all the time of course, or subscribe to our daily news update, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook. The site has in any case evolved into what it now is, which is a voice about the council, arts events in town, businesses and national politics since Edinburgh is home to the Scottish Parliament. We use multimedia to the fullest and I particularly like using video as part of the way to tell the story.

Taking the leap into print

It seemed the obvious way was to produce a newspaper full of the kind of articles that we usually write, but just not the news items that would make it too time precious. So I have asked our contributors for some historical or timeless types of articles, there will be articles about some Edinburgh Fringe shows and lots of photos.

One of the nice things about summer in Edinburgh is that our population doubles with the Edinburgh International Festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival. This means that our online numbers soar.

What we are going to do in the newspaper edition is link it to our website with QR codes which I hope will help the numbers even more.

The Edinburgh Reporter is a site which aims to bring all the news about many different aspects of living in Edinburgh to residents and visitors alike. This paper is intended to be self-financing from advertising and sponsorship and will last all summer long rather than being constantly updated 24/7. The cost is now covered so all we have to do is the final drafting, pushing and prodding to get everything in between the covers.

The point of no return

It has been quite easy to sell space, which must mean something! Whether that means that we will do this again I am not sure as yet since I have yet to push the PRINT button. However the actual process for producing the paper has been made easy since everything is online, just as it would be in any newspaper office.

My experience of working shifts on a local newspaper is proving invaluable, and probably without it I might have thought twice about embarking on this part of the journey but I have and now I have reached the point of no return. So onward!

I will let you know how the distribution goes. I have no idea what 5,000 20-page newspapers looks like but I am sure that it will be more than I think! Our distribution strategy is to leave them in appointed hotels, self-catering outlets, coffee shops and of course I am going to use all of our journalists and all of my friends to spread them far and wide in Edinburgh.

Homepage image accompanying this article is copyright Martin McAdam.