Local media is best

At the beginning of this year I decided to make our Community Project for 2020, Local Media is Best.

The thinking behind this was based on a number of reasons, but the main one being the notion that a locally owned media outlet would always do a better job of having our community’s best interests at heart.

In places like Orange, most media is owned by non-local corporations whose prime objective is to make profit. They’ll always talk the talk about how important serving and supporting the local community is, but history shows that for the most part that’s all it’s been - talk.

My hopes were to draw more attention to what we do here at OC Life, to continue to provide people with an enjoyable and entertaining read each week, to develop a working relationship with the local Community Radio Station 107.5FM so together, we could serve the Orange Community even better, and to shame the CWD into producing better local products, products that served our community more positively, products that provided better value for money and products that we would all want to read and could be proud of.

It’s now March and so far, I have to say we haven’t achieved much at all on the Community Radio and CWD fronts. We ourselves are still ticking away quietly and nicely, doing what we do, but the others I mentioned haven’t reached the heights I’d hoped for. The local Community Radio Station has been working through several unfortunate issues over recent months and the CWD products continue to lose favour in both sales and community respect. Weekday sales of the CWD have dropped to under 1700 a day in the latest industry surveys and it’s only a matter of time before something will have to give to address the continuing decline in their daily sales. For comparison and interest, daily sales for the Dubbo alternative, the Daily Liberal are now down below 1000 each day, but they do compete with a popular free Community newspaper, similar to Orange City Life but one that carries much more local general news than us, Dubbo Photo News.

I mention this now because we are in very challenging times and given how things are changing on a daily basis as a result of the Coronavirus, having easy access to the latest developments here locally is vital. Orange City Life can certainly help with some of this, but being a weekly publication, we can’t get information out as quickly as the CWD or a radio station. We need both of these functioning well to keep the information flowing and to help the community get quality, credible and reliable information that applies to us here in Orange.

In places like Orange, it’s not just in times like these, but all the time that local media outlets have the ability and heart to serve our local interests best. It’s really just a matter of whether they want to do that or not. Please be assured that at Orange City Life, we do!