Editor's Note

Hi Everyone,

Almost three years ago we started this newspaper with a dream to bring the local community a ‘free voice in print’.

At the time, we had just heard NewsCorp announce they were closing 14 regional newspapers overnight – three of those were here in the Whitsundays.

A few weeks later, our boss took a huge leap of faith when she launched this free, local and independently owned newspaper.

Fortunately, it paid off and with the support of the community we serve, we are now an established mainstay, a weekly read that is picked up by thousands of people every Friday.

As a team, we aim to be over-achievers, delivering not only the best we can, but also pushing ourselves to be one per cent better than last week.

One of the ways we have recently raised the bar is by introducing our first annual readers survey.

The idea came from our Sales Manager Mike McCann, a young Irish dynamo who joined the team two years ago.

By enticing participants with a motivating $1000 fuel voucher as a prize, he managed to get 881 readers to complete our two-minute survey and the results were fascinating.

You can read the full results on our snappy infographic on page 12, but here are a few highlights.

If you’re between the ages of 31 and 50 you make up the largest age demographic of our readership.

If you read both sides of the paper, you are part of the 70 per cent of people who do the same.

If you love community stories and the fact that the paper’s free, then you share this with most readers too.

One of our biggest core values is providing local news and we are pleased to see that community stories are the most popular.

We love covering community stories too.

Rach

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Quote of the Week: “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often” (Winston Churchill)

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