Interview: Editor Archie Mackay

Am Pàipear is a monthly newspaper. Um, it comes out once a month at the beginning, uh, of each month, and, um, it has a variety of different material in it. Um, because it’s a monthly newspaper we generally don’t have a lot of current news as such, you know. We might have one or two items that are, you know, relevant to, uh, that have maybe happened in the last few days or something like that, but in general we, we tend to focus more on, um, contributions that come from, from our readers, uh, and feature articles, really. So, so that’s the kind of item that we generally, uh, we generally publish.

Um, the business – on the business side of Am Pàipear it’s, it’s self-financing. Um, there’s always been a misconception, I think, that, um, it gets a lot of grants and things like that, you know, for it to survive, but it doesn’t at all. It survives on its own. Uh, it pays my wages and it pays the wages of a couple of other part-time staff as well. Um, and that’s done purely by the advertising revenue that the paper itself generates, and we’ve got a – we’ve got a really, you know, loyal advertising base as well within the local community. Um, most of the businesses do use us, and in a sense it’s actually another valuable instrument for the community in that way, because it almost acts like a local telephone directory. So if anyone’s, you know, looking for anything they can always – they can, they can find most businesses, local businesses in Am Pàipear.

Recently Am Pàipear has been considering other, um, ways to diversify what it does. Um, obviously the fact that we’re a monthly newspaper does have its limitations. As I was saying earlier, we, you know, we have to, uh, we have to consider the way that we, we put news forward. So, in general, it is feature articles. So, we’ve kind of realised, now, that in – in the days of internet and broadband access and so on, that, you know, there’s an opportunity there for Am Pàipear to use the web as another tool to be able to, you know, get maybe more news out into the community faster.

So we’ve developed a website now. Um, and on the website we have – we use it as a kind of daily news, news service so we can get – the Am Pàipear itself obviously gets press releases coming from a variety of different agencies, um, on a daily basis. A lot of these press releases are relevant to the islands, but it’s maybe, it’s not necessarily, um – you know, we don’t necessarily always publish all of them in the paper because they might be two or three weeks old. Um, but what the website allows us to do is put those press releases up on a daily basis, so the community is, you know, is informed immediately if, if there’s any news that’s relevant to the islands that’s coming from any of the public agencies or further afield.

Another thing that Am Pàipear has been, has been doing recently is, uh, supporting the local, local arts and uh, local arts and culture sector. Um, we’ve, we’ve established our own art gallery now as well, so we have. Out in our corridor out here we’ve got, uh, we’ve got an art gallery which showcases the work of local artists, emerging artists or established artists, and we’ve had fantastic support from within the artistic community, and great support from visitors coming in to, to look at the artwork as well. So that’s another project that, that we’ve taken on board. It’s a little bit of diversification, um, but it’s, it’s mainly – it’s not really something that we’re doing to generate any additional income as such. It’s really just to give the community, um, something else, you know.