April 2nd, 2022Kyle’s Rant

THE Local started on September 2, 2013, due to a combination of happenstance, and has been driven forward into the present with tenacity from the crew, the reckless and rambunctious business acumen and photography skill of yours truly as well as the skill of the editor, keeping a steady hand on the tiller.
This is our 250th edition and I was pontificating about a few stats that would drive home the gravitas of this anniversary and came up with the following.

We produce 5500 copies each edition with an average of 28 pages (some as high as 80 pages and one, in the height of the pandemic, as low as 20). That is around 150,000 kilograms of paper and 2,750,000 staples with a little less for our first “cheaper” print site that had the odd 100 staples per issue missing or poking out the sides from a few papers. And I must not leave out the 14 kilograms of ink we use to print which equals just north of 3.5 tonnes.
We have obtained or taken an average of 30 images per edition (not counting adverts) and the same number of editorial pieces. That is 7500 images and the same editorial stories over the years.
Our delivery run takes around 10 hours to get the paper across our patch which is around 300 kilometres per edition with additional top-ups, which means we have spent 2500 hours in the sun but mostly rain, hail and sleet and racked up 75,000km in our delivery vehicles.
The delivery circuit has laid waste to a SsangYong Musso due to an overheating clutch incident at the ChillOut parade one year, followed by catastrophic brake failure at the Daylesford Sunday Market.
It has also claimed the life a Peugeot 306 but fortunately not its pilot at The Cutting in Hepburn. The car was no match for a four-wheel-drive moving lickety split from the direction of the former Old Heppy and crossed the double lines.
The stats go on to include the website, which is buzzing and receives over 13,000 unique visitations per month because of the four editorial packages including images and YouTube that are uploaded every day, 365 days per year.
So, reflecting on this ambitious undertaking we embarked on almost eight years ago, I think we got it right. We shot for the stars when Fairfax and other print organisations were screaming from the tallest building “print is dead” to save their own print bill. We got a boring country newspaper idea, shot it in the arm with a mixture of great local creatives, hyper-local stories and left the bad news for Facebook.
You’re welcome, rant over…