Happy Christmas from Murray Bridge News

It has been a challenging year for many small businesses in the Murraylands, including for Murray Bridge News.

But as I sit at home in the lead-up to Christmas, reflecting on 2024, I’m thankful for the year we’ve had.

Murray Bridge News welcomed a new journalist, Liana Webster, thanks to a grant from the Walkley Foundation; we moved to a new web platform; and we published more than 750 stories –we’ll look back at the best of them in the coming days.

I haven’t told you this yet, but we recently earned accreditation as a social enterprise, too, recognising that this for-profit business has a community focus.

On a personal note, I’ve been pleased to learn a few things at industry events in Port Douglas and Sydney, and to be re-elected to the board of the Local and Independent News Association.

More recently, as you know, we’ve appealed for more support from local advertisers.

We needed to find 11 regular advertising clients, I said, or we wouldn’t be able to keep going in 2025.

How did we go?

We’ve only found four so far, so we’re still urgently seeking more support.

I am hopeful that a federal News Media Relief Program, announced the day after our appeal, might buy us enough time to find those extra advertisers if our application is successful.

Everything is still up in the air and disaster is never too far away, but that has been my experience of the media industry for about 10 years now, so we’ve decided to press on.

After all, you said such nice things about us in our reader survey.

Let’s look forward to some excitement in 2025, then:

• For the first time, we hope to expand our coverage to a broader area
• We’ll take a citizens’ agenda approach to reporting on the federal election, putting the issues you want discussed in front of all the candidates
• Most excitingly, we’ll be announcing a major new event for the Murraylands

For now, though, it’s Christmas holiday time, and barring any emergencies, we’ll be taking a couple of weeks off to rest and recharge.

So thanks, one more time, for your interest and support in 2024.

See you in the new year.

Peri Strathearn
Managing editor