Inside Moray: Elgin's Community News Site for the Moray Firth Coast
Inside Moray was a community news website covering Elgin and the wider Moray area in north-east Scotland, published at insidemoray.com. Described by those who ran it as a community news resource for the whole of Moray, it provided a free online service covering council affairs, community funding, arts, politics and everyday life across a largely rural council area that stretches from the Moray Firth coast south into Speyside. For several years in the 2010s it became a familiar morning read for people in Elgin, Forres, Buckie, Lossiemouth, Keith and the villages between them, at a time when established local newspapers were contracting and a dedicated digital voice for Moray was otherwise hard to find.
Where Inside Moray Was Based
The site was rooted in Elgin, the main town of Moray and home to roughly a quarter of the area's population. Moray as a whole had a population of around 94,750 in the figures published by the Moray Community Planning Partnership, spread across 2,238 square kilometres between Inverness and the Highlands to the west and Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire to the east. Just over half of Moray's people lived in its five main towns — Elgin, Forres, Buckie, Lossiemouth and Keith — with the rest in smaller settlements, farming country and Speyside whisky villages. That geography shaped Inside Moray's brief: it was not an Elgin-only site, but a Moray-wide one, reporting for readers whose nearest daily newspaper office might be many miles away.
Founding After STV Local
Inside Moray was created by journalist Stuart Crowther. According to the tribute published on the site after his death, Crowther's passion for local journalism was rekindled when STV's local website news service finished, and he decided to build a replacement of his own for Moray. The result, styled insideMORAY in its early branding, grew well beyond what its founder expected. The tribute recalled that people across Moray came to rely on what it called their morning fix of Moray news, and that Crowther was famously dedicated to the routine behind it, rising at 4am each morning so that the day's stories were ready when regular readers sat down with a morning cup of tea or coffee. That early-hours discipline became part of the site's identity: a small, personally run newsroom keeping a daily rhythm for a dispersed rural audience.
Four Years Under Its Founder
Crowther ran Inside Moray for almost four years before stepping away at the end of February, in the account given when the site changed hands. In that period the site established itself as, in the words of its successor organisation, a highly successful free community news service covering all aspects of life in Moray. Its pages mixed hard local government reporting with community notices, arts appointments, funding opportunities and human-interest features. A typical run of stories from its archive includes participatory budgeting schemes inviting bids for community funding pots, awards for local film-makers and social enterprises, and appointments to new arts and culture partnerships for the area — the kind of granular civic coverage that rarely reaches national outlets but matters directly to village halls, charities and small businesses in Moray.
The tsiMORAY Chapter
When Crowther gave up the site, Inside Moray was absent for around two months before returning under the management of tsiMORAY, the local third-sector interface charity for Moray. The return was announced on the site itself, which framed the handover as the rescue of a valued community resource rather than a commercial acquisition. Under tsiMORAY the site continued in the same community spirit, carrying extensive coverage of the voluntary sector that the charity worked with day to day: small grant awards shared between local projects, public voting events for participatory funding held at The Inkwell in Elgin, and stories celebrating Moray organisations, including a Forres-based computer recycling and training enterprise honoured for its environmental impact. The fit was natural — a community news site run by an organisation whose job was to support Moray's communities.
Election Coverage and Open Invitations
Politics was a central part of Inside Moray's offer, and it approached elections in a deliberately open-handed way. Ahead of the Moray Council elections in 2017, the site ran a Meet the Candidates feature series and publicly invited every individual candidate and political group contesting the election to state their case through its pages, giving a contact address for submissions. The published features were substantive rather than tokenistic: one Elgin City North candidate used his slot to mount a detailed argument about bus service subsidies, council funding reductions and the history of a Westminster grant for supported bus routes dating back before 2010. That willingness to publish long, argued contributions from across the political divide reflected Crowther's own background in broadcasting discussion programmes, and it gave Moray voters a local forum that went beyond leaflets and hustings reports.
Campaigns and Controversies
Inside Moray also reported the local controversies that divided Moray opinion, including the long-running dispute over a proposed western link road into Elgin. In January 2015 the site reported how campaigners opposing the road had won the backing of actor Kevin McKidd, one of Elgin's most famous sons, who was visiting his home town for the New Year and met campaigners on Wittet Drive to hear the issues first-hand. The road had been rejected at planning stage only to be revived in the council chamber shortly before Christmas, a sequence that generated strong feeling locally. Covering a story of that kind — part planning process, part community campaign, part homecoming for a Hollywood star — showed the site operating exactly where a community news service should: close enough to the ground to know the street names, and read widely enough that its reporting was picked up and preserved by fan and news sites following the story.
The Moray It Served
To understand Inside Moray's role it helps to understand Moray's economy and character. The area's economy has traditionally rested on its natural resources — agriculture, fishing, forestry, food production, whisky and tourism — with the Ministry of Defence, through its bases at Kinloss and Lossiemouth, the largest single employer. More than half of Scotland's malt whisky distilleries are associated with Speyside, and towns such as Dufftown and Aberlour sit at the heart of the Malt Whisky Trail. Elgin itself is home to Elgin Cathedral, the food and drink businesses of the Laich of Moray, and long-established firms such as Johnstons of Elgin. A news site for this patch had to move comfortably between a distillery announcement, a council budget fight, a fishing port concern in Buckie or Burghead, and an RAF Lossiemouth story — and Inside Moray's archive shows it doing exactly that.
Radio and the Newsbeat Connection
Crowther's work extended beyond the website. The tribute to him recalled the laughs shared with guests on his radio show, where he was supported by his long-term collaborator Karen, who also helped run the site's Facebook group and presented alongside him. That broadcast strand, remembered by colleagues as Newsbeat, helps explain the site's conversational tone and its habit of hosting argument rather than simply reporting it: Inside Moray was built by people used to putting local voices on air. Its Facebook presence was an important part of its distribution too, with followers there often the first to share community news — and, in May 2019, the first to be told of its founder's death.
The Death of Stuart Crowther
On 22 May 2019 Inside Moray published the news that its founding editor had died the previous Sunday night. The announcement, written by his collaborator Karen, described Crowther as a passionate, intelligent and caring man and said Moray would be the poorer for his passing. Tributes, the site reported, flowed in from all quarters. The piece captured what readers had valued: a journalist who, when a national broadcaster's local service closed, simply built his own, and who sustained it through sheer routine — up before dawn, publishing for neighbours. His death marked the end of the founding era of the site he had created almost single-handedly.
Legacy in Moray's Media Landscape
Inside Moray's story is part of a wider Scottish pattern: as print circulations fell and regional publishers consolidated, independent and community-run digital sites stepped in to cover council chambers, funding rounds and village campaigns that might otherwise have gone unreported. Moray retained established titles such as the Northern Scot in Elgin and the Forres Gazette, but Inside Moray demonstrated a different model — free to read, community-managed in its later phase, and open to contributions from candidates, charities and readers. Its archive, still hosted at insidemoray.com, preserves a detailed record of Moray civic life in the mid-to-late 2010s, from election arguments to grant awards.
Inside Moray Today
The insidemoray.com domain continues to host the site's archive, including the tsiMORAY-era coverage and the 2019 tribute to Crowther, making it a useful primary source for anyone researching Moray in that period. Whether read as a news archive or as a case study in community journalism, Inside Moray stands as evidence of how much one determined local journalist, and then one local charity, could do for a rural area's information life. For WorldNM's directory it is recorded as Elgin's community online news service for Moray — a small site with an outsized place in the recent media history of the Moray Firth coast.
