The Orkney News: An Alternative Voice for the Islands
The Orkney News is an independent, community-based, not-for-profit online newspaper covering the Orkney Islands, Scotland, at theorkneynews.scot. It went live in January 2017, founded by Green Party activist Fiona Grahame and a small team who believed that stories affecting Orkney were not being fully covered by the islands' existing media. Its tagline promises community news for Orkney, and its founding idea was simple: that an island community served by one newspaper and a part-time BBC radio service had room — particularly online — for something different.
Almost a decade on, the site remains what it set out to be: a story-driven, contributor-led platform concentrating on small businesses, community life and people making a positive difference, while also carrying political commentary from across the spectrum it set out to represent.
Overview
The Orkney News is online-only. It has no print edition and no paywall described in its launch coverage; instead, even before launch it had already sold advertising space, consistent with its not-for-profit, community-based structure. It publishes under a .scot domain — a choice its founder said the team felt was important, signalling that this was a Scottish island publication built for its own community rather than an outpost of a mainland group.
Its patch is the Orkney Islands, the archipelago off Scotland's north coast whose main town is Kirkwall. That is a small, tightly networked community, and the News was designed for it: local stories, local columnists and local contributors, published on the web where islanders — and the Orcadian diaspora — can read them.
History and Founding
The Orkney News went live in January 2017. Its launch was reported the following month by journalism trade site Hold the Front Page, which described it as an alternative online-only venture founded to highlight stories its publishers claimed were not being fully covered on its patch. The founder, Fiona Grahame, was a Green Party activist who had previously been involved in the attempt to unseat Orkney and Shetland's Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael over his role in the leaking of an official memo concerning Nicola Sturgeon's views on the 2015 general election.
Grahame explained the gap the team saw in an interview with The National, quoted in that launch coverage. Orkney had one newspaper, The Orcadian. There had been others in the past, such as Orkney Today, which she described as a good-quality newspaper, but they tended to cover all the same things. The islands had one radio station, BBC Radio Orkney, which at that time broadcast for half an hour in the morning on weekdays and a half-hour evening slot in winter. A group of islanders therefore felt there was space — particularly online — for a newspaper that would cover stories affecting Orkney that The Orcadian and BBC Radio Orkney perhaps were not covering, or not covering in the same way.
The Team and Its Columnists
The News began with a seven-person team. From the outset it recruited regular political columnists, reflecting Grahame's stated aim that the site would offer a range of political viewpoints. At launch, SNP list MSP Maree Todd was among the columnists lined up, and Labour MEP David Martin had agreed to write a column. For a brand-new community website, securing serving parliamentarians from different parties as contributors was a statement of intent: this would be a platform for argument and commentary as well as reporting.
The contributor model has remained central. The site carries work by community writers, and its video output includes films made for the News by Mike Robertson, whose recordings of island events — including the Kirkwall vigils for Gaza held outside St Magnus Cathedral — are published on the site's YouTube channel. Journalist Christie Grahame is listed on Muck Rack as a journalist for The Orkney News and the Scottish Beacon, with bylined local reporting for the site.
Coverage and Content
Grahame described the News at launch as story-driven, concentrating on small businesses and on people in the community who are making a positive difference. That remains a fair description of its mix. Alongside community news, the site carries features and commentary on local events, environmental issues, cultural heritage and social matters affecting the islands, and it invites contributions from local writers and community members.
Some strands illustrate the range. The Orkney International Science Festival's guide to the islands notes that The Orkney News carries a regular astronomy feature, with topics ranging from archaeoastronomy to developments in space — a fitting specialism for islands known for dark skies and ancient monuments. Its video coverage records civic and campaigning life directly, from street stalls to the weekly peace vigils in Kirkwall. And its political columns give island readers commentary written from within Orcadian public life rather than syndicated from mainland titles.
Editorial Voice
The editorial voice is openly alternative, but not — by its founder's stated design — narrowly partisan. Grahame, herself a Green activist, said the site would aim to offer a range of political viewpoints, and the launch line-up of an SNP MSP and a Labour MEP alongside her own activism supports that. The voice is community-first: sceptical that established outlets tell the whole island story, interested in small enterprise and voluntary effort, and comfortable hosting opinion as a way of widening local debate.
That stance fits its structure. A not-for-profit, community-based site does not need to maximise clicks for a distant owner; it needs to be useful and interesting to the community that sustains it, and to give that community a place to speak.
Ownership and Business Model
The Orkney News was described at launch as community-based and not-for-profit. Advertising was part of the model from the beginning — the team had already sold advertising space before the site had properly begun — which for a small island publication means local businesses supporting a local platform. There is no parent newspaper group behind it; it is an independent venture run by its founding team and contributors. The choice of a .scot domain, made deliberately, underlines that independence and its Scottish island identity.
Audience and Reach
The audience is, by design, Orkney itself: island residents, and those with island connections elsewhere who follow home news online. In a community of Orkney's size, reach is measured less in national traffic rankings than in whether the site is part of local conversation — whether its columns are argued about, its films shared, and its stories pick up the threads other outlets leave. Its presence in island institutions' own guides — the Science Festival pointing visitors to its astronomy feature, for example — suggests it has earned that place in the local media ecology alongside The Orcadian and BBC Radio Orkney, the two outlets whose limitations inspired it.
Digital Presence
Digital is the whole presence: a website at theorkneynews.scot and an active YouTube channel under The Orkney News name, where filmed reports and community recordings extend the written coverage. The site encourages contributions, functioning as a collaborative space in which residents and visitors can share perspectives — appropriate for a publication whose founding insight was that online publishing, cheap and immediate, was what made a second island newsroom possible at all. As Grahame put it at launch, the team were all just running with the idea.
Place in Orkney Media
To understand The Orkney News, it helps to understand what it is not. It is not a rival edition of The Orcadian, the islands' established newspaper, nor a replacement for BBC Radio Orkney's bulletins. It is the additional layer its founders thought was missing: slower, more personal, more opinionated and more open to contributors, covering the stories — a small business, a community campaign, a regular astronomy column, a Saturday vigil — that a single weekly newspaper and a half-hour radio programme could not always find room for. In island communities, where everyone is close to the news they read, that kind of plurality matters.
Recent Developments
The News has continued publishing through the 2020s, with its YouTube channel carrying filmed community coverage in 2025 and 2026, including the Kirkwall vigils and local campaigning events, and its writers contributing to wider Scottish community-media efforts such as the Scottish Beacon. A launch experiment run by seven people in January 2017 has become a durable part of Orkney's media landscape — still independent, still community-based, and still making the case its founder made at the start: that there was space in Orkney for another way of telling the islands' stories.
