The coronavirus crisis has led to truly unprecedented times for everyone and one of the sectors hit is journalism, but our unrivalled and award-winning news service continues to deliver the latest Isle of Wight news around the clock.
We’ve been providing rolling coverage of the crisis for over 8 weeks now, which I can tell you is incredibly tiring, but we are still working hard to deliver breaking news as it happens. Our motto has never been more important… first, fast and free.
The need to convey important health and legal information from officials, as well as keeping Islanders informed of changes to events and keeping the community spirit alive, hopefully highlights the importance of local journalism. Islanders are incredibly lucky to have such good access to local news as in some parts of the country there are complete news deserts.
It may be at this point in the story you are expecting a desperate plea for donations. There is no plea here today – we are committed to ensuring our service doesn’t cost you a penny but that we are still here at the end of this crisis as the Island’s leading news website. I’d like to thank our loyal customers for their continued support, as well as the continued support of our readers.
Every cloud has a silver lining and this crisis will have benefits for businesses and communities, although they may be hard to see right now. We will take the lessons learnt during this difficult time to improve our service moving forward. We are continuing to invest in new technology to ensure operational resilience, which has always been a core part of Island Echo.
When I launched Island Echo back in 2012, I was running around with one of the first-ever 3G iPads but mobile internet was so patchy. I recall going from street to street to find a BT FON hotspot in order to upload photos. How times have changed!
We are now publishing over 400 articles a month, hitting a record of 520 articles in March alone. There are plans in place to employ new team members in the near future to increase our output even further and I look forward to working with new, fresh talent.
As we look towards our 8th birthday later this month, we are proud to have the most Facebook followers of our competitors and are Number 1 for ‘Isle of Wight News’ on Google. We are also proud to have been crowned Micro Business of the Year at the IW Chamber Business Awards in 2019.
You can place your trust in us to deliver accurate but timely news that has the Island at its heart. We are proud to be truly local and independent.
Thank you once again for your continued support.
Darren Toogood
Editor/Publisher
Shame you don’t print everyone’s comments thou! Obviously not ones that are inappropriate but just someone’s opinion!! It’s a common thing people say!
A good service thanks
Thanks for your timely coverage in recent weeks. I always visit here first for local news!
Its sad you remove comments but still love the news site
Thanks to all @ Island Echo for keeping us well informed and up to speed with all the breaking news as it happens. Thank you.
Must say I think this is a wonderful medium for news. Whilst I love I.W radio, the news is often very slow, and is more like history in this fast moving world of ours. So congrats on keeping us informed.
Agree that all but the most crude posters should be allowed to air their views, as freedom of speech is so very important, and now more than ever the most at risk of being taken away.
Let the masses speak out, we can easily ignore posters.
Some other sites put a filter button which the readers can then choose not to read those posters who they deem offensive in any way, leaving others to enjoy all comments
If you were that great you would report what is really happening instead of spreading the fear and lies try and be the first ones to actually expose the truth on mainstream
You never publish cross people, even though you say it’s a discussion. It’s not. You print what you want nit what the people have to say