FOUNDER: Danny Casey founded the Killarney Advertiser in 1973.

By Cormac Casey

In the 1970s my father, Danny Casey, had a belief that local news must be produced locally. We must remember in the '70s we only had county and national paid newspapers and one national broadcaster. If any local community was lucky enough to feature nationally, more often than not, it wasn’t the desired headline.

Understanding how news was delivered in the '70s we have to remember that Tim Berners-Lee only tentatively introduced the World Wide Web in 1989, 15 years passed before Zuckerberg’s Facebook surfaced, Twitter two years later and the first generation of i-Phone arrived the following year.

In the '70s local news was word-of-mouth. However, our natural ability to embellish even the simplest story turned into a thing of legend. What was missing was the method to communicate local news and control our own narrative from within our own community and, more importantly, to accurately document community history.

Today we consume news from numerous different mediums, from the printed page to our social media account. Whatever the medium, our news needs never change - one constant is the reliable source and our personal choice of engagement.

In 1973 the objective of the Killarney Advertiser was to deliver real local news locally. The method of the time was print. Over 47 years the product has dramatically evolved from a humble 10 page black and white to a 72 page full-colour publication. Today print is one of many media products available to us: our online and social media presence is another facet of our offering, and this is only the beginning.

The ‘Let's Talk About Town’ online survey published this week was facilitated by the Killarney Chamber of Tourism and Commerce and collated by the Institute of Technology in Tralee. One of the survey questions asked, ‘We want to know how do you find out what’s going on in Killarney?’ The response clearly shows that Danny Casey’s 1973 objective continues to deliver today. This is very positive news for the Killarney Advertiser team and the community. Quality hyper-local news is alive and well.

The Killarney Advertiser is not one entity, it is a community. I would like to acknowledge the dedicated ‘Advertiser’ team, contributors and readers, and a special thank you to the commercial community that continues to fuel this project, and finally the participants of the survey who delivered a clear and resounding support for one man’s simple objective to deliver local news.