It is still, as anyone watching it can easily confirm, a low production values operation with our team gathered in a small room recording the program on to a smart phone, which captures a lot of incidental noise. A slick Sky News-style operation, it ain’t.

But at this stage I make no apologies for that. We don’t have a big budget here and my focus in these early days is engaging content from the newsroom.

My journalists Chris Burns and Esther MacIntyre are settling in to the style of the program and starting to become more comfortable showing more of their personality on air.

But it is not primarily about personality, it is about the news of the week in the North West and I firmly believe this is another good channel to engage our audience about that news, with the added flavour of it being live and therefore more real and “untainted”. 

For episode 10 on Monday, both Chris and Esther were away on assignments at the time so it was opportune to invite an outside guest to join me.

State member for Mount Isa, Robbie Katter was that guest and it was great to have 10-15 minutes to flesh out a few issues in greater detail than normal.

Now I know that in some quarters this newspaper is disparagingly called a “Katter rag”, and local ALP president Nick Maric used this opinion page on Thursday to demand we hold Mr Katter to more accountability.

As far as I’m concerned this is nonsense.

Mr Katter does get plenty of access to our pages as befits our state member of parliament but he doesn’t get to promote his views unchallenged.

Yes I allowed him to do most of the talking in Elevenses, but that is our role – to be a funnel for local opinions.

His opinions on the rural bank were instructive and rural debt is an issue that won’t away despite the collusion of the major parties.

Labor would be better served articulating good local policies than attacking the messenger. DB