David Atkinson is using the Church's equipment and content comes from the community.

Many people can stay connected well with phone calls, Facebook and Zoom calls, but it is important to not forget about those who were less tech-savvy.

"We needed to reach out in some other way," says Atkinson.

With that need in mind, we wanted to connect older folks, but also people who don't have data or access to the internet."

Horowhenua District councillor Sam Jennings said the radio station was aimed at older people and those who did not have access to the internet or other news sources.

Jennings was providing information for the news and announcements and was working on increasing content and interviews from mayor Bernie Wanden and other figures.

"We want to use it as an opportunity to have an active audience to talk about stuff."

Jennings said he was concerned about vulnerable people who didn't have the internet, who were reliant on NewsTalk ZB and the 6 pm news, but were missing local news, such as new supermarket opening hours.

Atkinson encouraged people to send him contributions, as the show could run all day if there was enough content.

Atkinson said he was an amateur radio operator and the church had previously bought radio station equipment that had been gathering mothballs.

The radio station went on air for the first time last Friday.

Listen Up, uses the frequency 88.3 FM and is broadcasting each morning at 10.30 am.

The radio station is run from Atkinson's house with a laptop and a "tiny antenna" that can only reach the northern half of Levin because of licensing.

Source

• stuff.co.nz
• wn.anglican.org.nz
• Image: godtube.com

Cardinal George Pell, an Australian who is one of the most senior people in the hierarchy of the Catholic church, was found guilty in December and no one till now has been allowed to know the details of the charges against him, the trial proceedings, the identity of the complainants, or his conviction.

It left a pretty big gap in the community's knowledge of a serious event in the affairs of the nation.

The county court in Melbourne ordered that any Pell-related criminal information be kept under wraps pending the outcome of a planned second trial on a number of separate charges.

The notion was to protect prospective jurors at a second trial from having their thoughts contaminated and their views prejudiced by what happened at the first.

Now that we know there will be no second trial, the suppression order remaining in place against reporting the verdict on the first trial looks, to my mind and in this age of the ubiquitous internet, rather nonsensical.

Indeed, suppression and non-publication orders from the courts increasingly take on a ludicrous quality, where locally based mainstream publishers and broadcasters with significant assets lie down and abide by judicial edicts, while those with one finger on a social media app blissfully ignore them.

One law for big publishers and no law for everyone else.

It's as though we are in Fantasia, where a large proportion of the population know something that they are not supposed to know.

Such was the case with Pell's conviction. Some of the big media outlets in this country gave us a whiff that there was something in the public interest going on that could not be reported, with headlines like "Censored", "Secret scandal" and so on.

Meanwhile, it became evident that the internet does not stop at the sovereign borders of the nation.

Online publishers beyond the writ of the county court of Victoria were doing their level best to pump out the story.

Among the notable reports were those by the Washington Post, the Daily Beast (which was published and then geo-blocked) and a US Jesuit news site.

The grapevine effect was up and running - so much for the holy writ of suppression orders.

Following the publication of those teasing headlines - after Pell's conviction on the choirboy charges - there was a tense session in the county court in which the chief judge, Peter Kidd, and the director of public prosecutions, Kerri Judd QC, expressed their concern that the suppression order may have been breached - even without Pell being identified directly.

Since then the office of the Victorian DPP has notified media organisations, along with some of their senior editorial employees, that she is "considering charges" for sub-judice contempt and scandalising the court.

The Melbourne lawyer Justin Quill, from Macpherson Kelley, is acting for a combined group of media organisations who will defend the charges, including the Nine newspapers and TV outlets, News Corp, Channel Ten, Mamamia and Macquarie Media.

As many as 100 editors, online content people and journalists are potentially in the frame. Continue reading

• Richard Ackland is an Australian journalist, publisher and lawyer, who graduated with degrees in economics and law and was admitted as a solicitor of the Supreme Court of New South Wales before going on to pursue a career in journalism.
• Image: SMH.com.au