Blogger and rural resident Alison Fairleigh and Weekly Times journalist Emma Field have done a fabulous job creating a movement called ‘The Great Cafe Challenge’. The aim is to encourage all cafes, Australia-wide, to include at least one rural newspaper in the reading material they have on hand for customers. After all, cafes (restaurants etc) wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for farmers – there’d be no food to sell and no coffee beans, tea leaves, milk or sugar, and no-one to work in or patronise cafes because everyone would be too busy growing their own food or hunter-gathering!
The Great Cafe Challenge came about as a result of a customer who complained about the relevance of a Weekly Times newspaper in a Melbourne Cafe, ‘The Naked Expresso’ to the joint owner, Wimmera-raised Tom Ervin-Ward. Tom tweeted a comment about it, it was picked up and followed up on.
Follow the Great Cafe Challenge on Facebook and on Twitter and please encourage your local cafes and other places that stock reading material for customers and clients, such as medical, dental, accounting and legal businesses, to also provide a rural newspaper and/or magazine.