 On the Isle of Skye, the founders of the West Highland Free Press were approaching retirement and looking for an exit strategy that ensured their legacy while keeping the paper and its employees based in the community. The West Isle of Free Press is a weekly newspaper based in north-western Scotland, primarily on the Isle of Skye, but we circulate throughout the West Isles, the mainland, but it's much more than that. It's a newspaper that reflects the community it serves. Once we had been approached, if we were interested in buying the newspaper, we didn't know which direction to move in. We got involved with the co-optives in Scotland and they pointed us in the right direction and put us in contact with the right people who could make employee ownership happen. It soon became apparent to us there was a whole new world out there of not only support and help, but also raising finance. It couldn't be a workers' co-optive, but we had to have employee involvement because if you don't have employees buying into the whole ethos of what we're doing, it won't be successful. People have to be engaged and interested. I can see in the future people being an awful lot more enthusiastic about what they're doing and they will look at the bigger picture a lot more now and see what direction we're taking. One of the more tangible elements of what we've managed to achieve is the development of a new product, a press agency. It was the employee's idea because they felt that an awful lot of what we were doing as a newspaper was being basically plagiarised by some of our competitors and we did nothing to protect that in the past. Through the move to employee ownership, through employees being far more energised than what they were doing on a daily basis, they took responsibility for driving that forward and made it happen in a very, very quick time scale. And we're already seeing the benefits of that, where our content is now actively sold. Whilst it's a new structure has been in place, I think people seem to be coming forward a lot more with more ideas. The people that are working for the paper on a day-to-day basis are the ones that are going to be shaping the future of the company and I think that in itself can only be a good thing. As far as the long-term future of the vessel and publishing is concerned, employee ownership is safeguarding the future of the company because the model we've chosen keeps the company independently owned. It keeps it community-based but it keeps the jobs in the future of the company intimately tied to the community. That's what we're really hoping will be the lasting legacy of the paper.