Do you need Gay Guest House content on your site?

By Fiona Boyd |

What has a town planning application and the biggest news story of the year on regional radio have to do with your blog or website content?

Let me tell you a story of something that happened to me in the early 1990s when I was a casual Producer with ABC Radio in a mid-sized Australian coastal country town.

Among other things, each month we would trawl through the local council minutes to try dig up issues and stories for our Morning Program – a 2 hour interview-based talk program that often required me as the Producer to come up with up to 14 unique story leads a day.

I joined this team in the midst of something that turned from a local small town controversy into a full-blown international debate on gay rights, gay tourism and the pink dollar. I wasn’t there for the first news interview that started things off, but joined the week after when a talkback caller came on air and divulged that the planning story we’d done on a guesthouse had way more to it than met the eye. The broadcaster was intrigued and probed for some time until it was established that the caller believed the guesthouse was to cater specifically for the gay market and hey presto we were away. Suddenly this issue was known as the Gay Guesthouse story.

What's your Gay Guest House moment?

The story was duly filed on the news wire by the News Editor and after the show the broadcaster and I sat down and debated what angles we could follow up with in the next day’s program on the Gay Guesthouse story. We decided to chase the applicants and find out more about the guesthouse and what it would really be like. That side of things was easy enough – the applicants were indeed gay, and unofficially their guest house would target market the gay community, but they hastened to add that any paying customer was welcome, they would be no different to any other guesthouse in the area (a new growth industry at the time). They were reluctant but willing to go on the radio.

So far, so mild, but foment was churning beneath the surface along the High Street and pretty soon residents were openly arguing about the Gay Guesthouse in public.

By the way, this Australian coastal country town could in no way be considered a mecca for gay, creative, innovative industries or people at the time. It was a town that had suffered quite harshly during recessions in the late 1980s and again early 1990s and the town’s values were focused around mateship, blokes, fishing and agriculture.

The controversy and open debate on town streets yielded us some great interviews with the Town Mayor, Planning Director, the applicants (who were fantastic radio talent), and gay rights activists from Perth who were aghast at some of the paranoia of our talkback callers. Indeed looking back it was rather extraordinary, there were accusations of children being turned gay and the like by otherwise well-balanced and sensible community members. The really strong players on air in all this were the Mayor – Councillor Annette Knight – a really gifted communicator and progressive and the applicants – who just wanted their business to get off the ground.. It’s kind of lucky that Annette had such advanced communication skills because things were about to get hot and steamy.

Somewhere in the second week of story reporting on the Gay Guesthouse on our little Morning Program with an unaudited listener audience of c 25,000, things really, really hotted up. On arriving at work at 6am, I did as per usual and replayed the answer machine. On it were messages from the BBC in London, CBC in Canada a couple of US news networks, our own 7.30 Report Program on ABCTV, and also from the current affairs programs of all the commercial television networks. Everyone wanted to report the Gay Guesthouse story.

Hitherto internationally unknown and irrelevant Albany, WA was suddenly noticed around the globe because half its residents wanted a Gay Guesthouse, and the other half didn’t. Talk about a tipping point.

Over ensuing days the Mayor and the Presenter did interviews via satellite with all the major international news outlets, our studio offices played host to ABCTV crew and journalists as well as those of the commercial networks – our radio show was filmed and broadcast in the evening news and national current affairs shows. All this was in the days before online (we did have one email account, for the News Editor’s use only). We even had a reporter from the BBC turn up and use the local commercial television station’s gear and our satellite uplink to file his story.

The Gay Guesthouse was international news and we were inundated with interview requests from around Australia and the rest of the world.

So what is the moral here you ask? Well, from our point-of-view the whole story reporting on this issue was both exhilarating and exhausting, but something important happened to our Morning Program. We became known as the only show to listen to in the mornings in our region – the ratings of the commercial rival who had been nearly level with us fell away and my belief is that a whole new audience for talk radio in that town was born. I certainly know that all council staff had our show on every morning from that time on.

How did the story propagate? All our news items were filed on the ABC’s newswire service, which in turn would file our story copy to AAP. Once the Gay Guesthouse story was with AAP it was picked up by Reuters and then went out in their paid newswire service to most of the world’s big news outlets. Usually none of our stories would even get as far as Reuters, but because we had a ‘hot potato’ story this time, we got noticed.

Story propagation today is that much faster, what took two weeks with the Gay Guesthouse story, could take 24 hours or less now. What’s interesting is considering exactly what ‘hot potato’ issues you could write about that could be a Gay Guesthouse story for your blog or website. That issue with seemingly endless angles and perspectives and one that’s guaranteed to get at least half your readers hot under the collar.

For those of you who are interested, the planning permission went ahead and the Gay Guesthouse had strong bookings for its first year of business. Beyond that I hope they’re still powering on and serving their customers.

If you have any ideas you want to share, or have your Gay Guesthouse moments you’d like to air, please have your say. We’d love to hear your story.

Image: Flickr Tracy O

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