A couple of months back, James and Jenny thought it would be a good idea to nick Russell & Ben's Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet for Greenbelt. There's loads of people there, and some of them write things while they're there, went the thinking. So far so good.
One of the things Greenbelt has been thinking about for the last couple of years is how to communicate what happens at the festival beyond the festival, and how to give people at the festival a glimpse of the bigger picture - the stuff they haven't made it to, the vibe, what things looked like (we have a great team of photographers creating tons of great images over the festival, not to mention contributions on Flickr from a host of festivalgoers). So, the paper seemed like a good fit. We talked with Russell, Ben, and Tom about them bringing their Newspaper club system to Greenbelt, but time, tide, and August got in the way.
We decided to do it ourselves, which is pretty much where I come in. We arranged printing with Newsquest in Oxford, and we would fund with ad sales. Which was fine, except we were a bit late in the day and couldn't sell enough ads. So, that was that. Except it wasn't. We decided to try and hire a big A3 laser printer and do a four-page A4 news sheet, except we couldn't get a straight answer on hire charges and costs and it looked like that was going to fall through to. Then we had a brainwave. James and I share an office with James Governor of RedMonk, whose clients include HP, who make printers. Maybe he could persuade them to lend us one?
It didn't look good, in fact, it looked like a dead idea. So, when I got a call from him on Thursday night (I arrived on site on Wednesday). There was no printer, he said, but Hewlett Packard would sponsor us. How did that sound? It sounded very good, actually. And when we found out what HP were prepared to offer as sponsorship we realised that actually, we could do the original newspaper! We were pretty stunned, particularly since we were on site and had given up all hope on the project. So big thanks are due to James Governor, and, of course, massive thanks to HP!
So, now, with none of the design preparation I'd originally planned to have done, without a printer, a ruler, or a layout pad, I'm holed up on site making a newspaper which is going to press tomorrow night, come hell or highwater. We'll be distributing it (for free) around site on Monday. I may not get much sleep, but it's going to be great.