The weekly newsletter from Justice? - Brighton's Direct Action collective

SEVENTH HEAVEN

SchNEWS celebrated its seventh birthday last November. Since our birth during the campaign against the Criminal Justice Act, this scrappy little A4 direct action newsheet has become a firmly established part of the anti-capitalist movement.

It's impossible to know how many people read SchNEWS, there's 350 on our mailing list (including 50 prisoners who get it sent free each week) but many of these make photocopies, while others on our emailing list pass it on. But we do know that we've currently got 7,500 email subscribers, and get about 150,000 hits on our website every month. Popular sites like Urban 75 mirror every issue while others like the A Infos service email it out each week to all their subscribers - and some even translate the odd issues into Italian.

Our party and protest section is the most popular feature on our website, updated every week with a mishmash of festival dates, meetings and demos as well as a section on where to go if you want to find out things that are happening in a particular town or city. We also try to continually update our contacts list - currently listing over 700 useful organisations.

SO WHO FUNDS ALL THIS?

SchNEWS is run on a voluntary basis. No one gets paid tho' we do manage to blag into gigs and festivals for free (to spread the word of course) and when our treasurer's not looking, raid the petty cash tin for biscuits. Our stories originate from anarchist literature to the dodgy Financial Times (no, really), from conversations in the pub to the internet. While we always try to be as accurate as possible and chase people up to verify the stories, the idea of SchNEWS is not to believe the printed word, but to get up off your arse and go and see things for yourself. So our articles are often first hand accounts from our very good selves as we storm all over the country causing trouble/saving the world/having a laugh.

As for who keeps us going... Well, even with free office space kindly donated by the Levellers, we still reckon to be spending around £20,000 a year on printing, stamps, telephone, computers, envelopes, stationary, e-mail accounts... we rely on subscriptions, benefit gigs and our readers generosity to keep us afloat.

Finally, SchNEWS is an open collective, we are always looking for new people to get involved, so if you like reading the news the mainstream tends to ignore (or at best talks about the lifestyle rather than why an action is going on) take a look in the next column and see if anything grabs your fancy.

WAKE UP! WAKE UP!
IT'S YER TYPICAL SCHNEWS WEEK

• Monday/Tuesday evening: We get up to 500 emails a week, and someone has the job of going though all these, answering queries and deciding which ones might become stories.
• Wednesday: Start writing and researching SchNEWS, go through all the mail, decide roughly what we are going to cover this week.
• Thursday: More writing, except it's usually a bit more frantic cos we've got to get it all finished and checked by early evening before the pubs shut.
• Thursday early evening: Desk Top Publishing crew come in and do their stuff, somehow managing to crush a tonne of information into two bits of A4.
• Thursday bit later in the evening: SchNEWS gets put on the web Friday 10 am: Hot off the press. A bleary-eyed person prints up the SchNEWS at The Resource Centre.
• Friday afternoons: The mail out crew send it out to all our paper subscribers. While this is going on SchNEWS is being distributed to various places around Brighton.
• Saturday/Weekends: Depending on the weather/time of year you might see us festivals or handing out SchNEWS to passers by in the North Laines.
• And there's more: During the week the subscription database is constantly being updated, letters answered, book orders posted, journalist queries answered and the next SchNEWS book being sorted.

Still interested? Then give the office a call. We have regular training days, but if you can't wait for them, give the office a ring now. Don't let the fact that SchNEWS comes out every week lull you into a false sense of security. We constantly need more people to get involved. We guestimate SchNEWS reaches around 40,000 people a week. Not bad for a scrappy no-adverts no-compromise bit of A4.

Last updated January 2002.

CHECK OUT OUR LIST OF CONTACTS

ARCHIVE - every issue since January 1997, with extra Web links
DATABASE - organisations, books, emails, web sites and other stuff 
BOOKS - buy our books

What we got up to last year

SchNEWS, PO Box 2600, Brighton, BN2 2DX, England
Phone/Fax: +44 (0)1273 685913 Email: schnews@brighton.co.uk

Last updated 11th January, 2002
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