 |
 |
|
|
|
Home
| SchNEWS
Reader 1995 | SchLIVE! SchLIVE!Every week, even before the printed version began, SchNEWS has been reviving the old idea of reading the news aloud in public. Each performance was as different as the last - each one had its own themes, its own SchNEWSreaders. The Guardian's Jay Griffiths caught the night before Brighton Pride '95.... "Town criers were once the messengers of news. In the New Kensington pub in Brighton, this oral tradition is recreated every Friday night, as SchNEWS, the weekly newsletter of Justice? - an umbrella group for co-loathers of the Criminal Justice Act - is staged aloud. It is a portable affair. "All you need is an Oxfam suit and a banner," said Gibby Zobel, one of the SchNEWS creators. "People say 'Who's that nutter in a suit?' and they stop and listen". SchNEWS is read up scaff towers on protests, from the pub roof, at fairs and festivals. Its footloose flexibility of form means anyone can be the messenger, but Gibby, trained journalist and one of Nature's transvestites [eh? - Sch] has Mercury's own touch, from fleetness of speech down to the mercurial, quicksilver rig. He does tonight's reading in a beehive wig of wavy silver foil, a glittery silver dress and full make-up. The rest of the team, miked and ready with the town crier's bell for the headline bongs, play it with droll self-possession of Messrs Hislop and Merton. The news covers live export protests, ID Cards and the ongoing 'interactive CJA Arrestometer'. Hunt Sabs 151 (there are boos), Road Protestors 50 (boos). Fascist Printers 2 (cheers). A regular spot is the "crap arrest of the week". Tonight they report that a woman on the Critical Mass bike protest was arrested for unlawful obstruction because she was peddling too slowly. Al Baker, Brent Spar protestor, is about to give an exclusive interview to SchNEWS. A local Conservative councillor recently referred to Brighton's homeless as a "venomous subspecies of squatter." By doing so he earned himself a live phone interview, conducted by Gibby with all the curling insouciance of Julian Clary. SchNEWS follows a long tradition of radical presses being thorns in the side of the establishment. In the early eighteenth century, Richard Steele's 'Spectator' - planned, like SchNEWS, in some sympathetic snug or other - was as popular with the Tories of its day as Scallywag was with John Major. Following the press-gagging Stamp Acts, The Spectator was silenced. Now the Tories use the libel laws, and the London pub which Scallywag used to grace is empty of them now. (Which pub? The Sir Richard Steele). To maintain editorial independence, SchNEWS is funded by subscription and they accept no advertising. Another aspect of its independence is the manner of its newsgathering; to focus sharply on their own agenda, most of the producers of SchNEWS eschew watching TV, listening to the radio or reading the mainstream press while working on SchNEWS copy. They rely on "word of mouth and fax frenzy", gathering information from all around the country, receiving up to 40 phone calls per day, looking for news from the grassroots - or tree branches - of protest. Gibby describes filing a story from the Stanworth Valley eviction from a mobile phone sixty feet up a tree [during a press blackout] while the bailiffs were taking people out of branches all around him. SchNEWS is edited by a collective; roughly twenty-five people who work on it regularly. There is a party atmosphere in its creation as in its delivery; a public reading connects and motivates as silent paper cannot. SchNEWS technology (DTP, fax, e-mail and internet), is a far cry from the town crier, but by coupling it with oral transmission, they can get the best of both the Olde Worlde and the SchNEW."
|
|||
|
@nti copyright - information for action - copy and distribute! |
|||
