On Glastonbury and newspapers
Next week I head off to Glastonbury again, for another 6 days work on technical production, with Jonathan Moore, for Q Magazine’s Glastonbury Review. The magazine is created on site, in an unassuming Portakabin backstage by a small team of writers, photographers, an art director and a designer. The deadlines are tight and the days quite long, as bands play late into the night and are reviewed immediately. At the end of every day, a set number of pages are sent to print - finishing with the cover, late on Sunday night. The finished magazine is delivered back to the site in physical form on Monday morning; a souvenir, and something for festival-goers to read on the long journey home.
The magazine is a spin off from the longer running Q Daily newspaper. Originally produced for the now defunct ‘Select’ music magazine, the daily newspaper is created in the Portakabin next door, by a similar size team.
They’ve overcome floods of near biblical proportions, a variety of powercuts (including the one where Michael Evis was considering calling the whole thing off) and still they’ve always made their deadline. The 4 colour newspaper is printed overnight, and delivered all over the Glastonbury site the following morning, by a small team of people who retain the ability to get up early in the morning even with a hangover.
As the festival is in a field, the emphasis has always been getting the journalists and photographers out there, to see what’s going on and check the mood. It’s the atmosphere, the outfits, the mud baths and the real-life weather that make Glastonbury.
As it’s been going for so long, the newspaper’s been publishing the ‘old skool’ Twitter for many years - technically known as the ‘vox pop’. Will this change in the coming years? Perhaps, but reporting atmospheric snippets in context might still be the best plan, for example:
Oh my god! I’m *covered* in mud. Help!
Could mean either of the following situations, depending on your mud-tolerance levels:
(taken by Paul Holloway):
(taken by Ian Gregory):
There’s still alot to be said for the roving reporter and photographer duo - not to mention the fact that at the moment, technical connectivity is still a pretty loose term in a place like Glastonbury.
But… Isn’t the newspaper dead anyway?
Perhaps, but Glastonbury Festival is it’s own little world just for a few days. It’s a huge site, and as I mentioned before, not everyone will be able to hook up to a web connection. The newspaper does a few different things:
• spreads news (of course) - line-ups change, things happen, you’re in an outlying field - how would you know? When the weather strikes it’s good to know who has boots for sale, just how far you’ll have to walk to see the band you love, and roughly what state you’ll be in by the time you get there. Glastonbury is also a pretty good leveller - in a celeb’ driven culture people like to know Kate Moss is wearing flip flops and mud spattered, and Lilly Allen is queueing for the toilet.
• connects people - the newspaper makes people feel like they’re part of something bigger - a wider community of people who are ‘all in it together’. A few years back, when the rains struck before anything had even got started, the headline shouted ‘CHEERS GOD’ and everyone felt included. With low web connectivity, the paper is right there - you can read it with friends, borrow a copy off the hot guy in the tent next door, and read the messages from other people like you in the dedicated ‘shoutout’ column. There’s something about the physical, that works fantastically well in an environment like this.
• acts as a souvenir - it’s great to have a physical reminder of what you saw - and even better if a photo of you was published too. The newspaper is as much of a keepsake as it is a practical source of information. Those of you who’ve seen and loved Things our friends have written on the internet could probably attest to the joy of the physical - the extra permanence it brings.
I’ve still got all the copies I’ve ever worked on, and I must admit - a couple I haven’t. Why do I keep the ones I didn’t work on? Because there was a message in the ‘shoutout’ column just for me - and keeping it in a drawer stuffed full of old gig tickets and other memorabilia, is the nicest thing - a proper, tactile, sitting on the floor surrounded by stuff read, the likes of which the internet is still finding it hard to beat.
