We produce the weekly edition each Saturday at Coleford Town Council Offices, No 1, The Town House, Lord’s Hill Walk, Coleford GL16 8BD.
Recording and distributing Forest Talk is a team effort.
At present there are 4 teams working on a rota. This means that a variety of voices and content are heard each week, and volunteers normally only spend about 4 hours on one Saturday per month helping to produce the newspaper.
The Editor is responsible for the content of each edition.
The first 45 minutes is taken up with local news, selected to reflects the content of that week’s local newspapers.
The second half is rather like the magazine selection of a newspaper. It contains individual features, often of particular local interest. They can be from other publications, or sometimes location recording of choirs, concerts and field trips or interviews with local characters and MPs.
We may also include downloads of radio programmes, such as In Touch from BBC Radio 4.
The editor is assisted by a Sound Engineer, who looks after the recording equipment and makes sure that the recordings are of good quality.
Our engineers need to be confident in working with sound equipment but no specialist technical knowledge or qualifications are needed – all volunteers are given training.
Our volunteer Readers read the articles and features, and introduce themselves so that our listeners know who is in each team and get to know us all.
Copying and Distribution:
When they have finished recording the newspaper the volunteer teams copy and distribute that edition’s memory sticks.
The edition is saved to a ‘master’ memory stick, then a memory stick copier is used to produce all the sticks to be sent to listeners. A memory stick is sent to each listener in a plastic padded wallet. The wallets are sealed with Velcro strips.
When the recipient has listened to the memory stick, he / she pops it back inside the wallet together with the plastic address label, seals the Velcro end and posts it back to us.
Each week, the latest edition of the newspaper is made available on the Forest Talk web site.
If you are interested in helping Forest Talk as either a Reader, Editor or Sound Engineer please contact us via the Contact us page. We will be very pleased to hear from you.