Win 5 tickets to Teenage Cancer Trust Comedy night at the Royal Albert Hall starring Jimmy Carr, Alan Davies, Stewart Francis, Tim Minchin, Jon Richardson and Dave Spikey.

Comedians! Funny! Jokes!

We’ve got 5 tickets, a box no less, to give away. All day today on our Twitter we’ll be running competition. We will ask 3 newspaper related questions, simply answer with the hashtag #nccomp and everyone that gets all three right will go into a draw to win the tickets. You need to be free on the evening of 2nd April.

Follow us on Twitter to enter: twitter.com/newspaperclub

UPDATE:
1st question is here

UPDATE:
2nd question is here

UPDATE:
3rd question is here

UPDATE:
Worst competition ever. None of you have entered. So we’re going to put everyone who has answered even one question into a hat and we’ll draw a winner tomorrow.

The idea behind Ferment is that for every issue we choose a theme that we hope will be as widely interpreted as possible, thus inspiring an extensive range of responses from our invited contributors. Initially writers respond to the theme, then illustrators respond to those writers’ poems or short stories. We then publish the paired-up results as a 12 page black and white newspaper. I design each issue, along with James Weiner, and our editor, Paul Askew.

Without Newspaper Club, Ferment probably wouldn’t exist. All of us were finding something lacking in our day jobs, wanted to do something creative together, that we had control over, and that was fun to do. We don’t intend to ever make any money from Ferment, but it does need to pay for itself. To do this, we sell it from our website, but we also sell it into shops around Oxford, where we are based.

Whilst online sales are reasonably healthy, the feedback we were getting from our stockists was that whilst customers were interested, it was hard to shift issues as Ferment could be mistaken for free music or illustrated magazines. This was obviously an issue that needed to be overcome. So how are we solving it?

We are attacking the problem in two ways for our next issue; a neat little bit of packaging design, and some simple changes to our masthead (the bit at the top of our front cover with our logo, pricing, etc).

Things like shrink-wrap and cellophane didn’t really tickle our fancy as people wouldn’t be able to get a feel for the paper, which is important to how Ferment is experienced, plus it can seem a bit tacky. Instead, we decided to roll up each issue and wrap it in a black belly band – perhaps evoking the quality of a morning paper thrown onto a lawn in an 80s John Hughes movie. The band is then ‘sealed’ with a small matt vinyl sticker that we got printed cheaply, featuring our logo and website address.

The other piece of the puzzle was to reinforce the value of Ferment, and to increase the desire for it. We came up with the idea of clearly individually numbering each copy of each issue, much like limited edition prints or records. The edition number will be positioned prominently next to our logo and price in the masthead, and can be seen even when the zine is rolled up.

So that’s it – feel free to rip off our ideas – although we probably won’t know how effective they’ve been until a few weeks after our next issue goes on sale in early February. The theme is ‘Cities’, and if you live in Oxford, you’ll be able to see the fruits of our (and our esteemed contributors’) labour in Comma, the Old Fire Station, and Blackwell’s book store or you can get it from fermentzine.com.

Thanks to @structomagazine who helpfully suggest we ship this, er, device with every order.

Newspaper Club was featured with our friends at Moo.com and Berg (and their intriguing Little Printer) in a piece about how Tech City Silicon Roundabout is knitting together paper and pixels. The message of the piece:

Many digital natives, it seems, are still remarkably attached to  legacy media.

We had a big Newspaper Club meeting and Christmas Dinner on Friday. Lots of exciting plans were discussed and Ben and I cried bitter tears at not getting Christmas bonuses, unlike everyone else, just because we never do any work whereas they do.

But the major event, for me, was that we announced Anne Ward’s elevation from Customer Service Supremo to Managing Director – in recognition of the fact that she is, basically, managing and directing the company.

There are lots of things to be proud of with Newspaper Club – printing our millionth paper, all the great papers people make, Tom’s coding genius – but the best bit for me has been to see Anne just take over and turn our silly idea into a brilliant business. Multiple times a week the @newspaperclub feed fills up with people saying great things about Anne and her team. It’s a joy to see. So, huge congratulations to Anne, and can we have Christmases bonuses next year please?

The other day Art unveiled these wonderful new stickers. Loving designed and printed over the last six months they feature round, square and rectangular shapes. The rest of the team seemed to like them. It was hard to tell.

I know what you’re thinking, how can I get my hands on a sheet of these amazing stickers? Simple! We’re going to be giving away one sheet with every order you make, while stocks last. So get ordering, sticker lovers.

I experienced one of my biggest thrills whilst working at Newspaper Club (and there have been so very many) one evening earlier this year. We were celebrating the arrival of a shiny new digital press at one of our printing partners. Very thoughtfully, our printer friend had laid out on a big table all the papers they’d run off for Newspaper Club’s customers in the previous few weeks.

I knew we were constantly being given some great stuff to print but I was really unprepared for how good they all looked. Many were quite beautiful. Others clever and witty. Even the ones that had a bit of an amateur look about them looked amateur in a genuine and charming way. Brilliant.

Well, I’ve just experienced another thrill like that one. We now have an online, and constantly replenished, version of that printer’s big table on the site: our Newsagent. People share their newspapers there by simply selecting an option on the Dashboard when they’re ready. It’s only been up for a couple of weeks but there’s already a good selection.

To pick out a few from our currently featured papers (though I could have chosen literally dozens of interesting ones from those shared): this splendid wedding anniversary one by Phil Dobinson, which has surely earned him a wheelbarrow of marital brownie points and whose front page is at the top of this post (incidentally, they also made a similarly splendid wedding paper); this intriguing one by the Ferment ‘zine people, which happens to be about one of my favourite subjects, food (you can sign up to buy it here); this one by the photography collective wideyed featuring a residency in a French chateau and lots of wine-making (wine being another favourite thing); and this one made by Ingi, who is, you know, one of those Icelandic-Belgian-Geordie comic creators (it will be for sale at the Canny Comic Con on 10th December). I could go on – but why not pop over to the Newsagent and take a look yourself?

The word “newspaper” really doesn’t do it all justice, does it?

We reached a significant milestone the other day. We’ve printed one million newspapers. The one that took us over the line was an order for 70,000 copies from Zip Design who were making a newspaper for Gymbox.

It’s incredible to think we’ve reached that milestone in just over a year and a half.

Thanks to everyone who has printed with us, and here’s to the next million!

PS I’ve been doing some sums and I reckon a million newspapers laid end to end would go around the moon three times and stacked on top of each other would be as high as twenty one BT Towers.

…I’ve switched from reading the NYT on my iPad to reading it on paper. It feels like a huge improvement. It isn’t that the iPad didn’t give me all the information I wanted – at any time. It’s just that when I have the actual paper in my hands, I find myself reading more – and more closely. I have a sense of accomplishment as I toss each ransacked section onto the floor next to my blogging chair. The photographs pop. The placement of the stories visually adds a layer of editorial spin that informs me about where the paper is coming from. I didn’t quite expect this. I liked my iPad mornings with coffee and gluten-free cookies. But suddenly, a newspaper is fresh.

We know exactly what he means. As do more and more people from far and wide – last week we delivered nearly half our papers overseas, mostly to Europe but also to customers in Australia and North America. We would like to send more to the US, and we’re sure we can.

So thanks for the reminder of what newsprint can do, Mr Sullivan.