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I thought it was worth writing an additional post with a bit more detail about the truffle newspaper we’ve made this year. When I say ‘we’ve made’, it’s important to note this includes Ian who designed it so beautifully, and The Newspaper Club who actually got the thing printed. (I thoroughly recommend anyone who wants to make a paper about, well, anything really, to use them.) The papers arrived this week and they look and feel great.

The paper will be available in store (to take home) for anyone wanting to learn more about truffles. Some of the pages are shown below. It’s been fun making it and we’ve had to do a lot of digging around ourselves (not sure if that’s a truffle pun, but if it is, it’s not intended) and have learnt a lot along the way.

There’s an interview with Simon Harvey – an ex military dog trainer who now trains truffle dogs in Tasmania. And also an interview with Peter Marshall from Terra Preta truffiere in NSW. Some of you may recall Peter from when we went truffle hunting with him last year. His approach to truffles is quite unique and he’s a fascinating man to spend time with, which hopefully comes across in the article.

There’s also hints and tips on looking after truffles, a few recipes (thanks to Tony, Kate and Andrew), some facts and figures about the industry, plus some other nonsense in there as well.

A page for the fact fans

I’m pretty sure it was P Diddy who once said ‘Truffles are the bomb’

They’re not that easy to find…

The magical world underneath the trees

You can see the newspaper in the Newsagent

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.

Monday 16 January is officially the most depressing day of the year. Those clever people at the Church of London wanted to do something about that. To combat the winter blues they’ve created a great-looking, colourful newspaper full of good news. Called what else but The Good Times, it’s available from locations throughout London today. To find a copy check out The Good Times website and turn that frown upside down.

If you can’t get a paper copy, the PDF is on the website along with a great account of how the paper was made in 7 days.

We’re quite excited about 2012 at Newspaper Club. It feel like there’s a real head of steam building behind us at the moment, and it’s time to start pushing ahead with some of our big plans.

But it’s not going to be easy and we’re going to need some help to do this.

First of all, we’re looking for a web designer and front-end developer to join us full-time in our London studio, working alongside Tom, our CTO and co-founder.

You’ll have strong sense of design paired with solid front-end development skills, and be able to take an idea from a paper sketch through to implementation in-browser yourself. It goes without saying that you’ll have a good working knowledge of modern, standards based, HTML, CSS and Javascript techniques and technologies.

You’ll probably have a couple of years’ experience working on public facing sites, for yourself or others, and be able to use good product instincts to make decisions and get things shipped quickly when needed. If you haven’t got the experience, you’ll be able to show that you’re a quick learner (with code to prove it).

Experience with MVC Javascript frameworks such as Backbone.js is a big bonus (as is experience with rich Javascript applications). An interest in print design and knowledge of Adobe InDesign would be appreciated too, but is not essential.

Obviously, you’d love to come on a tour of a massive printing press.

We’d love to see some of your work: links to sites you’ve worked on, a portfolio or a Github account. Please don’t post us a CD-ROM.

We’re a small (there’s 7 of us), but growing team, split between London and Glasgow. Our London studio is in a relaxed co-working space in Shoreditch, shared with the Really Interesting Group, Makie Lab and other interesting folk. We believe in having fun, doing work we’re proud of (we won a Designs of the Year award in 2010), and going home on time.

If you’re interested, drop us an email to jobs@newspaperclub.com with a covering note, and a CV or something we can look at about you. Or if you know someone you think it’d suit, do pass it on.

If this position isn’t quite for you, but you can offer us something special, please drop us an email anyway. We look at all CVs and portfolios, and if something opens up we’ll be in touch.

Please, no recruiters.

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’re finishing up for Christmas today so will leave you with this lovely festive newspaper from Australia.

Twelve Days of Christmas designed by Famous Visual Services in Melbourne features the work of 12 local artists with a new look at the 12 days of Christmas.

The whole paper is on show in our newsagent.

Any of you in Fitzroy can look out for the paper which is being sold to raise money for a children’s playground in a local housing project.

And with that we wish you all a very merry Christmas (festive opening hours are over here).

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.

The recommended last printing dates for Christmas are as follows:

• Tuesday 13 December 2011 – international orders
• Thursday 15 December 2011 – UK orders

At this time of year the weather is the biggest risk to any deliveries so please allow extra time for your order to arrive.

Holiday closing

We’ll be closed on the following dates:

• Friday 9 December 2011 – closing at 12 pm
• Friday 23 December 2011 – closing at 12pm
• Monday 26 and Tuesday 27 December 2011 – closed
• Monday 2 and Tuesday 3 January 2012 – closed

This means that over the holidays the print days are:

• Tuesday 20 and Thursday 22 December 2011
• Thursday 29 December 2011
• Thursday 5 January 2012

After that everything is back to normal – printing on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2pm.