 |
| Street Paper Showcase - Miku Sano (The Big Issue Japan), Photo: Danielle Batist |
The afternoon sessions of Campaign Day at the INSP Annual conference was focused on proposals for the next phase of the Global advertising project and a number of showcases from various street papers presenting success stories.
Richard Turgeon, Marketing and Communications Director, L’ltinéraire and co-founder of Urban Resillience, began the afternoon addressing the principles for the next phase of the development.
The development is proposed to be a simple eight page supplement to add to the regular content of the street papers. The street papers reach out to six million culturally engage readers and the objective is to generate more income for these papers.
The INSP is working with Mel Young co-founder of The Big Issue Scotland and the homeless world cup. Ahead of the sports event in Mexico the first supplement in September 2012 will be centered around this.
The supplement will be written, edited and published by the INSP. It will be formatted to suit the papers and magazines as they all vary in size and style. Turgeon hopes it will “Unite the circulation of papers together more to create a better and equal balance”.
Values are continuously important to the street papers as they strive to help those in need therefore promoting social image through the media is integral. The supplement will carry forth this image by using businesses that maintain these social values.
After the brief proposal of the project from Turgeon, the session carried on to small group discussions where delegates could discuss the project in more detail.
In four groups, the project was described in more depth and delegates were given a chance to decide whether to sign up.
Some issues brought up during these discussions included the increase in weight the vendors would endure due to the increase in pages and the maintaining of social values from paper to paper.
Lisa Maclean, Executive Director, INSP, said papers would have an advanced notice of the supplement content and could add their own twist in order to make it more localised to their readership. Maclean mentioned the supplement would have “Topics that relate to the main readership all round”.
The overall consensus from the discussions was positive. Most delegates agreed it was a great idea. Most mentioned they would have to bring the idea back to their own country and have discussions with colleagues before making a decision to sign up.
Finishing off the afternoon was a showcase of successful projects street papers have carried out in order display the talents and passion of some vendors who have not been able to exploit their talents due to their circumstances. Delegates from The Big Issue Japan explained how their vendors have worked hard over the past months to rebuild their cities after the earthquake that left over 15 thousand people dead.
Many showcases were media related, videos and CDs have been produced to show the world the stories behind those they help.
Street Papers across the world have introduced these extra projects in order to generate more income to help more people. The Global advertising project is essentially one project helping another.
Overall, each paper works to the maximize new ways to eradicate poverty. With larger a income and readership these individual projects will continue to further help those in need.
