SCHNEWS
8 Years old (420 issues....and still counting)


SchNEWS was born in a squatted Courthouse in Brighton in 1994 as part of Brighton's campaign against the Criminal Justice Act when a few bright sparks decided to start reading out the news. Some of those bright sparks then decided to put some of it on paper - nearly nine years later and still printing! From the anti road protests at the M11 in London to the Newbury Bypass to the big Reclaim The Streets events of the nineties SchNEWS was there. From worker struggles such as the Liverpool Dockers, fights against the privatisation of public services, racism, genetic engineering, to reporting on positive solutions - week in week out SchNEWS reported the news from the direct action frontline.

Then in February 1998 some of the crew went to Geneva to the first ever Peoples' Global Action conference. Here we met people involved in grassroots protests from across the world, swapped stories, made friendships and began to see the bigger picture, and with many others who had been involved in localised direct action campaigns, our attention now turned to also attacking the corporate carve-up of the entire planet. The first signs of this new shift was in May 1998 when mass demonstrations were held world-wide simultaneously against the G7 Summit in Birmingham, then again on June 18th 1999 (J18). But it was the mass protests against the WTO in Seattle in November 1999 that really brought this 'movement' to the world's attention. Needless to say, ongoing rampant economic globalisation, the near-universal clampdown on civil liberties since September 11th 2001, continuing refusal by the fattest felines to acknowledge the rapid decline of the environment and right-wing fundamentalist US imperialism are still keeping us busy...

It's impossible to know how many people read SchNEWS, particularly now with the internet. Out of the 3,000 that get printed, 350 are paper subscribers, and around 50 prisoners in Britain and abroad get it each week for free. Add to that around 8,000 email subscribers, many of which get it as a PDF* file (so it looks exactly like the real thing). While many photocopy and distribute their paper copy locally, PDF files allow people all over the world to print out SchNEWS, and distribute it, before it's even hit the streets in Brighton! We often hear from people who print out PDFs and distribute each week - at infoshops or wholefood shops, on campuses and out on the streets, all over the world. Added to that popular sites like Urban 75 mirror SchNEWS each week, while A-Infos news service email it out internationally to subscribers, and the odd issue gets translated into other languages. So as well as the many thousands who visit the SchNEWS site each week, it is hard to work out how many we reach altogether.

Our Party and Protest section is the most popular feature on our website, updated every week with a mishmash of festival dates, meetings and demos as well as a section on where to go if you want to find out radical contact points around the country. Our DIY section has useful tips on everything from setting up your own newsletter to making your own bio-diesel. We also try to continually update our contacts list - currently listing over 800 useful grassroots organisations.


schnews online here