Our Service

 

The Production Process

The Kentish Gazette is published on Thursdays. The Editor of the week will then cut out articles and divide them into three equal piles of between 10 and 12 articles. On the following Friday afternoon he or she meets the digital Sound Engineer who has set up our 'studio' in the basement of the Salvation Army Centre in Whitehorse Lane, and they are joined by two readers. After a sound check the reading begins with the editor and each reader taking it in turns to read an article, which is recorded onto a laptop. It usually takes about two hours to complete a one and a half hour edition. Once complete the readers depart and the Editor and sound engineer are joined by another 'copier' to begin the duplication process to produce the memory sticks for between 140 and 150 listeners.

 

The Copying Process

The next step is to produce the master sticks, but before that any 'extra' programmes that we may have pre-recorded are added to the news. We have three USB stick duplicators capable of copying a total of 34 sticks at a time. The previous week's news has to be deleted before the current week's news can be copied onto the sticks. The whole copying process takes around an hour. Every listener has a personally labelled stick, which when ready is returned to a similarly labelled pouch, specially designed for using the free postal service the Royal Mail offers under the Articles for the Blind Scheme. Immediately the copying is complete the pouches are taken to the Post Office and, all being well, the listeners receive them on Saturday, or Monday morning at the latest. Once a listener has finished with their stick, they post it back to our postal administrators who ready them for the next weeks production.