The Great Yarmouth Talking Newspaper for the Blind

Published every
Friday
by cassette
and
 On-Line Now

Link to page colour options

Who we are!

Welcome to the website of Grapevine, The Great Yarmouth Talking Newspaper, a registered charity run entirely by volunteers to provide a free weekly service of local news to the blind and partially sighted living in the Great Yarmouth district and the surrounding villages, as far north as Stalham.

This service was started in 1980, and since then volunteers have been taping news stories taken from the weekly edition of the Great Yarmouth Mercury newspaper, for distribution weekly on tape cassettes.  The number of listeners has grown over the years and we now send out about 280 cassettes each week.

What we do and how we do it!

Friday afternoon at about 3pm the process of producing the weekly audio news tape begins. Sacks of the previous week’s returned cassettes are collected from the Royal Mail sorting office in Great Yarmouth and taken to the Grapevine studio.

The week’s Editor Team Leader collects four copies of the Mercury newspaper and then meets at the studio with the other three editors to read, select, cut-out and paste the selected articles on to paper pages for the readers to read.  This is usually completed by 5pm.

The team of four arrives at about this time and opens each returned pouche, remove the cassette, changes the address label, and records in the log book the return from that listener. A  check is also made to see if a message or letter from the listener has been included.   The cassettes are then “cleaned” of the previous week’s recording and prepared for the engineers to use again.

There are usually four readers and they arrive at about 5.40pm together with the Presenter who is leading for that week. The readings are allocated and checked.

The engineers will also have arrived, and have cleaned the recording heads on the recorders and the copiers, and also set up the computer to make a digital recording for the web site.

The one hour session is recorded "live", with a short break at the half-way point. Re-starts are only made if a major engineering fault occurs; the tape is not edited after recording.  It is in essence a "live" broadcast.

When the recording is complete, the technicians use the four master copies to begin the full bulk copying process at high speed.   Meantime one of the engineers is uploading the recording to our web site. This is usually available on line by 8pm.

As tapes come off the copiers they are checked by the team of four to make sure the quality is of a satisfactory standard.  The cassettes in their pouches are put into mail bags to be sorted by Royal Mail and delivered on Saturday morning.

At 3 o’clock in the afternoon nothing is ready, but by 8.30 the new recording is on its way to the listeners.     We think that is “not a bad effort!”

Our Weekly Web Audio Edition

Why not access the weekly Grapevine edition on the web?

Information and links

Return Grapevine main page.