Introducing the Festival Media Network
The Festival Media Network is a trade organisation for independent media who cover, preview and/or review at the Edinburgh Festival each August. It aims to:
- Encourage the sharing of knowledge between member media
- Enable collaboration between member media.
- Represent member media to festival and city organisations, producers, performers and venues, and other media
- Ensure festival and city organisations, producers and performers, and other media are aware of the independent media who cover arts festivals.
- Promote journalistic and editorial best practice in covering arts festivals.
Background
In recent years the independent media - from the more prolific bloggers through to long-established independently-owned festival-specific media - have begun to play an increasingly important role in at the Edinburgh Festival, and especially the Fringe, where reviews and previews remain so integral, but where more mainstream media coverage has been in decline for quite some time.
As the Scottish and London dailies, facing, as they do, severe financial pressures, continue to cut back on their Festival coverage, the good news is that a number of independent media - all created and owned by individual entrepreneurs - have sprung up to fill the gap. However, we know that many in the festival community - performers, producers, promoters, publicists, festival directors and venue managers - can find it hard to keep up with each new independent title, and figure out where they fit in and how they work.
This is why we have created the Festival Media Network. First, to help the festival community navigate the independent media that are out there, and to understand what role they play, in giving valuable critique, in helping to sell tickets in Edinburgh, and in helping to build reputation beyond August. And second, to provide a united front through which other segments of the festival community can talk to all the key independent media as one, if and when they have questions, queries, comments of concerns about the way the independent media cover Edinburgh's summer festivals.