After a few hectic weeks our 'wrap' is published today. It's called a wrap, in newspaper jargon, because it's wrapped around The Advertiser free newspaper. Forty thousand copies of the wrap were printed yesterday and copies will be distributed to all homes in West Berkshire. There are two reasons for such a wide distribution. Firstly, we're interested in the views of people who live outside Thatcham as well as residents. So, if you visit the town, work there or go to school there we'd very much like to hear from you. Secondly it's not possible to target a wrap on specific areas - it must be printed with all copies of the newspaper, but even so it is very cost effective. If we wanted to produce, print and circulate a document of similar length just to homes in Thatcham and nearby villages it would be much more expensive than using the wrap format for our supplement and we wouldn't, for example, get coverage in places like Newbury.
We've had a very interesting time working with the team from the Newbury Weekly News on the wrap - notably John Hampson and Marcus Bishop - who have done an excellent job for us. (I'm sure that they'd want me to stress that all the words and ideas in the supplement are ours, not theirs.)
We're hoping to get a good response to our questionnaire and, just as importantly, to find more people who want to get involved in improving Thatcham. We've got an excellent team of volunteers working on the Thatcham Vision already (see page 2 of the wrap for details), but there's lots to do.
