A few months ago in Scouting Magazine, there was a small advertisement asking if anyone wanted to be involved in writing articles and editing a member’s takeover edition that would be out in Dec/Jan. If you wanted to take part, there was a small piece to write about why you volunteered in scouting. I did this a few months ago, sent the email off, and thought nothing would come of it. Then a couple of weeks before the summer holidays, I and a small group of other people who had written in started to receive emails from Elis Matthews, who is the editor of the magazine, and from Sam Parker who would be the acting editor for the special edition of the magazine. This was asking for ideas for articles that could be written.In the end, it was decided that Facebook would be more efficient to use to organise our articles, because people could see what everyone else had thought.

After about a month or so, we had some more definite ideas, such as articles on the favourite activities of each section, favourite recipes on camp, and one question for lots of different leaders to answer, suggestions for which were things like ‘If you received a £5,000 grant, what would you use it for?’ and ‘What is your personal scouting highlight?’. The articles were also assigned to different people, and we were all split into groups loosely according to the kind of articles we were writing and which area of the country we were in. It was also decided that the big questions we were going to ask the leaders would be done at Gilwell Reunion. Because I was going with Network, and with a combination of other people came up with the concept for the article, I volunteered to ask the questions. So during the Saturday of the reunion at Gilwell, along with another takeover edition writer and editor, interviewed around 50 people asking a variety of different questions, which would be edited later.

The next month or so was spent refining the articles we were responsible for as they were due in at the beginning of October. By this point, we knew there would be an opportunity to go to London to ‘sign-off’ our edition of the magazine at Think Publishing, who produce the magazine along with the Scout association’s editors Elis Matthews and Hillary Galloway. I was really looking forward to this meeting, not only because it was a chance to go to London, but to have a sneaky look and to see how everything was going before it gets put into production. I met some of the other people who had been working on the magazine for the past few months like me, and we had a chance to edit the articles further to check they made sense, arrange the layouts of the pages, and also choose the front cover. Overall, I really enjoyed the experience, and hope you like the magazine when it comes out!

The magazine will be out next month and you can expect to see Sarah’s article along with 1st Chopwell’s Camp Cook Book (written by Jamie Ion). Here in Blaydon District were always looking for young people to help edit our website, if you think this could be you then please get in touch with us by visiting our contact page (select ‘Web Team’ from the options).

Update 1/12/11 – The magazine has now been published online.