ThreeWeeks is the flagship media at the Edinburgh and Brighton Festivals. Its mission is to provide as comprehensive coverage as is humanly possible of both these festivals, in particular reviewing those shows not getting media coverage elsewhere.
We launched ThreeWeeks in Edinburgh in 1996 because at that time the Edinburgh Festival was growingly hugely each year, but at the same time media coverage was, if anything, decreasing.
That meant that many strands at the Festival - and especially the new, alternative and grassroots performers and companies which, as far as we could see, were what made the Edinburgh Festival so exciting in the first place - were not getting the coverage they deserved.
We developed ThreeWeeks to specifically tackle that problem - by launching a unique media education project which [a] gave students and young people a brilliant hands-on training opportunity and [b] gave us a sizable review team allowing us to get out there and see the shows other media hadn't got the capacity to see.
From year one ThreeWeeks aimed to cover as many aspects of the Festival as possible, from the big names at the big venues through to the real grass roots shows not covered elsewhere. And from year one that's what we did.
Over a decade later we continue to operate to that ethos, getting even closer to achieving it by reviewing over 1500 shows each Edinburgh Festival - nearly all of them - and hundreds more than our closest competitors.
Once we have seen all those shows we get our coverage out to as many people as possible in all sorts of media - our own weekly newspaper, a daily printed review sheet, a daily email bulletin, our website, a radio show, by podcast etc etc.
Since 2006 we have applied the same ethos in our coverage of the Brighton Festival. This year we will have over 25 student reviewers seeing shows. You can read their reviews via our eDaily, our website and through a daily column in The Argus.
We also offer a bucket load of previews and interviews on and with some of our favourite shows and performers, on our website, and via our free ThreeWeeks Guide to the Brighton Festival, available all over Brighton from 6 May.
ThreeWeeks is owned, published and loved by UnLimited Media, a Shoreditch based media and marketing company. It is edited by Chris Cooke and Caro Moses, who also run UnLimited Media.
UnLimited doesn't make much money out of the ThreeWeeks enterprise, we do it because we get a buzz in discovering and championing cultural innovation, and the best places we've found to do that are Edinburgh in August and Brighton in May.
