Volunteering is an interesting thing. I read recently that the numbers of people who are volunteering for things have increased significantly during this recession business. Since people can’t make any money, they’re helping out for free. Isn’t that nice?

Nexus makes use of a significant amount of volunteers. Flicking through last week’s issue (#14), there’s the music pages, the movie review, the Auteur House column, the Seeing Stars bit, and the columns which were all written by volunteers, as well as some of the news. The guy who does the music gets free CDs and the guy who reviews the movies gets to see them for free, and that’s the only payment involved. The games reviews and puzzle-page used to be done by a volunteer, but now they are added to the workload of someone who gets paid.

So who gets paid to work on Nexus? There’s the editor, the graphics designer, the news editor, the guy who gets the ads, and the features editor. Josh is the editor and it’s his job to make sure that Nexus has a whole lot of pages with stuff on them each week and to get the balance right with ads so that we actually make money. To do that job he tells Grant the news editor how many pages of news he wants, and Grant goes about researching and making those articles. Grant has people who volunteer for news writing (actually only a couple at the moment I think, but luckily they’re pretty good) so in an ideal world it would be his job to manage all the incoming news to make sure we have X amount of pages of news, which he would check and then hand off to Josh. In reality he does most of it himself.

Talia is our graphics designer and her job is to take all the text that everyone has submitted and turn it into attractive looking pages that catch the eye and are easy to read. I don’t envy her job. For a start, it’s nowhere near as easy as she makes it look and secondly, because there are basically 3 other people trying to make a magazine who also have coursework to do it normally means that she is stuck laying everything up on a Thursday night, which sucks.

The Features Editors job is rather loosely defined, but basically at the moment means filling in all the spaces that won’t be filled in a given week. That means coming up with like three pages of stuff, and also there is an agreement somewhere to make three award winning issues, which has kind of fallen by the wayside lately with the exception of when we busted the Unis balls over that thesis affair, and even then that was mostly Josh’s work. There’s a thing about how to pick a lock this week. We have no idea if that is interesting, but it should at least be informative. Did you know it’s illegal to carry lock-picking tools? The point of all this is, it’s hard to find volunteers. It’s hard to find enthusiastic people who want to contribute. It’s even harder to find enthusiastic people who can write, but that shouldn’t be a barrier; after all that’s what an editor is for. We have meetings now and then with free pizza and beer for people who contribute or who don’t but would like to, but somehow the notice for the last one never quite made it to print and only a few of us showed up. See, we’re human too so don’t worry if you don’t think you’re up to it.

If you saw a good movie the other day and want to write about it then do it and email it to us. Or better yet come and visit. If you have a hobby or you’re in a club and want to see it featured in a magazine then get in touch (features@nexusmag.co.nz). There are perks and you’ll also meet all sorts of interesting new people.