The Edinburgh Fringe, more accurately known as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, is the world’s largest arts festival, lasting 25 days and featuring more than 55,000 performances of over 3,000 different shows across 317 venues. The scale of the festival poses a problem for the serious news outlets (websites, apps and newspapers) that aim to review the shows. Around 3,000 shows have to be reviewed during the preview week and the first ‘proper’ week of the festival. In the preview week, reviewers can only get to see about one event per day, but in the first week of the festival proper, they could see three shows per day on average.
Most reviews must be done by the end of the first week of the festival, so, with the preview week, two weeks are available. The festival operates on a one-hour cycle for each event (like tracks at a conference), but there are gaps, so this usually allows 15 minutes for walking between venues. There are also plenty of professional ‘queue managers’
and guides around the venues to guide visitors to events. If it takes roughly one hour for a reviewer to write and post a review, and reviewers work 12-hour days, how many reviewers will be needed if all shows are to be seen?