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Tax might not be taxing, but it’s bleedin’ tedious
Posted on Jan 15 2007 | Tagged as: Politics, While I should be working, Work
Question: How does being able to memorise the values of council tax bands for Wales make me a better journalist?
Presumably there is an answer, or we wouldn’t have to study it, but I can’t fathom what it might be.
I’m currently revising my for Public Administration Part 1 - Local Government exam, the joys of which I shall be experiencing this afternoon. The course is far more targetted towards the newspaper and broadcast options than it is to us magazine students, since they will in al probability be starting their careers in local media, and local government will be a frequent source of stories. There are, by contrast, precious few local news magazines.
The really frustrating thing is that anyone remotely engaged with the world - which I’d like to think I am - should know much of this stuff already. The new models of leadership following the Local Government Act 2000, for example - which is how Hartlepool wound up with a monkey for a mayor, and Middlesbrough with an ex-cop of questionable honesty. Or the media and public’s right of access to meetings, or the methods by which central government controls local government.
Having studied the latter it might prove useful in an entirely different way.
My parents’ local authority is threatening to fine people for not recycling (because they’ll get a bollocking for failing to fulfill some EU quota or other). I don’t think they have the authority to do so. So I might make some trouble.
New Title
Posted on Dec 19 2006 | Tagged as: Work
For the production part of the course, next term we have to make a magazine from scratch and knock out three issues. Real practical stuff. Good.But… The mags have to be targetted at readerships within EU Funding Objective 1 areas of Wales - pretty much anywhere but Cardiff. I’ve nothing against the restriction - on the contrary, I think on the whole it’s a good thing if it helps us understand the process of targetting a publication at a very tightly defined readership better.
I’m not too sure about the reasons for implementing it, though. Namely, that when students could make magazines about more or less anything they liked, one was stripped of an award after it was discovered that something in one of them was plagiarised. It just strikes me as a bit heavy-handed. I would’ve just had the student in question stripped of their diploma.
They may have a point…
Posted on Dec 16 2006 | Tagged as: Media, Work
…those people who hate journalists.Here we are with a high-profile, horrific serial murderer out and about, and what am I thinking?
I’m thinking: I know the girl covering that story for radio. Maybe I should select the assignment on “trauma in journalism†for my ethics (ha bloody ha) course and talk to her.
Terrible, isn’t it?
(And yet on tuesday night at the journalism school christmas ball - where, incidentally I didn’t make up with the PR girls but in fact made things worse - I didn’t bother going to pester that kid from Love Actually just to see if there was a frivolous celebrity story there, and last night walked straight past some armed police without stopping to find out what was going on. Rubbish.)
Numbers: not magic
Posted on Dec 08 2006 | Tagged as: Media, Politics, The Stupid, Work
The front page of today’s Metro: Tesco’s shame.
It’s a story about Tesco selling clothes knocked up in dodgy Bangladeshi sweatshops whose workers are paid pennies a day.
Hang on. Bangladesh? We’re used to hearing that sort of thing about China. I wonder why we don’t hear so much about Chinese sweatshops anymore…
Of course, the story would still have sold newspapers irrespective of how stupid it is. Not that most of the Metro team would have known how stupid it is.
This is where I have a bit of an advantage of most other trainee journalists: mathematical literacy[1], having first studied Astrophysics.
We did a news exercise in school[2] the other week based on an open letter that Lord Howie had written in the New Civil Engineer sometime during Michael Heseltine’s stint as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry.
Lord Howie’s figures didn’t add up.
I nearly went with “Labour spokesman can’t add” as the story, but it’s hardly news…
_ _ _ _ _
[1] Although my colleague Jen studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge, so I might well be screwed anyway.
[2] I hate their website. Ironic for a school who have been trying to drill into us for the last three months how important the web is to have such a rubbish homepage.
Jeremy Beadle
Posted on Dec 03 2006 | Tagged as: Work
I’ve been ploughing on with trying to learn shorthand (well, kind of - passed 70wpm a week ago on friday) despite being less and less convinced of its usefulness, doing it more for the CV than anything else.
Much of this is purely to do with the way I work. I need to be able to listen properly and take cues from an interviewee’s responses to ask things that perhaps I hadn’t previously thought of. And though perhaps the strongest argument against using a dictaphone is the amount of time it takes to transcribe, I find the act of transcription helps me focus a feature better.
So when I interviewed Los Campesinos! the other week I took only cursory notes - gestures and the like - and for my chat with Stephen Green I abandoned even the pretence of taking proper notes. It seemed to work.
Then I was interviewing again today, in the pub. Quiet, sunday lunchtime, hardly any background noise, going quite nicely. Until they put the cricket on. I’ll have to get out those 80wpm dictation tapes and have me a bit of a practice.
UPDATE: Another downside of recording interviews - I can’t bear hearing my voice played back.
Press Conference guerilla-style, or: The magazine diploma goes Viz for a day
Posted on Nov 30 2006 | Tagged as: Work
Between James taking a phone call at the start of the conference; James getting up and walking out, only to wander back in again ten minutes later; Jon setting his phone alarm and chucking it under someone’s chair, the alarm being a looped recording of Alan Partridge exclaiming, “I am hung like a donkeyâ€; my incessant cough (not affected, but usefully real); and Kristian’s tangential questioning I think it’s fair to say that we achieved in this Press Conference exercise pretty much what the Boss had asked us to do: make a nuisance of ourselves
The exercise pitted a group of about six magazine students and the same number of newspaper people, in a Press Conference-style scenario, against a handful of Public Relations trainees, who were taking the role of government ministers presenting the Stern Report.
I was mightily impressed with their ability to evade questions: they’ll go far.
Until…
The guerilla tactics paid off. Flustered by our misbehaviour, the lady playing Gordon Brown fell for Kristian’s nonsense question: “Since methane is a greenhouse gas, are you planning on introducing a personal pump tax?â€
Her response: “It’s an international problem. We wouldn’t rule anything out at this stage. Taxes will be considered.â€
Cue our story, Tax-mad Brown full of hot air, replete with puns on his “silent-but-deadly policy of stealth taxationâ€, pondering on whether the tax would be a flat rate or “pay-per-trumpâ€, and a Beastie Boys paraphrase (guess…).
They’ve made a formal complaint. We might be banned from the next exercise.
Praise indeed
Posted on Nov 26 2006 | Tagged as: Praise, Work
I’ve been reliably informed that one of the lecturers in the journalism department, organising this press conference exercise that got me all confused the other day, described gair rhydd’s three-page coverage of the Stern Review, including my article, as among the best coverage (s)he’s read.
Pretty chuffed.
Busy week
Posted on Nov 26 2006 | Tagged as: Media, Work
This is probably not the best thing to admit on a blog that might possibly, potentially be seen by a possible, potential future employer (Nor is it a good way to start a post - (H)e(a)d) but I’m monumentally disorganised.
That’s how last monday I found myself working from 6.30 am to just before 9pm, with only an hour off to refuel. The last thing I was doing was an interview with the first band to have me genuinely excited in a long time, Los Campesinos! [1], to use as a background/boxout for a piece I’m doing on MySpace.
I’d also done it as a backup for the South Wales character profile we have to write for the features part of the practical half of the course, just in case my first choice went bosoms skywards or turned out to be rubbish.
My first choice was Stephen Green of Christian Voice. I caught up with him at the London School of Economics yesterday (meaning at friday night’s awards ceremony I had to make sure I was going to be a fit state to conduct the interview).
I think what I’ve got should make for quite an interesting article. You’re on the edge of your seats. I can tell.
_ _ _ _ _ _
[1] Who I was planning to see tonight, but probably won’t have time. It’s nearly 2pm, and I’ve a feature to write and some controversial sausages to taste-test. Maybe I shouldn’t have spent my morning writing five blog posts.
Curiousity caused by Cat
Posted on Nov 20 2006 | Tagged as: Work, Yours truly
This here journalism combines two things:
- a need to know everything, and
- the desire to be heard, to imagine, however fleetingly, that people are actually paying attention to what I’ve been saying, positively or negatively
Naturally, I’d prefer positively.
So when this afternoon Cat found a photocopy - a photocopy! - of my piece on the Stern report, with several paragraphs highlighted, in the ladies’ toilets in university these came crashing together.
What were they doing with it, and why? I’ll probably never know. Point two fulfilled, for good or for bad. Point one’s out though.
(I should stress at this point that the article as it appeared in print bore no more than a passing resemblance to that which I submitted, oweing to some truly dreadful subediting. A shadow of its original self, it was. A shadow.)
UPDATE: Tell a lie, I do have an idea. We’re doing a press conference exercise with the PR students - on the Stern Review. Apparently some of them have been looking at my article, presumably pre-empting my questions.
Prisoner of the Information Act
Posted on Nov 17 2006 | Tagged as: Censorship, Media, Work
It’s the epitome of circular arguments. The Freedom of Information Act says we can have information. The Data Protection Act says we can’t. The FOI says we can have it because it’s in the public interest to release. The DP says it’s in the public interest to withold. The Information Comissioner, who I imagine (without justification, admittedly) to be a pretty conservative old chap not given to helping uppity students such as me, will have to arbitrate.
The BBC’s Newsnight team were working on a programme about religious extremism on university campuses. They put in FOI requests to a fistfull of UK universities, including Cardiff. Before they received an official response from Cardiff they had an email, sent in error, intended for another member of staff, asking whether to mention a certain incident. When the official response came back, they denied anything ever having happened.
Newsnight called me, as a man on the ground at Cardiff University, to see if I knew anything. I don’t - but I’d like to.
So Perri, the gair rhydd editor, and I put in a request of our own, and you can guess how that went.
What made us more suspicious was that the Students’ Union’s General Manager interrogated Perri a couple of days after our request was submitted, demanding to know why we’d put it in. What was that about “news is something someone else doesn’t want you to read� Well, excuse me, but if there’s fundamentalists at Cardiff Uni I’d quite like to know about it, and I’m sure most of the other students would too. But apparently it’s a breach of the data protection principles, as it’s not a “fair†way to process the collected data.
The worst thing? How to get information out of people who really don’t want to give it to you isn’t something we’re taught. It’s probably not even something you can teach.