Why if you're a student, you MUST blog

Oh what like I don't know? It's been raked over ad nausea:"why should students blog", but here's my bent as a senior lecturer, former broadcaster, and blogger.

Firstly, I'd wish the name blogger had an alternative to it when looking to brand studious and prolific writers in journalism. At the next attempt launching a writing template, please simply call it "writer" and watch the fundamental difference it would make amongst student journalists.

Updates soon from "Writer lite", "Pro" and "Gold standard." Which one would you prefer?

So why should all students blog?

• That perennial yawning catch phrase that your lecturers cease to let go off; you become your own publisher. Tick box.
• Then, your blog will enable you to write about matters which concern you and your friends if you wish, a re-wording of the previous point. Tick box.
• And then a moment of silent clarity and internal huzzahs: you've joined the new world, a journey into digital journalism, the unknown, but which gathers pace in its quest to reformat the art of knowing and telling. Tick that box.

So why is it some students or trainee journalists resist the urge to blog or feel at best it's an inconvenience, worst rubbish?

This is something I come across wearing my top hat as a BJTC council member.

Briefly, the BJTC is the body which sits at the interface between journalism colleges, universities and the media industry in the UK, and whose kite mark of accreditation is much recognised and admired within the industry.


Why you don't blog
There are a number of limited reasons why I could think as a student, professional or who ever you may be, you should blog, but I'll keep this to students.

Overheard at our last BJTC council meeting yesterday by one member: "Oh if they could just write, our HR (Human Resources) could do with students who could just write and write well. Getting techie, yeah, but write".

Now here's the its not rocket science bit.

If you want to be an actor, act; if you want to be a psychedelic pharmacist, you're going to have spend some time in the lab; if you want to be a writer, write. With some professions theoretical knowledge alone just won't do.

Here I'm referring to writers as journalists and not fictional novelists. Two separate desires, no less superior to each other, though many journalists in their lifespan tend to become novelist than the other way round.

What blogs do is strip bare the tenants of journalism.

Disregarding the most complex of tasks, setting up the blog in the first place and gathering any number of widgets, you're being defined by the art of pen to paper; key to screen.

You are who you are by your posts, the frequency and quality of your style and argument.

Were I a media manager, I would insist on seeing an interviewee's blog. I understand the Guardian Newspaper does.

A blog provides a crucial insight into a potential journalist employee. That never mind all the wonderfully well phrased entries on that CV, the blog says the following:

I James Meredith Sinclair, studying journalism, blog because I am:

• Interested in writing - determined by the frequency of your posts.
• Can display broad interests or how well honed my specialist knowledge is - determined from the quality of your writing.
• That fundamentally, and often overlooked, it is my online CV, my "newspaper cuttings".
  

Yes strange as it may seem job applicants once used to walk round with dog eared binds, stuffed with their columns and bylines painstakingly cut from newspapers, and if you were a broadcaster researching any number of subjects you went down to the cuttings library. Ho hum.

Reasons why you don't blog
Often young trainees and student journalists will have reasons for not blogging. They vary, but some reasons are more prevalent than others.

• Not knowing what a blog is - fairly common.
• Not having anything to write about ranks in the top three
• Too busy with all my other work is a strong favourite

You could probably come up with your own counterpoints for the aforementioned. Here's mine.

• If you're unaware what a blog is and you want to become a journalist, then I may question your hunger. Just as if you wanted to become a chef and you didn't know what a microwave was you'd have me reaching for the next candidate.

• Having nothing to write about portrays a lack of high media consumption and perhaps forming your own ideas, which yes, is a skill that will develop at journalism schools. But if you don't listen to any radio news, read other blogs, watch the news, then you're isolated and will have little to fire the imagination into damming the hubris of that politician or health care spokesperson.
  

• And if you're too busy, then whilst that's to be applauded, you're exhibiting a key flaw of journalism practice which is a lack of organisation and priority.

Here's my back-in-the-day lecture. Sorry!

But back in the day, in 1989, when Daniel Boettcher, now one of the BBC's all rounder correspondents, was my classmate, and blogs were not around, our lecturers at Falmouth in Cornwall pressed us with work. At times it became mind-splitting, until the low down in organisational skills was aired.


Why you're never too busy
News does not respect time, it is not guided by what period of day it is, neither is it sensitive to whims; it happens. It's relentless.

And when it happens on your patch, you'd best be there, and when another big story happens on your patch again, you'd best be there as well. You simply don't have the luxury to say you are busy.

You may have made the decision not to do anything about the latter story, but that's a different matter entirely.

This was best put to me by the venerable and inveterate ITN News Editor Phil Moger, a true powerhouse in journalism and passionate about it to his retirement having served it many years.

I had some shifts in the 90s at ITN with Phil as Editor. After the niceties, for the following half hour my to-do-list kept rising steeply with one assignment or another.

At each turn, either Phil or a correspondent would request where I was in the task and why I hadn't finished. I'd been used to multitasking, but this was something else. Soon I would approach Phil, and after our exchange, he smiled.

There's no such things as being busy, just know how to prioritise and once you make the editor aware of what you're doing, let the ed make the call.

Later I would learn how to say "I'm busy" and by then it was understood and appreciated how truly busy I was.

Prioritising and finding the creative period in your day means a daily post should take you minutes. More on that in my next post.

The new writers
I have come across some wonderful student bloggers. It would be inappropriate to single anyone out from the current Masters programme, but from previous years there's the likes of Richard Brennan of Newsjiffy ( class of 2006) whose blog gets to the point, far swifter than I have here.

And also from outside where I teach comes Adam Westbrook from City University, whose latest post indicates how far City Uni have come with blogging.

I still remember that moment when having spoken about Adam to my students, various friendships were formed and Adam and us (students and me) would later meet at the Front Line Club.

Students from competing universities who share something in common - a creative common.

Then there's Dave Lee, whom Like Adam defines the future. In both cases, yes, they've recently pinged me, but that's not really the self-vanity point here. They're good strong bloggers reaching out.

And there are countless more, including as I alluded to before current Masters students whose blogs I read. But there are many others who have not taken the plunge.

Ultimately, and something Darwinist might say, that needs to happen. There has to be a distinction. There needs to be difference, a hierarchy.

You may rubbish this, for we're all not built the same, what interests you may be nonchalant to me.

But our job is to provide a route so that everyone has an opportunity to make strong their case for becoming a paid and respected journalist.

Blogs to some people, may actually not matter, but they do provide a weather bell, and if no one reads them nay mind you're at least, at least, doing something no one else can do for you which is....

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft. ~Jessamyn West, Saturday Review, 21 September 1957

Next week what to blog about and what we've discovered in access to blogs.

David wrote his first published article at 15 for his school mag about the Neutron Bomb ( pretentious Ba*****) He doesn't believe blogging will save the world, but it will make a world of difference to understanding issues. He sits on Council of the BJTC

M2V - Videojournalism for anti-conformists

More than a little earnest for many of today's matter-of-facters, but Cicero on history:

"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity." Cicero

Gosh!

But then this VJ evolution, I'm in the midst of completing a couple of pages on viewmagazine that pieces together some contemporary historical going-ons that as a VJ, exec, or academic you may find useful.

Less about what it is... grief, done that. But the pitfalls, work-to-rule, quelling staff revolts (oh yes!) and really what next, when the sheen dulls.

In line with that I'll be bashing together a feature M2V which will be a sequel to Digital Diversity.

The video shot of the Telegraph ( top) and its multimedia studio, will be accompanied by some interesting thoughts from managers and the Telegraph's new super journalists.

Why no one else is doing this is interesting, but imagine 12 lucky young graduates put through their paces over the course of a year to learn everything there is to know about this new journalism.

Some investment huh?

For the first time you'll hear their views, plus some original archive from Channel One TV's broadcast, with an interview with ex Sky TV's head of News and former Managing Director of Channel One TV, Nick Pollard.

Channel One TV was the first and only VJ station in the UK in the mid 90s.

See you Monday

The Embryo of 21st Century Journalism

John Angeli, the UK Press Association's Editor of Video made the point - PA is looking for fresh ways of harnessing the video beyond the 2 min news package, which would entail geo-specific clips delineated along a timeline of events.

He cited the shooting of Rhys jones, the 11 year old liverpool boy shot in the back of the neck by an assailant, as an example.

Inspite of the comprehensive reporting John added, he couldn't quite get a grasp of the location of a nearby pub from where the fatal shot is said by police to have been fired.

The pub ismentioned as a crucial location by investigators.

Multimedia reporting could perhaps provide added information, John suggested.

It prompted Visiting Lecture Tanja Willmot who teaches online journalism to ask whether, wrapped up inthe definitition of multimedia: graphics, video and the rest, journalists should be made to learn such new crafts.

And that for me is the rub.

I hope to expand on this on viewmagazine.tv, but first at the heart of what PA is doing, what Tanja was questioning is the very traditional definition of Journallism.

Journalism ~ writing for a journal.

Firstly a great thanks to the Press Association for welcoming 20 or so international master in journalism students from the University of Westminster, and a special thanks to John Angeli and Catherine from Multimedia.

Once upon a time visits of this kind were weighted in terms of benefits towards students, and while that might be the case here, it also, I hope, gives media companies like The Press Association the chance to see how the present crop of new multimedia news practitioners are thinking.

The new new thing

David (behind camera) working with Phd colleagues at the Smart Lab in cooperative, sharing exercises.

You meet a guy/girl you have never met.

They do something remarkable that you don't do and perhaps therefore you would wish to be in possession of this.

Conversely, and you're not to know, they may be thinking the same thing about you.

You exchange some tentative words, find you overlap on their space and again conversely they're asking you questions.


Now here's the dilemma.

In that time you probably get a good idea of what they do and you could if you perservered incorporate that into your own way of working.

They might be thinking the same, though again you don't know.

But then something extraordinary happens in this extraordinary climate.


Share Culture

It began many years back; when sapirn sussed that in a bid to stay alive it would be more beneficial if they hunted together which would yield greater rewards.

They cooperated.

But the word found favour and pop stardom in the era of the Open Source - the Net.

Share, Share, Share.

It somehow goes against the grain of things we've come to believe - and often I find its strongest opponents, strangely but naturally, in the alliances of new journalists.

At school you most likely curled your hand around your work to avoid it being seen by others or engaged in subterfuge to get the highest marks above your colleagues - and perhaps, perhaps there was good reason for that.

John slept all day while Jane swotted to pass exams and she'll be damned if she was going to do John that Lazy ********d any favours.

But then we enter a new phase of out lives: dependency from birth gives way to independence ( quick hide your work) then from there hopefully interdependence.

The matra: what you do adds to what we do sits at the front of the cortex.

That's how Robb Montgomery and I in the space of a few minutes of meeting each other in Cairo decided without consultation, without any fuss, how we would mutually we would work together.

It's a bond of trust of understanding which is difficult to determine, to even predict.

And many, many, many of us are doing - much still to the bewilderment of business.

Somewhere in the time continuum of high school to university or life in teens to twenties it may reveal itself.

But how do you engineer it?


How do you effect change

There are cultures and personalities I have come across over the years in my lecturing that eschew partnering.

There are a number of reasons why, often very legitimate in the way we must also respect others customs.

....this profession however, this new dawn of a profession however begs cooperation.

It requires, graphic artist speak to coders, journalists speak to Flash designers, speak to photojos, speak to managers, speak to employers - NOT as a top down.

An ideal state and perhaps a naive one you might say, but there is much value, huge value in this.

And within the ecosystem of cooperation people find each other.

"I will find you" barked Daniel Day lewis in The Last Mohican.


Smartest Person

I'm forever using the phrase borrowed from Dan Gilmor of the smartest person in the room syndrome amongst those I'm sharing ideas with.

Sometimes I'll be asked a question and jokingly refuse to answer because I sense the person posing the question hasn't turned other side of themselves to ask someone else.

That somone who've they've been sharing space with for a considerable time may just know the answer.

70-80% of what you think you know ( the percentage is not definitive) is apparent when you end up teaching someone else.

There are twin rewards.

Confirmation of your own knowledge and more so adding to this unconventional transaction of helping someone else.

Before the film "pass it on" that's what we knew it by.


The road less travelled

Many years ago I got lost in Brindisi, Italy with a friend travelling through Europe.

A young girl, barely able to speak English; our only italian was thank you, took us to her home - shooing us to be quiet as we walked upstair.

Her dad, she showed pictures of was a boxer and we could hear him yelling in the background.

Next day as we set off, creeping downstairs, we offered whar money we had left.

She declined and she didn't have to say what she expected of us.


Dilemma
In essence that's where we are with Prisoners Dilemma; if you don't know it already as part of game theory it's worth investigating.

And that for me is one of the challenges to new journalism, not the technology which we'll have to wrap our heads around but the unwritten quid pro quo.

Meeting new people like Robb and getting excited very quickly at what he does; of talking to students who when you put something in the bank return it with interest.

It is the story of IMB and the open Sources who declined any money; and in my case Al Jazeera's creative director Morgan Almeida who took my site Viewmgazine.tv to make their own site and in which I went back to their site to see how I might modify my own.

The difference in approach resides in the value of new thinking; how working together - as new age hunters gets us to the fastest prey, gets us to new planes, gets us away from how our Gimme gimme gimme ways will end up undermining us.

It is being played on the world stage with climate control.

The biggest game of Prisoners Dilemma manifesting itself because some nations have no respect for others and so would probably want to go down togther than find common ground.

But I digress.

There's good reason I hope that as the Net digs deeper into the unit of our work-life's currency; when Net Neutrality reigns, that journalism - the exchange, interpretation of data and information creates something even more powerful and wonderous than we're seeing today.

That is from those already paving the way for change and they quietly know who they are.

GRAZIE