Englishness - an identity acknowledgment

Picture of Chinese premier taken at Mansion House

I am invited to China's youthful Premier Li Keqiang keynote speech in Mansion House.

At a point in his talk, in the coded language of diplomacy, the premier is piqued, gently mocking a very British, even English trait.  

He says, I know you Think Tanks like to deal in abstracts. We (Chinese) deal with facts. Previous sentiment from the premier's office have been less guarded.

A day later, there's a need to reflect on Englishness further.

One of my Master's student Li Yang had completed her online assignment in the nick of time to be awarded a merit, but it was the last few passages of her essay that stood out like white peaks of the Andes.

"I always admired the English, but now I know you are shallow minded, are not interested in learning about anything, are lazy and have no interest in anyone else".

For that brief moment, I carried the weight of Englishness in determining whether I should address this off-piste topic, or ignore it.  I did the former.

She's not been alone. Almost every year, Chinese students, buoyed by tales of England before they arrive are somewhat crestfallen by the year's end. 

The first steps towards correcting alcoholism is to acknowledge you are an alcoholic, according to Alcoholics Anonymous. Yes, the English get drunk on their own sense of superiority, but they have ever reason to: the Magna Carta- the crucible of democracy. Never mind that it was foisted upon the populace. 

Its success in wars and meeting aggressors head-on. The English creators or co-creators (according to different narratives) of the beautiful game, gentlemen's game and summer post-coital game (Brideshead) ; Football, Rugby, and Cricket in that order.

The English are wont to feel full of themselves. But is that not what other nations radiate in their national identities? The Italians, Milan and cuisne; the French for their language of rhetoric and comprehending beauty; the Chinese for their work ethic and nay say can't and America for all things "Transformer" size and that psyche that the lines between a porter and president is within reach.

The English, though possess a dissonantly unique trait. Acknowledging their problems, discussing at length its remedies, but painfully not seeing them through.

Its borne out in recommendations in education policy. In the row over schools in Birmingham becoming Trojan horses for Islamic extremism, Ofsted's Sir Michael Wilshaw says he told the education secretary that if you want to conduct a fair assessment of a school it's better not to inform the institution when you intend to visit. Michael Gove MP, apparently ignored this sensible advice. 

The Metropolitan Police force have been informed by several bodies and a major enquiry  they are institutionally racist. But their current commissioner Bernard Hogan Howe's television interview rejects this.  "I hope not. I don't think it's for me to judge", he told ITV News.

The media can see no wrong, even when hacking a missing girl's phone that provided the impression she was still alive, and was seen as repulsive. Leveson's recommendations for change to protect the privacy of individuals has seemingly neither been helpful to press and media barons in the wake of such actions.

In all the last three cases, education, law and order,  and media, symptoms of the alcoholic disease is evident, denial of a real problem. For the period these events become newsworthy, they are discussed with the intensity of a grandmaster Chess player's crunch match.

Discuss, deject, damaged (DDD) could be an appropriate slogan. In spite of the realms of discourse, an inevitable dispiriting mist descends on the debate when no action is taken, and in time the damage becomes inevitable.

However, no where is the trenchant genre behaviour observed at a national event, more so, than in the united theme of sport, and in particular the game of football.

And if there is one arena where a drunken man wanders into his first AA to declare he is unfit, listened to, told what to do, but returns drunk again 4 years later to go through the same cycle, as if collective amnesia has gripped the AA meeting, it is the World Cup.

No matter what happens at consecutive World Cups, the formula stays in tact; the result is the same, the cycle of behaviour is unswerving. Cynically you could blame it on the media; they have to, after all, sell newspapers and television spots for advertisers and share holders. 

But truthfully, it is that singularity identified by Li Yang.  If x = feelings of superiority, then no matter how much it is diminished towards reaching zero, it forever is portrayed as infinity - an infinity of self-belief.  This by the way is the formula for resolving infinity.

Today, like previous years the over inebriated soul is spoken to: we have too many internationals in our domestic game, we can't cohere as a team; the rot starts from the playgrounds of 8 years olds hoofing and a roughing the game as Dad Terry stands on the sideline screaming "C'mon ma son ge stuck in there".

Football pundit Garth Crooks on Newsnight said this is not a night for hysteria, rather calm reflection. Whilst the other inteviewee the gorgeous ( er not my phraseology) David Ginola clearly had stronger issues to vent, but restrained himself on live TV. 

Notwithstanding the clever selection of pundits for Newsnight, the dichotomous views rather sums up why the English fail to address being 'drunk' on the pitch.

Both pundits agreed England lacks a national identity buttressed against the 3-million population of Uruguay who clearly know there's or the Vorsprung Durch Technik of the Germans.  But an equally fallable Achilles is reaching a consensus how to address this malaise running several generations.

My own two bit: groom a selection of strikers to reduce their odds at not fluffing the ball when the goal scoring chance is inevitable and find something which enables English footballers to handle pressure. 

Never mind I tweeted after the match.

With shades of the Oracle's advice to Neo in mind... You don't believe in all this crap. Have a cookie and when you walk away from this you'll feel bright at ray.

So back to the drawing board. Perhaps in reading the Times with its headline featured piece: 'Reforms are crushing creativity and turning children into robots', this is at centre of England's woes.

Based on fact,  the Brits and Englanders are good at creativity e.g. Olympics. Maybe then its management stifling advances. Move over the FA. Or maybe, as an outsider looking in suggests, we're just not good enough anymore.

All grist to my mill. I'm about to present a paper from my doctorate thesis on how to reform television news. It's not as if no one knows the media is broken and others have tended ideas year after year. But broadcasting for the last 50 years has more or less remained the same. 

England. We like our traditions. And we like a real pint of beer as well and getting hammered on the weekends.

Know what you want, don't be afraid of rejection and be nice to people

Yixiang talking to MAJI students

"Know what you want, don't be afraid of rejection and be nice to people".

It's an aphorism that sounds like a humanist religion. For Yixiang its come to define how she's made her journey from determined MA student to a confident professional in the space of two years.

The former Westminster University student cuts a diminutive and slightly nervous figure delivering an impromptu testimonial of her life to this year's cohorts.

And the journalists-in-waiting kept her on point fielding a number of questions: what modules did you do? When did you learn financial journalism? Why did you do an NCJT course again?

If she could, she would have preferred to be seated listening to some other speaker than being the centre of attention herself - a touch of the imposter syndrome. Humility is one of her other endearing qualities remembered by the journalism lecturing team.

But such is her story, how a shy Chinese student fought to find work from one British media establishment to another: the BBC, The Financial Mail, Euro Money, that her story begs to be told. "I got a lot of rejections, a lot of rejections, but I believe if you really want to do it, you will", she says.

Yixiang's beginnings
Deborah Vogel, the course leader for the University's MA Journalism programme recalls the early signs of her now characteristic focus. On the first day of contact, says Deborah, Yixiang had prepared a shopping list of questions, she had clearly given much thought.

As one of her lecturers, Yixiang surfed under the radar for the best part of the first semester. In the second semester she opted to the online module. The running joke for online from Masters students is   "you will die and be reborn".  Apparently it's something I said in jest which took off.

However, because of the volume and nature of work the joke wears out very quickly. Students have to believe they can take the pressure of design, coding, writing, multimedia, whilst committing themselves to understanding technical and creative aspects of various softwares.

The close contact working with colleagues, sometimes enacting Soho Dotcom's Death March, means its not for the shrinking violet or those wanting an easy ride. You can't be shy working online in a team. So, Yixiang might have crossed my mind.

However two months in Yixiang wanted to meet for a problem. She had already consulted the "wisdom of crowds";  she was applying for a BBC online internship and wanted help writing the application, and only had a couple of days before the deadline. I asked her permission to use this email below.

from yixiang, many thanks

10 March 2008 13:34


Dear David,

I want to ask you that tomorrow could you kindly share some time with me discussing my application. I will have interview on Thursday.

I will bring my web critique and some other question answers, hope you could have a quick look, and comment on it.

Here is the link for the programme I applied:

www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articles/2007/02/19/step_up_feature.shtml.

You might be very busy, but I really need some help, and your suggestions and comments will be useful for me. 

I thank you in advance

yixiang

I passed the ball back to her to write it up first, so by the time we met and bar the odd change and how you sell yourself online, Yixiang had prepared a meticulous document pulling everything she had learnt together.

Yixiang at the BBC

After three filtering processes and a day's long interview, she got the position. Look up the link and see how you might fare.  By now as I documented in this blog post back then, Yixiang was becoming a women possesed - something we've had good laughs about.

What followed within her internship was an extraordinary balancing act of working with the BBC whilst meeting the course requirements for the MA programme. In her final project Yixiang decided on creating a site to showcase the talents of concert pianists at the world famous Royal School of Music. Pianism.co.uk has since come down from the web.



Perhaps it's the less spoken about fact that she is an accomplished pianist herself or that she wanted to shine a light on those she admired. Either way after three months she emerged with a website which would earn her a distinction.

It wasn't without its difficulties. Some of the pianists in emails were plaintively rude, but Yixiang shrugged of any rejections and got on with the task.

Graduating
After graduating as any student will know came the hard slog for work. Yixiang got into selection panels for the likes of CNN and along the way accrued her fair share of rejections.

However she had made a decision, a plan she was keeping too. Going back to China was not an option, so she was intent on carving out a career in the UK.The thought led her to enrol on an NCTJ  print course where she buried her head in law, public affairs, shorthand, and local politics.

The University of Westminster's modules are based on the NCJT, as well as the BJTC - which it still looks to for accreditation, but Yixiang's quest was to specifically understand the Brit market with a desire at the time to work at a local level.

And then as she puts it she was finally brainwashed. Working in local newspapers and contributing to the university's much vaunted online newspaper,  HA1, a competitor to local newspapers,  gave her the sense of how community news worked.

Anyone who has worked in local news knows the benefits of getting your hands dirty. I recall my first radio piece for BBC Radio Leicester in 1987 when I mispronounced Groby as Grow-bee, when it should be Groo-be. I spent 6 hours trying to figure out overnight at the station how to change and record that one word, before it got broadcast. I survived and spent three years on and off working the local beat.

For Yixiang the sum total of her past was about to come to a head. Along her journey other jobs would open up: the Financial Mail and The Independent where she did a stint as an award. And as she puts it, anytime she visited Harrow she had a mission. "I'd be thinking of a local news story and how I could pitch it to the local newspaper editor, with a different angle", she says.

Pitching is an exercise at the University we place a premium on. If you can't pitch, you can't sell.

Today the story of Yixiang is about to take a more interesting and highly fruitful turn - Hong Kong.

It doesn't get any better than that. Yet the principles that underpin her rise are as unpretentious as she is.  There is no magic bullet to making it work. As one of my mentors put it, every rejection letter is one step closer to the job you're after.

Or as someone who inspires me, and hopefully inspires you too says...how does it go? "Know what you want, don't be afraid of rejection and be nice to people".

Never a truer statement.

Postscript: As I was finishing this article, an email from Yixiang's prospective employer marked "confidential" landed asking a range of private work-related questions. You can't imagine what I might have said, can you? :)

Yixiang takes the applause

A journalism in crisis - not really!

Snatch the toast, down the orange juice, last check of my case.. laptop, charger, hard drive.... I'm off.

In minutes my university will open the floor for a two day event examining many facets of questions and thesis that journalism is in crisis.

It's a loaded statement full of vim.

Newspapers are closing, tv is losing figures, traditional journalism as you might know it looks under threat, the fourth estate is having its teeth wrenched out with pliers; there is no hope.

But does this receding pulse in journalism as you know it signify a crisis? And if not ( I don't what planet you're on, someone's thinking) what does?

Could I suggest perhaps that it's not journalism in crisis, but the custodians of a genre we have become familiar with that is badly feeling this era. The loss of jobs anyway you cut it is deeply wounding. But there are also new jobs, that had not been invented five years ago emerging for a new breed of info gatherers.

Yes, they may not have the attributes of a Murrow or Paxman, but then we all started somewhere.

Journalism always in crisis
And by the way journalism-as-you-knew-it has always been in crisis. Addison and Steele's equitone approach would not have bode well in eth 18th century, as did the first time pictures were featured in newspapers 20th C., or when radio and TV were born, and more acutely still cable and satellite flung itself onto our laps.

Sometimes too, the fat we live off requires genuine intro-reflection. As one newspaper exec put it recently, the fact that some UK newspaper groups are pulling in a £1m profit every month is in their eyes simply not good enough.

Damn! There goes the CEO's purchase of that new yacht around the Caribbean.

I may or may not be required to speak tomorrow on how TV has been affected by all this new change. My head of department has been wound up like a toy on stand by; nervous energy brrr, nervous energy.

Frankly, as a general view, I'm likely to say very little has changed. That is with a caveat.

If 2005 it looked dire, a hang-over from 2000 when as a dot com executive I too think I smelt the whiff of napalm in the morning, in 2009 there's a sense amongst TV that we're riding this thing.

There was a time you couldn't squeeze a conversation about who was coodling whom at the last Christmas party without wondering if there would be another one - Christmas party.

But then, the caveat - the execs with stabilising pockets and an expansive strategy, often shielded from the ravages of advertising's flight syndrome, got busy innovating.

Whatever you knew as a new media boffin, they wanted to know. Conferences charged £1000 a delegate and they flocked to learn social media, the new plug in, the rationalisation of irrational behaviour, this thing called videojournalism, and this "bizarre" thing called Multimedia.

Bizarre because we already do multimedia. Doh!

Last year a BBC friend showed me an internal memo listing twelve points at how they were taking new media head on. It was impressive to say the least. Next week I'll bring you an interview with the recently appointed head of BBC multimedia news, Mary Hockaday.

So given the correction, long overdue in the media industry, a b**ch if you're in the stock broking business as it happens every seven years, the media is undergoing some form of transformative correction. Yes you too can get it in on the act, with linitations, if you're a twitterer or blogger.

Question? have you noticed that when the banks collapse, it's those nasty pesky banker CEO types, but when journalism goes belly up, it's new media's faults. What perverse psycho analysis! brilliant!!

The Margaret Thatchers said
Youtube if you will, but we're not for tubing. Bar humbug! Four years on everyone's youtubing and more. And the clever ones are leveraging their existing media, whilst cracking down on copyright infringement.

But if my tone comes across as "meeja land's all hunkeedoree", it would be a wiser TV exec still who would know complacency is a word in the media dictionary behind "compost".

That many of the traditional media have realigned their thinking is testament to Darwin's laws. But the radicalisation of change, whilst it's slow down in momentum, does not mean its not stirring for a new wave.

Note: slow down in momentum is not the same as companies closing. The big changes in 2005-7 are only now really taking affect.

So this new wave we simply don't know what that is, yet. There are few citadels of the new media e.g. Huffington Post to emerge and challenge the guard of traditional media. But the trend analysers would have us tread carefully.

Computers more intelligent than people, IS on the cards. It's a matter of calculus and a few micro chip laws. Newsgathering will find new pathways. You and I as consumers will be better served, because... because.. some bright spark is already looking at ways to make news you can use, truly usable.

So right now, I'm emerging from the tube station, having penned this on my iphone.

Journalism in crisis? By the sounds of the British MP debacle, journalism looks like being in good health.

Granted it's one incident, albeit a soap opera series, but if anything as the academics and industry folk gather at this conference, the story here for me is how to look at the glass half full.
To those who don't see a crisis, but an opportunity to solidify journalism's new growth. Journalism in crisis? Ah no, there is a crisis in journalism, to some at least.

p.s
Last minute changes occuring, but here's where you can catch up with the two day event
http://www.westminsternewsonline.com/JIC/livestream.html

Student voice - tale of two international journalism students

Two students standing over my shoulder as we were talking TV and Online, so I decided why not let them talk about what they've been up to and the experience of being here 1000s of miles away from home.
first up


Parishmita:
I am from the far northeast part of India, - these are seven small states - which is always in news for the wrong and the most happening reason i.e Terrorism. But there is more to North east than militants. To start with there is Tea (the famous Assam tea), beautiful lakes, river and mountains. I went to Maharani Gayatri Devi School Girl's public school in Jaipur (Pink city) in Rajasthan (land of desert)

David says:
( is this your intro ??) She's saying I can't do this.. ~Not here. she say's everyone will be reading. She says I'm being mean. We're having an interactive moment here. She wants to change this now.. the intro. Chinaka the other student says she shouldn't. She says I did not give her much time and that she'll look foolish (long sigh)...... [ all a bit of harmless fun] :)


Chinaka:
And I am from Nigeria...and South Africa...and Angola...one word...African. After doing an undergraduate course specialising in Publication Design, the desire to incorporate deign, photography and Film in one became very apparent. I arrived and found there was so much more to Journalism...

Parishmita:
Indeed, Chinaka. I was a journalist in India for three years but just a couple of months in the University of Westminster and it's like i have found the key to Pandora's box! The most enriching experience so far has been TV and radio. For more go here

I had no clue about film making but now i am out filming a current affairs piece with my colleagues. Phew! so far very taxing but i am enjoying every moment especially playing with the camera and practicing the 3:6:9 (David got these numbers in our brains so much that I dream of it at night).

David:
I have vowed not to edit anything out, irrespective of what they say.. Yeah even insults!!
[they're all now musing loudly how they could have put one to me]

Parishmita:
We have been continuously put under pressure and trust me, I worked in an actual newsroom in India but I never felt the pressure as much as I feel when I am working with David but that is the fun. David push you hard and you take it as a challenge and push yourself harder to show [ show him.. show him] YES you can do it.

I understand the divide between a print, tv and online journalist is narrowing down and the course that I am doing aims to churn the multimedia journalists, which is the need of the hour.

But if you really want to know about it ASK David! sometimes I wonder if times is moving fast or David's speed is faster than time. All in all, it's a privilege to get lessons from David and of course the rest of the faculty. The time, energy and ofcourse Money that i have invested in this course is after all worth it.
(I am not being nice to you David. I am just being truthful)

David:
I told her not to be nice, to be frank about her aims.

Chinaka:
Okay so I literally have like 2 seconds to briefly give an account of my experience so far here in London, studying at the University of Westminster.

I am doing an MA in International Journalism. I will not go into detail as to what the international in the name stands for, except perhaps the fact that there is not a single soul in my class of 40 from the UK. I

I remember the first time I arrived, during orientation, we have a lunch with the staff that would be teaching and guiding us for the next couple of months. I remember Gyimah asking me, “What do you want to get out of this course?”

One thing I have come to understand is that to be a journalist today, is to be a multiskilled journalist: I am currently, with a degree in Publication design, I am learning to make current affairs, TV news and features (pre prod, prod and post prod- final cut pro), radio news and features, Online journalism (learning the importance of blogging, creating websites with Flash, Dreamweaver, while incorporating design softwares such as Photoshop, Illustrator.

Due to the intensive nature of the course, you learn to understand the ways of the industry…well just a sneak preview but the hardest thing is ensure that I have not lost focus on what I want to get out of this whole experience.

It has been quite interesting to watch myself grasp information and do things that I did not think I could do. And also just being in London has given me a totally different perspective as a journalist.

A journalist can be an artist, and educator, story-teller, and I want to take this skill one day and contribute to the media industry in my country and continent as a whole.

I will continue my account in my blog...

David says I'll either trawl em back to talk more or ping you to their own blogs - if they have them running.. just joshing.. they say they want a right to reply. should I?

Journalism in Crisis

A conference organised by the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Westminster in association with the British Journalism Review

London, 19-20 May 2009

Keynote Speakers

Professor James Curran, Goldsmiths College
Professor Todd Gitlin, Columbia University

Call for papers

News journalism is in deep crisis. Newspaper readership is falling, the audience for television news shrinking, and young people in particular seem to be less interested in traditional forms of news consumption. 24-hour news channels on shoestring budgets fight over tiny audiences while even well established and committed news organisations like the BBC and New York Times are cutting budgets and laying off journalists.

Those that remain complain of increased workloads, lack of resources, insecurity of employment, greater dependence on news agencies and PR handouts, and lack of training opportunities. There are accusations that serious journalism, with in-depth coverage of important issues that can hold the powerful to account, has given way to a toxic mix of infotainment, sensationalism and trivia.

Some, particularly the young, see online as the way forward. Internet penetration is high in most developed countries and growing rapidly in the developing world. The web offers a multimedia environment for new developments like citizen journalism and blogging, different kinds of news reporting and new approaches to current affairs.

But it also threatens the business model of newspapers as classified advertising moves online, while television suffers from fragmented audiences and the growth of time-shifted viewing. Many question whether user-generated content can ever be a substitute for well-resourced newsgathering carried out within trusted institutions according to established professional values.

This conference will review the current threats to the practice of journalism and examine some of the developing alternatives.

Papers are invited that address any of these issues. We welcome contributions on:

• The audiences for news
• The development of new media outlets
• Current practices in journalism
• The impact on journalism of changing economics and ownership
• New approaches to journalism, and
• The future of journalism as a paid occupation.
  

Many of the problems identified are specific to the advanced countries. The organisers welcome papers that address the different situation in developing areas, like India, China and Africa, where audiences for traditional media continue to grow and where online news has quite different implications.

NB:Reproduced from the University of Westminster page

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

A day at Press Association

Great to see the two editors, Catherine in wine red polo neck and at the back head just peaking, John, also playing to Duncan Raban's "Broadway- I did it my way" pose

Picture by Duncan Raban

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.