Archive for Cardiff University

Rory Cellan-Jones: A man ahead of technology

{ November 24, 2009 @ 9:02 pm } · { Cardiff University, Journalism, Online Journalism, Rory Cellan-Jones, Twitter }
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On the 10th of November we had someone to talk to us who made me quite star struck. Rory Cellan-Jones is the BBC’s technology correspondent and I not only recognised him immediately but his voice was unmistakeable. I remember sitting and listening to him with my grandparents while they nattered about how much technology was advancing and how they were never going to be able to keep up (now not only do they know how to text but they also have a laptop and have successfully sent two emails to date much to their surprise… and everyone elses).

So yes, we were told the day before that we were having a change to the schedule and Rory would be in to talk to us Tuesday afternoon in the lecture hall which made everyone rather excited. So in the afternoon we made our way to the lecture where Rory and our lecturer Glynn were waiting for us. Before we had much of a chance to settle we were told to all smile and wave not really knowing why only to discover this was posted on twitter later on:

I wasn’t looking too great that day because I was feeling ill  so I’m pretty grateful I’m at the back hidden!

All in all I found the lecture extremely interesting. Not only is he a very witty man, but he was so ahead of his time in 2008 that the powerpoint presentation he showed us from last year was still completely relevant in 2009, even with the speed at which technology is changing. He started off with the sheer number of people who were often seen hustling and bustling around newsrooms in 1983 when he started at the BBC including producers, reporters, editors and craftsmen including people involved with the cameras, sound, lights, engineers and film editors. The audience in the 1980′s was also very different to the audience we have today. Firstly the news brought in HUGE numbers because terrestrial TV was all people had to watch, there was no Sky and no online TV channels where people could get news anytime of the day. The audience were also pretty ignored. There was no way for them to get in touch with newsrooms such as email, text or comments via the web. Rory even told a very funny story about someone who had once called into the studio with everyone finding it hysterical – calling the person mad.

The landscape today of course is very different. There are now hundreds of channels people can watch, 24 hour news and online news while papers are in retreat and jobs for journalists are quickly disappearing. The audience is also very different with User Generated Content becoming a part of every journalists day to day life. The audience are very much involved and active and more and more raw footage of events is being filmed by so-called ‘citizen journalists’ enabling a story to gather momentum more quickly compared with the 1980′s when a camera crew made up of about 10 people would have to rush to get to a breaking news story as quickly as possible.

He ended the lecture with the ideal journalist for 2009. We have to be multi skilled, interactive with our audience, both a lone wolf and a team player and we have to be willing to be poor.

I’m not looking forward to the poor part…

However my favourite part of the whole lecture was this quote: “Twitter is a platform for news.” This could not be more true. I find out most things these days from twitter because I see it as a trending topic. The Ballon Boy scandal, I found out about that over twitter, as well as the ABC/ Adam Lambert debacle.

Twitter is a way for us to get our voice out into the world. It connects us with people all over the world. People we would never usually talk to. Rory himself told us about how he’d searched for an elderly person to help with a report on computers he was doing over twitter!

I <3 Twitter

So… talking about Twitter this is my niche section of my blog. The trending topics bit!  So today there are lots of different topics that are currently trending. Yesterday the number one tweet all day was #happybirthdaymiley for everyone to wish Miley Cyrus a happy birthday.

However, today the top spots were taken by Adam Lambert and ABC with the number one trending topic for the day being #ShameOnYouABC. When I logged on to Twitter I had no idea what this was talking about until I goggled it and found out that Adam Lambert’s performance on ABC’s Good Morning show was cancelled. Although no official reason has been given, the majority of people claim that it is due to his performance on the American Music Awards on Sunday night. Although ABC has not given a reason for the cancellation it seems that the twittersphere is going crazy with people showing their disapproval for what they assume is a backlash of Lambert’s AMA performance.

Another trending topic is Black Friday. This is the Friday after Thanksgiving and is considered the start of the Christmas shopping season. Lots of different stores in the States have sales on and it is considered the busiest shopping day of the year with fights even breaking out between people competing to get the best bargains. I once saw a fight between two women in work, over a £15 dress. They ended up being banned from the store for life…. Is a dress that has 50% off really worth being banned from a chain of shops for life?!

Until next time bloggers…

Bringing storytelling into the 21st Century

{ November 12, 2009 @ 11:52 am } · { Cardiff University, Daniel Meadows, Journalism, Twitter }
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Sorry for the lack of blogging the last few weeks. I jetted off to Lanzarote for a week and therefore missed two Thursday online lectures so I’m starting anew this week.

This week’s speaker in the online journalism lecture was Daniel Meadows who, in my opinion, was an absolute legend. He was a hippy and travelled around the UK between 1973 and 1974 in his Free Photographic Omnibus. This was basically a double decker bus kitted out with a dark room etc for him to take photos of people he met on his travels. As if that wasn’t interesting and unique enough in itself, Daniel went on to tell us about how years later he had attempted to find all the people he had photographed during this tour. Newspapers published his quest to find those he had photographed all those years ago while living aboard the photographic omnibus and eventually he found some. He later published a collection of them into a book called The Bus showing the characters then and now.

One woman in particular made an impact on Daniel and in fact she left a mark on me, even though I’d only heard her story through him. The story of Florence Alma Snoad, a part time cleaner when Meadows first met her in Southampton, was absolutely fascinating.

The whole idea of digital storytelling is one that I find quite scary. I’m not good with technology though I feel I’m more twentieth century now that I have an Apple Mac and a Blackberry but I still lack the confidence to tackle technology head on. When Daniel showed us the videos he made I instantly thought that it was unbelievably complicated and something that I would never grasp. Then he told us all about the project, Capture Wales. This project was set up for those who wanted to learn more about technology and digital storytelling to learn all about it. They were able to create their own videos (some of which were hilarious, such as Elvis Died in my Bedroom.

We were shown a video with people from the course talking about their experiences. The majority of people said they found it daunting at first and, like me, found it hard to believe that they were going to be able to make anything half decent. However, they had great support and help from the team at Capture Wales and the outcomes were fantastic. Some were humorous, while others were a bit more serious but all in all they were great pieces of work – especially for people who had only 5 days to learn the basics!

Anyways now onto the other section of the weekly blog. I recently got a Blackberry (in fact I’ve had it for less than 24 hours!) and one of the first things I did was install Ubertwitter. This is an application available for the Blackberry where you can update your status, location, see other peoples tweets, direct messages, trending topics etc making my Twitter life a lot easier and simple. Now I don’t even have to use the laptop to access one of my favourite sites.

This weeks trending topics have been fairly obvious. I checked them out on Thursday 5th and Friday 6th of November so as you can imagine Guy Fawkes night was right up there as number one on the trending topics due to the fact that it was Bonfire Night. I love fireworks, I usually go to the Swansea display, even before I went to university down there thats where my family and I would go, but this year because of the work load at Uni I was unable to go and had to settle for a nice Curry in Wetherspoons instead.

I am a complete Awards night geek and will stay up until ungodly hours to watch the Oscars and other such shows. MTV shows are some of my favourites because usually the celebrities are filled to the brim with alcohol and will do stupid stuff that you know they’re going to regret the next day (as evident with the Taylor Swift/ Kanye West incident – BOO YOU KANYE!). The MTV EMAs was an event that I had been looking forward to for a while, ever since one of my favourite artists, Katy Perry, was announced as the host being the only person that MTV has asked to host an EMA show for a second time. On Thursday night, the words EMAs, MTV and Katy Perry were all high up in the trending topics. Most people were commenting on the several outfits that Ms Perry had changed in to throughout the night including a West Ham United basque, especially for her footie mad boyfriend Russell Brand.

And for the third week running, Rihanna was in the trending topics yet again. It came after the revealing interview she gave detailing the night that she was attacked by her boyfriend Chris Brown. Unsurprisingly, ever the gentleman, Chris Brown released a statement saying that he was never going to speak of the incident because he believed it was something that was personal and private between the two of them. Personally I applaud Rihanna for having the courage to speak out on national TV and encouraging other women who are victims of domestic abuse to get help.

As the weeks go on I find myself being inundated with work, but in a way I’m grateful as it is making me realise how difficult deadlines can be to meet. It’ll come to a head one day when you’ll find me doing this in the office:

Until next time!

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