http://reviewedonline.co.uk/cinema/2011/0711/1907/harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hallows-part-2-cinema-film-review/harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hallows-part-2-cinema-film-review.htm

Emily (Left) & Naomi (Right) - taken from E4.com

This week it was Emily’s turn to take centre stage. After the disappointing opening episode I have to be honest and say I didn’t have high hopes for the second one but I was absolutely blown away. Since the new cast joined last season, Naomi Campbell has always been my favourite character. Political, opinionated and passionate she doesn’t care what people think and although reserved about her blossoming relationship with Emily Fitch, things ended on a high at the end of season 3 when Naomi literally held her hand out to Emily and they became a couple. And the world was a happy place. Everyone just wanted to see them get together as they made such a cute couple and it was nice to see a happy, functioning relationship in Skins, even if it just so happened that it was a lesbian one.

Now back to the present, and season 4, episode 2. So in the first episode all the Skins cast were at a party when a girl

Taken from E4.com

called Sophia killed herself by throwing herself off a balcony at the club after being dealt drugs. They were all questioned as part of the investigation and at the end of the first ep it was revealed that Naomi had in fact sold the girl the drugs, not Cook as was thought. In episode 2, Emily and Naomi are happy together at Naomi’s house when she gives Emily a gift – a pair of googles of her to wear while riding her scooter. Naomi emphasises how much she loves her and makes her promise that she’ll never forget it. While at college, they’re both questioned by the police regarding Sophia’s death as they seem to think they were quite a close group despite the fact that Naomi and Emily barely know her.

After being questioned by the police, Naomi reveals to Emily that she dealt the MDMA to Sophia so she could get the money to buy Emily the googles. She insists that everything will be fine as long as they act natural and don’t do anything suspicious. After this, Emily goes to visit Sophia’s mum and brother to find out a bit more about her. Going through Sophia’s room she finds a brochure for a university open day, a cadet locker key and a letter to her brother Matt. Matt walks in and asks Emily if she was Sophia’s girlfriend and argued that he knows she did not kill herself as she didn’t say goodbye to him. Emily hands him the letter before leaving. Later flicking through the prospectus she discovers an open day photo with Sophia and Naomi together. When Emily confronts Naomi, she reveals that she met her at an open day and had no idea that Sophia was gay. When Emily shows her the locker key, Naomi guesses that it must be for her cadet locker key – how would she know that if she barely knew her?

When they go to the cadet centre and open the locker they find a shrine dedicated to Naomi including pictures, poetry, drawings, a large locked box, Naomi’s old toothbrush and rubbish from her bin. Returning home, Emily has a row with her family over her relationship with Naomi and decides to move out. Matt arrives at her house and shows her Sophia’s note which says: “Once I had a love and it was a gas, Soon turned out she had a heart of glass. So Sorry, I Love you.” Emily denies that it was Naomi that she killed herself over and Matt wants to know what she’s scared of and argues they should help each other to understand Sophia’s death. Emily moves out to Naomi’s house where they get drunk and attend a house party. Seeing Naomi with different girls makes Emily jealous and she has a heart to heart with Cook.

Naomi begs Emily for her forgiveness

In the early hours of the morning, Emily makes an urgent call saying she needs to meet up and show them something not knowing that Naomi is awake. She goes to the club where Sophia killed herself and meets up with Matt, bringing the locked box from Sophia’s locker with her. Naomi turns up asking Emily to leave it, Sophia’s dead so it doesn’t matter but Emily disagrees and says she has to know what’s in the box. Following Matt up to the rooftop, Emily is chased by Naomi begging her to just go home and leave it alone but Emily insists that they open the box. Inside they find Sophia’s sketchbook/diary entitled “Love on a Train”. It details how Sophia and Naomi met on the open day and ended up going back to Naomi’s house where she cheated on Emily (it is unclear if it was more than a kiss at this point as all Sophia drew was a kiss, nothing more). Matt smashes the box to pieces and leaves, leaving Naomi and Emily alone on the roof. Naomi begs for forgiveness but Emily ignores her saying she’s ruined everything they had. Emily leaves despite Naomi calling after her telling her she was scared.

Back at the Fitch household, Emily is comforted by her dad who reveals he once cheated on Emily’s mum with her sister saying that people will do anything to act like they’re not trapped. Returning to Naomi’s house, Emily finds a note attached to the door saying “I’ll do anything”. Looking up at the bedroom window, Emily sees Naomi looking down. After a few seconds she turns and goes into the house leaving Naomily fans wondering if she will forgive Naomi for what she has done. Personally I hope so, its a shame for a sweet couple to be ruined so early on in the series.

It was not just the storyline that had me gripped, but the acting by both Lily Loveless (Naomi) and Kathryn Prescott (Emily) was absolutely outstanding. Both girls are definitely destined for Hollywood and I’ll be surprised if we don’t see great things from them in the future.

I just can’t wait for this Thursday’s episode!

I’ve been free for 4 days now and have achieved nothing thus far. Days one and two I worked loooong hours in work. Boring.

Me and some of my friends at the Summer Ball 2009

Monday I had a fun day of shopping with my best friend Bex in Bristol to exchange Christmas presents and just generally have a catch up as she lives in Devon and we see each other every 4-6 weeks these days which makes me sad because I miss her. Though what I find strange is that I only realise how much I miss the people I went to university with after I’ve met up with them. Usually I’m alright about it but then when we hang out I realise just how much I love them and how much the mean to me.

Cabot Circus shopping centre, Bristol

I love Bristol for shopping.The new Cabot Circus blows the new shopping centre in Cardiff right out of the water. It has Hollister, Urban Outfitters HUGE New Look and a brand spanking new Starbucks. I loved every second of it. Especially the part when we swapped presents and I got The Proposal on DVD. I’ve watched in 3 times already! Best film of 2009 by far! Today was then spent less productively… watching Ugly Betty for 4 hours then watching The Proposal several times. Though I did think about my assignment for my module Reporters and the Reported.

I think maybe I’ll do a bit more work tomorrow….

Reaper in Sicily are a band who have blasted onto the music scene, seemingly out of nowhere though they have been gigging around bars in South Wales for over a year. They were crowned the winners of the competition, beating over 700 other bands.

Rhys Bernardo, Matthew Jenkins, Mike Evans, Jonny Chappell and Thomas Williams admit that no-one was more shocked than they were when they discovered they had won. Lead singer Rhys said: “I remember we all grouped together  with our arms around each other when they were about to make the announcement and I thought if I hear the R of Reaper I’ll go insane. As soon as everyone heard our name all our friends and family ran towards us.” The O2 arena then fell into utter chaos with people being pulled off the band by security guards, resulting in the guys being taken out through a fire exit in order to escape. The band all agreed that winning felt like a relief after the build up towards the night, with Rhys adding that when they realised they had won it was ‘the best feeling in the world’.

Formed in the small town of Aberdare right in the heart of the South Wales Valleys, Reaper have found themselves transformed into an overnight success. At the age of five Rhys and guitarist Jonny met while modelling for Littlewoods. “This is a true story,” Rhys insists. “I didn’t see him again until we were about 16 when we met at a gig. I didn’t know he played guitar but I’d just split up with my band and a mutual friend suggested we get together and play a few songs.” And, as they say, the rest is history. Although they have had numerous changes to the line up over the years the current group have been together since November 2008 and all agree that the dynamic within the band is right this time round.

The band talk about the inspiration behind the song This is bigger than you and discuss their plans for the future:

Members of Reaper have been playing instruments for several years. Guitarist Matthew Jenkins began playing the piano at the age of 10 and guitar at 14,while Thomas Williams has been playing the drums for three years. Bassist Mike Evans and Jonny have both been playing since they were 16 and Rhys started singing in bands at the age of 13.

The band decided to enter the competition after they saw an advert and discovered that a rival band had entered. Mike said: “We just thought if they can do it then so can we. We put our name forward, filled in some forms and submitted a song and several pictures. It then got reviewed and we eventually won.” They did however have some reservations about entering the competition. Jonny especially was against the idea: “I thought it was selling out and it was like being on the X Factor. I was worried we’d be turned into the next Chico and Jedward!” Rhys was quick to add however that after winning everyone agreed entering the competition had been the best option.

The band cite their musical influences as The Blackout, The Used, Billy Talent and even Justin Timberlake, emphasising their ability to draw on various genres in order to create their unique sound. Reaper write all their own songs and music which makes their win even more satisfying. Rhys said: “We write the music then “Reaper” it up. We then add vocals over the chorus and then base the song around that. It can take anything from a day to a few months to create a song we’re all happy with.”

Reaper in Sicily have been gigging together since November 2008

When asked if their opinion of talent shows such as X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent has changed since being discovered via a nationwide talent show, Rhys said: “Well to be honest, I’m still not a lover of it, but I think labels and record producers look at contests as a way of reaching the best talent as the competition is always guaranteed to be high. No matter what they’re always going to find someone they deem good enough and this way the talent comes to them.”

However the band did have conflicting thoughts on who should win X Factor this year with Rhys backing Ollie Mears and Mike and Jonny both supporting Stacey Solomon.

Although they’ve won a recording contract the band admit that not much has changed for them, although Jonny added, “we are definitely more respected as a band”. The biggest change for the group will come with the release of their first single We are the Show on 1 February 2010 which coincides with the band touring as a support act.

© Ben Shabad

This week we didn’t have a guest speaker, instead we learnt all about computer assisted reporting (CAR). CAR is relatively new in the UK, though in the US it is an established part of journalism and is even taught in some universities. It was originally developed from journalists using tools used by social scientists such as spreadsheets and database managers. CAR enables journalists to report with authority – they become the expert rather than asking for an expert opinion. This is all probably not making any sense for those who weren’t in the lecture… Basically, CAR helps journalists find information, evaluate and analyse it and communicate it particularly when it comes to gathering statistics and using them to generate an article.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is an extremely important tool for journalists. Sites like What Do They Know are useful as well as a new site recently opened up displaying collected data sources from the government.

Some examples of CAR stories can be found on the here where it was discovered in December 2007 that police misconducts cost the forces £44 million. Another example is Stephen Grey’s book Extreme Rendition – Ghost PLan: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program where he revealed the CIA was using British air bases to transport foreign nationals to countries where they could torture them.

Some of the skills that CAR Journalists can obtain include data sourcing, data wrangling, negotiation, understanding the legal system and numbers and their ability to express these in a simple way so it can be universally understood. David Donald of the Center for Public Integrity suggested no more than three stats should be used in a story – but it is crucial that the numbers underpin the news. It is also essential that journalists take data back to the people before publication so the numbers can be checked and double checked before they go to print. There’s nothing worse for a journalist than getting a story wrong.

As much as I hate maths and maths hates me, I’m intrigued by CAR and its use of maths to generate good news stories. It is crucial for me to understand numbers if I’m going to use them as fact. Essential tools for the job are spreadsheets, database manager, social network analysis, mapping tools and mashup tools.

CAR I believe is fast becoming an essential part of journalism and we need to learn some lessons from our cousins across the pond and get emphasise to journalists the need for them to be taught in CAR.

We will soon be paying for news online

Paid Content was set up in to 2002 by Rafat Ali who started the site because he believed all media would eventually become digital. The site acts as a breaking news site, aggregator and shows regularly updates news stories throughout the day as they progress. It was built on a blog framework which was updated through the day and Robert pointed out that they were increasingly using Twitter for news. Their Headquarters are in New York while Robert is one of two UK editors who work from home.

He was quick to point out that those starting a career in journalism need to be able to multi-task as that is the way journalism is headed. The growth of digital media in the last 10/15 years particularly fascinated him adding that newspapers and magazines were desperately trying to keep up with technology and expanding out to to reach more people. With the current economic climate, newspapers are making a third less than they were this time last year and with online advertising considered the most efficient form of advertising, magazines and newspapers are losing money. They’ve started to question whether or not the advertising market will turn up and if it’s not likely to do so, then they need to use short term solutions to satisfy their shareholders.

This short term solution could be a pay wall. Business titles like the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal would possibly be very successful using pay walls as their readers are generally wealthy.

© paidcontent.org

But the real question is can the same be said for consumer news? Ft.com has 1.6 million users with 128,000 paying £90 a year. However, KPMG found out that 60% of people would rather see ads than pay for content ad free. Hitwise found that free content sites traffic has been increasing while transitional websites traffic has been decreasing and Lightspeed’s survey revealed that 9/10 people wouldn’t pay for content. In another poll people were asked what would they do if their favourite news site started to charge. The results weren’t all that surprising to me. 74% said they would find another site, which is probably what I would do. 8% said they would use its free headlines only while only 5% said they would continue reading it. Yet another survey found that 72% of people would want to pay less than £10 a  year to read content online with nobody willing to pay over £50. All the poll results can be found here.

Will people be willing to pay for national newspapers? If not why would they be likely to pay for local news? Hyper local reporting was extremely popular between 2002-2006 although the only real success was the Trinity Mirror’s Teeside Gazette. A second wave is starting again with Robert emphasising that this was an exciting time for any one prepared to multi-task as the future of journalism is specialisation.

So this week the topics have been fairly obvious given the time of year we’re in.

Still riding high on the list of trending topics after Thursday is Thanksgiving. SOO many messages popped up on my twitter homepage on Thursday with the majority of them being based around the holiday.

Image taken from www.tonyporch.com

Celebrities from Katy Perry, High School Musical star Ashley Tisdale and Matthew Perry posted Thanksgiving messages. As we all know the day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday and boy was there a lot of people getting their shop on. Figures released showed that $10.66 billion was spent which was a 0.5% increase on the previous year. With the current economic crisis retailers on the whole were pretty pleased with the outcome.

Image from Freefoto.com

Another trending topic related to the time of the year we’re in is Christmas, which is likely to stay in the trending topics for the next couple of weeks.

The weather is certainly making everyone feel more Christmassy with the temperatures dropping to freezing. I love how dark it gets early especially when people put up christmas decorations. The shopping season is now in full swing and I have yet to buy a single present. My best friend wants perfume, my sister wants an album, my mum wants the Foo Fighters greatest hits… and I have no idea what my dad wants… beer maybe? The music channels have started playing The Top 20 Christmas songs and no doubt the X Factor on Saturday will have a HUGE christmas tree taking up half the stage. We’re putting up our decorations at home this weekend which makes me excited! It gets me all excited for the 25th December. One of my pet hates though is people who put up christmas decorations in the middle of October. It baffles me. It makes you all christmassy then you realise you have to wait another 2 months before Santa even pops his head down your chimney.

© yournews.com

Finally one of the other trending topics this week has been Tiger Woods. This follows his car accident outside his house in the early hours of Friday morning. The events surrounding the accident are somewhat blurred with various celebrity news sites such as TMZ and Perez Hilton reporting that his wife, model Elin Nordegren, found out about an alleged affair chasing him out of the house causing him to crash. Indeed the police have said that some of the damage done to the car appears to have been caused by something else and is not consistent with the accident (such as the windows being smashed). However at the moment this is all gossip, and we all know to take news reported online with a pinch of salt at times.

Here’s a video from CNN about the crash

Until next time….

She took us through how she came to the conclusion she wanted to be a journalist. Aged 5 she decided she wanted to be a newsreader, which was very similar to me because when I was 6 years old I told my parents I was going to be a journalist and here I am 16 years later doing what I’ve always dreamed of doing. Though I didn’t achieve it quite as young as Damon Weaver the young boy who interviewed President Obama.

Aged 12 she wanted to be a war correspondent, then at 14 changed her mind and decided she wanted to be a reporter with a helicopter and a super human boyfriend (don’t we all!).

As she turned 16 she decided she wanted to be a political correspondent which then turned into wanting to be a journalist for BBC Radio 6 years later and finally at 23 she decided she wanted to be a newspaper reporter.

She stressed to us how difficult it was starting out as a journalist when you don’t have any official qualifications. She was always being told she was the second choice for the job. Something I’ve heard myself, though only when I was applying for retail jobs when I was 16, so its not quite the same. She was turned down by Coldfield News, Solihull Time and The Birmingham Post and Mail.

Finally her break came when she got a trial position on the business desk of The Birmingham Post. In December 2004 she was the general business reporter quickly becoming the enterprise editor 3 months later. Then in August 2007 she became the media and marketing editor. Pete Ashton created a blog called Created in Birmingham which was about cultural events happening in and around Birmingham. After discovering this blog, Pete encouraged Joanna to set up her own blog resulting in her setting up blog networks for The Birmingham Post and generating front page stories out of blog posts posted by non journalists. This again emphasizes the importance of User Generated Content (UGC). Joanna also told us that blogging has doubled her income in 18 months which certainly made more students prick their ears up. Personally I’d never even thought that blogging could increase my income in any way.

These days Joanna works for The Times , after being asked to visit the office via Twitter, sitting with the business team. She looks at new digital products, website development, new technologies, event planning and is involved in the paid content issue. Again we were told about the power of Twitter with Joanna saying that social networks were the future of distribution for journalism and I couldn’t agree more.

 It’s not only her amazing talent that I find inspiring but also how humble she is and giving. She donates lots of her hard earned cash to charities and is constantly overlooked for this.

I travelled for 5 hours to Nottingham from my little town of Aberdare with my friend Lauren. Now the furthest I’ve driven is Devon and that was with someone from Devon directing me so at least someone knew where we were going. This time I only had the woman on the sat nav directing me and the last time I used her I ended up in a quarry being told I’d reached my destination…. I hadn’t.

We got to the hotel and went for grub at a local pub before heading back to get ready. Now as sad as this may seem, I’d actually seen a photo of Beyonce wearing a dress from New Look in The Sun on Wednesday evening and went straight to New Look to get it for myself. So I changed into my party dress and headed over to the Trent Arena. I bought all my merch (I’m a complete merch junkie) including a programme, which disappointingly only had pictures, a poster and a t-shirt and then went and took my seat ready for the show to begin. I was quite a way back because I decided I’d rather get a seating ticket and be guaranteed a decent seat rather than have a standing ticket and perhaps be trapped behind a 7ft giant who would completely dwarf my 5ft 2 stature.

After about 9pm the lights went down and all I could hear were deafening high-pitched screams, then I realised they were coming from me. Then Beyonce came out with her voice completely in key. This woman really can do no wrong.

I’d waited 10 years for this experience and I was determined to enjoy every single second of it. Nothing was ruining this for me. Not when the guy behind me tipped his drink all over my poster and programmes, not when the girl next to me kept giving me horrible looks because I was singing so loudly – nothing.

I had an amazing time. Beyonce was incredible – not a note wrong. The concert I went to was all over the news and here and here because she announced that she was going to release another album next year. So excited! I literally queued up for her last two albums and can’t wait for this one.