A former student who is now a foreign correspondent for French and Israeli TV writes:
I'm doing a shoot and I need a help of a student with a mics boom. It will be unpaid but I'm happy to sit down with him/her and help with editing or give tips for camera work.Could you please pass the info on? The date I need the student for is Sunday 5 July between 1030-1530 or a bit less, depends on their availability. Shoot will take place in Maida Vale and food will be provided. Contact:
T: +44 (0) 7822 123 456
E: erez.frisch@gmail.com
W: www.ereztv.com
Friday, 26 June 2009
It has all gone quiet
Chris Horrie writes: Staff team have finished the internal marking of (nearly) all the work. It is now being looked at by the external examiners to make sure that process was basically fair. Then the exam board will meet and after that you will get your results. After that we will have some sort of picnic somewhere for essentially the third years. More details later.
The other big job we are doing at the moment is figuring out the timetable for next year. Now then, this year gone I am the first to admit that the whole thing was way too bitty and way too complicated. That's all changed because during the year I 're-validated' it all - meaning changing it all out of all recognition. Also we are starting a new MA in journalism which will I sincerely think be the best of its type in the country.
Now then, from here on in the second year and the third year are ALL about being in the newsroom and the studio constantly producing:
(1) weekly scheduled news and sports bulletins (like WINOL) moving to daily bulletins and maybe even hourly bulletins if we can manage it. These bulletins will be broadcast/webcast to the world via ...
(2) Winchester News Online which is our weekly community newspaper with the usual 'print journalism' mixture of news reporting, features, photojournalism, comment and what have you, supplemented by...
(3) Scheduled news and sports podcasts (a big success this year) and...
(4) One or more multimedia online consumer magazines such as The Vault, VOLT TV, The Shed and New Winchester Review. This is where we do magazine journalism ... features, fashion, lifestyle, gonzo stuff, funny Top Gear type stunt journalism, free offers, competitions... the fun side of journalism. Word in the business is that all tthese magazines (from say Elle to Top Gear) are going online now and using video. And lastly..
(5) We will be continuously 'webcasting' probably three streaming TV channels (using Livestream) This would be a rolling news channel, an arts channel and probably a sports channel because a group of what is now year two, and soon to be year three have done the deals to get access to local semi-pro sport (like Winchester City FC) so we can output hundreds of hours of that.
So that will be enough to be getting on with.
How this works is that the THIRD YEARS (ie currently the second years) will run the whole thing taking in turns to be studio director, editor, features editor, sports editor and so on. SECOND YEARS (the first years now) will be the content people going out much more doing packages, doing reporting jobs, creating features, sub-editing... etc. This can be a bit fluid though, so I see no problem myself in say a third year who wants to specialise in being a local news reporter continuing to do that. We have about 40 people and we have to cover everything, so we will require you to change roles so that you get wider experience.
The idea is that you will work within these roles for three days a week for probably ten weeks of each term and I am afraid it will be a bit like having a job and going to work on those days. Typically day one you will be in planning meetings, second day you will out on the road doing a package or if an editor in the office sorting things out and third day will be the bulletin/remake of the site.
If you want to get ahead go to the pages on this website and find the diagramme of the editorial structure where all the 'job descriptions' are set out and have a think about the jobs you might want to do. There will not be a completely free choice though and we may have to assign you to particular jobs over the run of editions/bulletins. But we will try and please people as much as we can.
On the fourth day there will be theory lectures - there's an excellent new theory programme (based on Politics, Philosophy and Economics) which really makes it a genuine degree. Third years miss out on that I am afraid (it runs as lectures and seminars for first and second years only). The third year academic content is mainly abou the FYP/Dissertation. We are looking at how that works now people (frankly) this year the FYPs were all over the place - some excellent, others not so good - and there was a huge element of students just choosing some subject or other because they fancied it, or they thought it would be easy or something. Will are looking at that now so we can give some more structure to that, so we will get a better result. There is no need to panic about FYP choice just now... if you want to read into a subject over the summer that's fine... the more you read the cleverer you will become.
For any first years who are reading this, the main point is that first years will not be working on WINOL because they will be doing 'off-line' training in a series of exercises which are all about news reporting and feature writing, photojournalism, basic web production and blogging. First years will be creating a new audio-visual magazine like online entity called Journalism Now. First years will also do the PEP-type theory course. We have improved the way shorthand is done (in a block, full time for two weeks at the start of the course) and we have introduced a course in basic English - this is because to be perfectly honest a lot of you are not fully literate and that's a problem for journalism students. For second and third years we will deal with this by enforcing the very successful fatal errors system more strictly, so after you have got a fail grade a few times on the run for an otherwise excellent piece of hard work it might encourage you to get yourself sorted out with that - that is what the FE system is for. I have found it to be a highly effective teaching tool at other colleges in the past.
Combined hons people will be doing the theory course with us and also contributing hopefully to the multimedia magazines - especially New Winchester Review, which is the more intellectual of the titles.
So there we have it - a fantastic year in prospect if you like doing journalism. But a type of hell if you don't like doing journalism, or just can't do it. We have also by the way massively tightened up on the way we do selection for single hons journalism course, and that is all about testing aptitude for journalism and making sure they are committed 100 percent uktra-dedicated highly competitive news rotweilers. I feel sorry for the third years who will now have to weather the economic shake out this year, and that is just incredibly bad luck. But I think in two or three or four years the economy will pick up and you lot will be very well placed. What is happening at the moment is that a lot of more experienced journalists who we trained as 'newspaper journalists' or 'radio journalists' are really being shaken out of the industry adn being made redundant as newspapers and radio stations close down around the country. But when the economy picks up again you people - multiskilled across all the 'production platforms' will be very well placed. And above all people will want to hire well educated and clever people which is why I think at the end of the day PPE theory stuff is in a way the most important of all. So that's bad news for this years graduates, terrible news for all journalists of my generation, but probably good news for most of you lot. Every cloud has a silver lining.
Please blog on these themes. Blogging will be even more important next year than this and will be the key to many of you getting jobs in a couple of years time. Eg the first years will read the papers every day and they will blog comments on the papers every day and we will monitor that and the course has been reorganised so they will fail if they don't do that. This means the new first years will become much better at journalism than most of you, and that will happen very quickly. I told you all to read the papers, but many didn't (making the key error of thinking that when I tell you to do something - or not do something - it is somehow optional). Those of you who are blogging I would suggest you monitor those first year blogs when they appear in October. Previously there structure of the course has worked against blogging, which is why it has seemed semi-optional. We will be moving things on creating a structure for the first and second years at least to give seminar papers in the PPE course (about Hegel or Existentialism or whatever) as video pieces to camera which will then be blogged - this kills about three birds with one stone... video presenting skills, examining your knowledge of what we are supposed to be reading, and ability for all students to learn from each other. There is nothing better or more important you can do over the summer than improve your blog, keep it going, research how to increase traffic - make it an obsession. If somebody emails me I will add notes to this site on ways that you can increase the traffic to your site.
I think that when you go for a job you will be asked a lot about your blog - just thinking ahead to the employment world a couple of years down the line - and you will do better if you have got a blog which has built a lot of traffic and - especially - 'page rank' - email me about how to get page rank...
In the meantime check out my new personal website at http://www.horrie.com which is there essentially to promote my fantastic new book about Her Majesty's Official Consverative Party which is published on August 22nd. It is in my opinion very funny and I am hoping that it will get a lot of attention and sales because of the current hoo-haa about the national parliamentary political scene.
The other thing I am working on is a Freedom of Information Investigate website for channel four news. You can see the demo for that which is parked on the 'contacts' section of www.horrie.com.
That's it - a brief update for now! Stay tuned over the summer and leave comments. The way this message board works now is that you can add comments but In will ahve to moderate them first.
The other big job we are doing at the moment is figuring out the timetable for next year. Now then, this year gone I am the first to admit that the whole thing was way too bitty and way too complicated. That's all changed because during the year I 're-validated' it all - meaning changing it all out of all recognition. Also we are starting a new MA in journalism which will I sincerely think be the best of its type in the country.
Now then, from here on in the second year and the third year are ALL about being in the newsroom and the studio constantly producing:
(1) weekly scheduled news and sports bulletins (like WINOL) moving to daily bulletins and maybe even hourly bulletins if we can manage it. These bulletins will be broadcast/webcast to the world via ...
(2) Winchester News Online which is our weekly community newspaper with the usual 'print journalism' mixture of news reporting, features, photojournalism, comment and what have you, supplemented by...
(3) Scheduled news and sports podcasts (a big success this year) and...
(4) One or more multimedia online consumer magazines such as The Vault, VOLT TV, The Shed and New Winchester Review. This is where we do magazine journalism ... features, fashion, lifestyle, gonzo stuff, funny Top Gear type stunt journalism, free offers, competitions... the fun side of journalism. Word in the business is that all tthese magazines (from say Elle to Top Gear) are going online now and using video. And lastly..
(5) We will be continuously 'webcasting' probably three streaming TV channels (using Livestream) This would be a rolling news channel, an arts channel and probably a sports channel because a group of what is now year two, and soon to be year three have done the deals to get access to local semi-pro sport (like Winchester City FC) so we can output hundreds of hours of that.
So that will be enough to be getting on with.
How this works is that the THIRD YEARS (ie currently the second years) will run the whole thing taking in turns to be studio director, editor, features editor, sports editor and so on. SECOND YEARS (the first years now) will be the content people going out much more doing packages, doing reporting jobs, creating features, sub-editing... etc. This can be a bit fluid though, so I see no problem myself in say a third year who wants to specialise in being a local news reporter continuing to do that. We have about 40 people and we have to cover everything, so we will require you to change roles so that you get wider experience.
The idea is that you will work within these roles for three days a week for probably ten weeks of each term and I am afraid it will be a bit like having a job and going to work on those days. Typically day one you will be in planning meetings, second day you will out on the road doing a package or if an editor in the office sorting things out and third day will be the bulletin/remake of the site.
If you want to get ahead go to the pages on this website and find the diagramme of the editorial structure where all the 'job descriptions' are set out and have a think about the jobs you might want to do. There will not be a completely free choice though and we may have to assign you to particular jobs over the run of editions/bulletins. But we will try and please people as much as we can.
On the fourth day there will be theory lectures - there's an excellent new theory programme (based on Politics, Philosophy and Economics) which really makes it a genuine degree. Third years miss out on that I am afraid (it runs as lectures and seminars for first and second years only). The third year academic content is mainly abou the FYP/Dissertation. We are looking at how that works now people (frankly) this year the FYPs were all over the place - some excellent, others not so good - and there was a huge element of students just choosing some subject or other because they fancied it, or they thought it would be easy or something. Will are looking at that now so we can give some more structure to that, so we will get a better result. There is no need to panic about FYP choice just now... if you want to read into a subject over the summer that's fine... the more you read the cleverer you will become.
For any first years who are reading this, the main point is that first years will not be working on WINOL because they will be doing 'off-line' training in a series of exercises which are all about news reporting and feature writing, photojournalism, basic web production and blogging. First years will be creating a new audio-visual magazine like online entity called Journalism Now. First years will also do the PEP-type theory course. We have improved the way shorthand is done (in a block, full time for two weeks at the start of the course) and we have introduced a course in basic English - this is because to be perfectly honest a lot of you are not fully literate and that's a problem for journalism students. For second and third years we will deal with this by enforcing the very successful fatal errors system more strictly, so after you have got a fail grade a few times on the run for an otherwise excellent piece of hard work it might encourage you to get yourself sorted out with that - that is what the FE system is for. I have found it to be a highly effective teaching tool at other colleges in the past.
Combined hons people will be doing the theory course with us and also contributing hopefully to the multimedia magazines - especially New Winchester Review, which is the more intellectual of the titles.
So there we have it - a fantastic year in prospect if you like doing journalism. But a type of hell if you don't like doing journalism, or just can't do it. We have also by the way massively tightened up on the way we do selection for single hons journalism course, and that is all about testing aptitude for journalism and making sure they are committed 100 percent uktra-dedicated highly competitive news rotweilers. I feel sorry for the third years who will now have to weather the economic shake out this year, and that is just incredibly bad luck. But I think in two or three or four years the economy will pick up and you lot will be very well placed. What is happening at the moment is that a lot of more experienced journalists who we trained as 'newspaper journalists' or 'radio journalists' are really being shaken out of the industry adn being made redundant as newspapers and radio stations close down around the country. But when the economy picks up again you people - multiskilled across all the 'production platforms' will be very well placed. And above all people will want to hire well educated and clever people which is why I think at the end of the day PPE theory stuff is in a way the most important of all. So that's bad news for this years graduates, terrible news for all journalists of my generation, but probably good news for most of you lot. Every cloud has a silver lining.
Please blog on these themes. Blogging will be even more important next year than this and will be the key to many of you getting jobs in a couple of years time. Eg the first years will read the papers every day and they will blog comments on the papers every day and we will monitor that and the course has been reorganised so they will fail if they don't do that. This means the new first years will become much better at journalism than most of you, and that will happen very quickly. I told you all to read the papers, but many didn't (making the key error of thinking that when I tell you to do something - or not do something - it is somehow optional). Those of you who are blogging I would suggest you monitor those first year blogs when they appear in October. Previously there structure of the course has worked against blogging, which is why it has seemed semi-optional. We will be moving things on creating a structure for the first and second years at least to give seminar papers in the PPE course (about Hegel or Existentialism or whatever) as video pieces to camera which will then be blogged - this kills about three birds with one stone... video presenting skills, examining your knowledge of what we are supposed to be reading, and ability for all students to learn from each other. There is nothing better or more important you can do over the summer than improve your blog, keep it going, research how to increase traffic - make it an obsession. If somebody emails me I will add notes to this site on ways that you can increase the traffic to your site.
I think that when you go for a job you will be asked a lot about your blog - just thinking ahead to the employment world a couple of years down the line - and you will do better if you have got a blog which has built a lot of traffic and - especially - 'page rank' - email me about how to get page rank...
In the meantime check out my new personal website at http://www.horrie.com which is there essentially to promote my fantastic new book about Her Majesty's Official Consverative Party which is published on August 22nd. It is in my opinion very funny and I am hoping that it will get a lot of attention and sales because of the current hoo-haa about the national parliamentary political scene.
The other thing I am working on is a Freedom of Information Investigate website for channel four news. You can see the demo for that which is parked on the 'contacts' section of www.horrie.com.
That's it - a brief update for now! Stay tuned over the summer and leave comments. The way this message board works now is that you can add comments but In will ahve to moderate them first.
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
New version message board + recent news
I have been off line for a bit reprogramming the site and - at the same time - wading through a pile of marking so massive that it is giving me a mental hernia trying to get through it all with my characteristic thoroughness and incorruptible, externally supervised fair-mindedness.
This is a new version of the message board which will be much easier to use. It will also allow students as well as staff to register so they can leave messages, or comment on messages. I have to decide on a policy for student users. I think it will be easier just to give access to lecturers and admin people, since y'all can set up your own blogs in order to comment about things.
All the first years from September will blog from day one as part of a new, improved 'induction' to the course which will actually involve meeting journalism lecturers and doing some warm up journalism activity, and not just sitting in a room with a random representative of the university, attending a comedy lecture with an unfunny annoying bloke from New Zealand and then getting drunk for a fortnight. Well that's the plan anyway.
First years (soon to be second years) have all got blogs, at the least ones who are presumably staying have got blogs. The people with no blogs I have no idea who those people are of course. But the bloggers I know very well because hiw I (anyway) work is to have a look at the blogs whenever I get a minute, then when I see you in person (assuming you have supplied a photo) I kind of know who you are. This is much better I think and enables me as your humble servant to cater for your needs much better. The only reasons I can see why a small number of people resolutely refuse to blog is that they are:
(1) dead
(2) have left
(3) can not write
(4) belong to minor religious cult such as the Menanites (if that's how you spell that) who are opposed on principle to the use of modern technology
(5) Are hiding but, like ostriches, do not realise that I can see them clearly even though they can not see me
If you are a lecturer I will already have sent you an invite asking you to subscribe to 'blogger' that will mean you can easily add messages. The control panel is easier to use than the Joomla controls we were using in the academic session now ending.
Mind you lecturers are a but shy in the blogging stakes. Maybe that will change, though they may also figure under excuse heading (4). If so I do apologise for any offended sensibilities.
Students and staff alike can also sign on as followers of this messageboard which is, if effectm a modified blogger blog which has been embdeded in the coursesite using a bit of simple HTML code, meaning they get automatic email alerts when the coursesite is updated.
The old message board is here... in case anyone needs to trace back the old messages. (http://www.virtualnewsroom.co.uk/joomla2/index.php).
[lecturers and administrators can log in to the old site by following this link. = http://www.virtualnewsroom.co.uk/joomla2/administrator]
All of this is part of a massive update and clarification of the coursesite. All the teaching plans for next year will be published here, along with associated teaching materials (such as 'media law web' and the 'WINOL' job descriptions.
For BA journalism you need to navigate to BA Journalism and then to "course details". You can get a good idea of what we will be studying and when, but we are still waiting for some details of the timetable.
The top page of the site at the moment is designated "MA journalism" because at the moment this is the course we are featuring and which we need to be most visible on the web at the moment. We are starting to recruit students to that from all around the world and all around the country.
We stopped recruiting for the BA Journalism just after easter. We gave all applicants very tough tests and a thorough interview and sadly had to reject a great many. In the end we made only 52 offers from hundreds of applicants. 26 of those have accepted us. That's amazing, because they will have four or five other choices on their UCAS forms and the people we were making offers to generally had around 350 or more A-level points - so they had a lot of choices.
Winchester is still pretty unknown as a university, but that should improve because of the work that is going into the sub-domain (a lot).
Basically we had a good year this year by moving a lot of the broadcast journalism into the form of live newsdays (second years) and newsdays with more emphasis on true content embedded within the WINOL website, very much in the style of BBC news online.
At the same time we developed online magazines using pictures and flash and video - very much the continuation of some of the things y'all have been looking at with Karin Stowe. I think The Vault magazine is very good and has a decent chance of winning the Guardian Student Media award. templates for The Shed and New Winchester Review were also created. I am going to start adding some of the third year dissertation and project work for that over the summer - so that will be a really excellent thing, I think - a really good showcase for the university and for students one and all (this is a team game) and genuinely innovative.
In the same way as the studio and newsroom and WINOL works, then students and lecturers together will create this sub domain so it will quickly become very good, trusted (like a sort of reliable version of Wikipedia as we add all our essays and so on) and will make the university better known and spread its deserved and growing reputation far and wide. As I plunge back into the marking pile with a naturally heavy heart and I can say that I have had a fantastic year with you lot and we are going to really put our foot on the gas next year and its going to be even better.
This is a new version of the message board which will be much easier to use. It will also allow students as well as staff to register so they can leave messages, or comment on messages. I have to decide on a policy for student users. I think it will be easier just to give access to lecturers and admin people, since y'all can set up your own blogs in order to comment about things.
All the first years from September will blog from day one as part of a new, improved 'induction' to the course which will actually involve meeting journalism lecturers and doing some warm up journalism activity, and not just sitting in a room with a random representative of the university, attending a comedy lecture with an unfunny annoying bloke from New Zealand and then getting drunk for a fortnight. Well that's the plan anyway.
First years (soon to be second years) have all got blogs, at the least ones who are presumably staying have got blogs. The people with no blogs I have no idea who those people are of course. But the bloggers I know very well because hiw I (anyway) work is to have a look at the blogs whenever I get a minute, then when I see you in person (assuming you have supplied a photo) I kind of know who you are. This is much better I think and enables me as your humble servant to cater for your needs much better. The only reasons I can see why a small number of people resolutely refuse to blog is that they are:
(1) dead
(2) have left
(3) can not write
(4) belong to minor religious cult such as the Menanites (if that's how you spell that) who are opposed on principle to the use of modern technology
(5) Are hiding but, like ostriches, do not realise that I can see them clearly even though they can not see me
If you are a lecturer I will already have sent you an invite asking you to subscribe to 'blogger' that will mean you can easily add messages. The control panel is easier to use than the Joomla controls we were using in the academic session now ending.
Mind you lecturers are a but shy in the blogging stakes. Maybe that will change, though they may also figure under excuse heading (4). If so I do apologise for any offended sensibilities.
Students and staff alike can also sign on as followers of this messageboard which is, if effectm a modified blogger blog which has been embdeded in the coursesite using a bit of simple HTML code, meaning they get automatic email alerts when the coursesite is updated.
The old message board is here... in case anyone needs to trace back the old messages. (http://www.virtualnewsroom.co.uk/joomla2/index.php).
[lecturers and administrators can log in to the old site by following this link. = http://www.virtualnewsroom.co.uk/joomla2/administrator]
All of this is part of a massive update and clarification of the coursesite. All the teaching plans for next year will be published here, along with associated teaching materials (such as 'media law web' and the 'WINOL' job descriptions.
For BA journalism you need to navigate to BA Journalism and then to "course details". You can get a good idea of what we will be studying and when, but we are still waiting for some details of the timetable.
The top page of the site at the moment is designated "MA journalism" because at the moment this is the course we are featuring and which we need to be most visible on the web at the moment. We are starting to recruit students to that from all around the world and all around the country.
We stopped recruiting for the BA Journalism just after easter. We gave all applicants very tough tests and a thorough interview and sadly had to reject a great many. In the end we made only 52 offers from hundreds of applicants. 26 of those have accepted us. That's amazing, because they will have four or five other choices on their UCAS forms and the people we were making offers to generally had around 350 or more A-level points - so they had a lot of choices.
Winchester is still pretty unknown as a university, but that should improve because of the work that is going into the sub-domain (a lot).
Basically we had a good year this year by moving a lot of the broadcast journalism into the form of live newsdays (second years) and newsdays with more emphasis on true content embedded within the WINOL website, very much in the style of BBC news online.
At the same time we developed online magazines using pictures and flash and video - very much the continuation of some of the things y'all have been looking at with Karin Stowe. I think The Vault magazine is very good and has a decent chance of winning the Guardian Student Media award. templates for The Shed and New Winchester Review were also created. I am going to start adding some of the third year dissertation and project work for that over the summer - so that will be a really excellent thing, I think - a really good showcase for the university and for students one and all (this is a team game) and genuinely innovative.
In the same way as the studio and newsroom and WINOL works, then students and lecturers together will create this sub domain so it will quickly become very good, trusted (like a sort of reliable version of Wikipedia as we add all our essays and so on) and will make the university better known and spread its deserved and growing reputation far and wide. As I plunge back into the marking pile with a naturally heavy heart and I can say that I have had a fantastic year with you lot and we are going to really put our foot on the gas next year and its going to be even better.
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