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.
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