ENPS - a bit of boasting

Just to emphasise the importance of ENPS. Brian and I have campaigned for the installation of this system since we arrived, and it has cost a lot of money and endless management meetings to get it. Most journalism colleges in the UK use ordinary computer programmes to produce news. A few leading colleges - an elite within an elite if you will - use ENPS - The Essential News Production System. The point is that ENPS is EXACTLY the same system as used by the BBC and - for example - Channel Four news here in the UK, and also by CNN and CBS news in the USA.

ENPS is the world class Rolls Royce international gold standard for newsroom production training. If you put on your CV that you were trained in news production on ENPS the status impact of that I would say is equivalent to saying you have 100+ wpm shorthand. The difference is with ENPS is that all you have to do really is turn it on. Better yet we have News City an ENPS-like news simulator. We are the only college in the UK to have News City except for the BBC College of Journalism (the corporation's internal training department).

Year one students will have the advantage of training on ENPS more or less from the start of their 'off line' news training course this semester. Year three and two will use the system on WINOL, where it will be integrated with the Joomla Content Management System (training in operating Joomla will be given next week; and ENPS will be back-filled later).

The University has been absolutely brilliant in backing us in setting this up, but it is new territory for the university and really for any university in the UK. So bare with us and be supportive over the next couple of weeks as we crank up ENPS, Joomla, the Studio, the radio station, News City, the Journalism Now site and continued development to the coursesite and the blogs... It is all coming together and after the preparatory phase of these first four or five weeks, we are ready to move into the second phase of the semester (first years moving on to starting actual news after various preparatory activities; second and thirds ready to launch WINOL). There will be problems because we are entering uncharted territory. It could be fantastic. Or it could be a terrible flop. We shall see.