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The Linc: Issue 2

April 20th, 2007

I’m happy to tell you all that Issue 2 of ‘The Linc’ has been sent to the printers. Officially, it’s issue 2. But it’s the fifth issue we’ve made since I founded The Linc last year. Complications are horrible, but must be overcome.
The web edition can be downloaded at thelinc.co.uk. Criticism more than welcome. I know there are many, many areas in which we can improve. In fact, I’m going to write about them now, while they’re fresh in my head.

But first, let me describe what other publications we have around uni. We’ve gone from having one slightly mediocre magazine on campus last year, to having two magazines and a newspaper this year. Not bad progress — our student media is growing up as fast as our university, it seems.

Bullet Magazine

Bullet is the original SU publication. It is, at present, the leading publication on campus. Sadly there isn’t a web presence for Bullet at the moment, so you’ll just have to imagine how it looks.

I like it. It has come a helluva long way since last year. You can put that down to the new editor and new team, no doubt, as I know they have been working pretty tirelessly on tightening things up from a standards and content point of view.

They’ll be the first to admit it isn’t perfect, though. Its design has never been too pleasing, with inconsistencies cropping up throughout – which is a pet peeve of mine (and every magazine/newspaper designer, I’m guessing).

The content is getting better. It relies on reviews and features to get the space filled. Often the odd interview will crop up (Bullet get the pick of the ‘celebs’ playing at the Engine Shed), and these are normally well written pieces.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Kate and the team can do next year as they try to take Bullet forward.

Ziggurat Magazine

Ziggur…what?! My thoughts exactly, but the title works. No-one is quite sure what it means, or why that name was picked, but then looking through the magazine it’s clear that mystery is what Ziggurat is all about.

Sticking their neck out from the offset, Ziggurat announced itself on the scene with the slogan ‘Better than Bullet’. A weird claim to make considering its style is nothing like Bullet’s.

I do like the gutsy distribution of it, however. News stands were hijacked and fill with the mag seemingly overnight. We arrived to a campus full of the mag. And now they’re all gone.

I’m not sure where it’s being printed, though, as it looks like it’s produced by a team armed with lots of A4 paper and a staple gun.

See some Ziggurat content on their website/blog here: zigguratmagazine.com.

The Linc

And now, The Linc. My publication.

It would be easy — and typical — for me to big up my own work here. I’m not.

While I’m proud of what I’ve done with The Linc, I still see that we have a long long way to go before it’s the newspaper I always envisioned.

Issue 2 is better than the first. So that’s a step in the right direction, at least.

Where we still fail is visually. I don’t have a team of photographers, so I’m scooping photos from free stock websites, and a handy picture agency we have access to. Not good enough. One of my main priorities is to organise a picture desk as soon as possible.

Another concern is the news. I’ve got features and reviews bursting out of my eyeballs, but good news stories are critically hard to come by. I’m in the process of getting signed up for mailing lists for local events, but the key is making this relevant to students. A tough job, but one I think we can manage with the right team in place.

Which reminds me I need to hire a news editor for next year. After our first attempt with several section editors — which fell on its face — I opted to edit the entire thing myself. Then, for issue two, I handed over control of sport to Gary, who now deals with content there. It’s no coincidence that sport is the best section of the paper by some distance.

A good news editor would help the news section improve leaps and bounds.

And I really have to hire some proofreaders too. The rush element that we faced for Issue 1 is back to haunt us with Issue 2. Not to worry — we’ve done our best with the time we had.

Here’s to Issue 3!

4 comments »

Posted in General, Student Journalism, TV, Tabloids, The Future

All kicking off at UCLan

April 12th, 2007

I’ve just read this post by a good friend Ed Walker over on the Pluto Editor’s Blog.

Seems a fellow student at UCLan lifted some text from a Press Gazette article by Martin Stabe. Naughty naughty.

Martin’s post on the matter can be found here. The comments are well worth reading. Most defend the Journalism School at UCLan — rightly so, it’s brilliant from what I’ve heard — and some rightly slate the guilty student/blogger.

I’m shocked at the student in question. Whether first, second or third year, this sort of thing is unforgivable. I was told it was unacceptable to copy work when I was 4 years old. It doesn’t take a lecturer to remind me of that basic moral.

One particular comment from Graham caught my eye:

Apart from a few notable exceptions I would guess that the majority of journalism lecturers in the UK probably don’t know much about blogs and how the whole social net thing meshes together and what that means for publishing. This will obviously have an impact on the quality of teaching.

Mmmm, indeed. Although I’ve been happy with my course at Lincoln, my major complaint is the lack of teaching on this area of online journalism.

A while ago, before the start of the current semester, I posted a blog outlining my worries and concerns over my online module. At the time I promised to put my argument to my online tutor and post the reply.

Well I’m glad to say I did do that, but am yet to post his reply. I will very soon but only once I’ve been given my marks. I’m no fool. :-)

If anyone is interested in reading them, however, pop me an email and I’ll send you the information I received.

For the time being, please find my email to the University, in full, pasted below.

UPDATE: Change of plan, Wordpress won’t seem to let me post the email (it’s a bit funny like that), so I’ll stick it up at the weekend. In the mean time, if anyone is curious, I can email it to them whenever they wish.

1 comment »

Posted in Design, General, Newspapers, TV, The Future

Who watches Channel Four News?

March 27th, 2007

We had another guest lecture at Uni yesterday. Dorothy Byrne, Head of News and Current Affairs, gave a talk on “The need for ambition and risk in TV”.

An interesting session – she made some great remarks about coverage of certain areas such as science and Northern Ireland politics. N.I in particular being very topical due to the events yesterday which, I was shocked to find out, didn’t get as much coverage in the UK press as I’d have hoped.

The Indepedent tried its damnedest to make a dramatic front page, with the title “The Hands of History” and pictures of famous political handshakes through the years. This fell flat on its face, though, when it reminded readers that Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams didn’t actually shake hands at all.

Having the majority of my family in Ireland, this news has extra resonance, and I very much hope it is the beginning of something very positive for Norhern Ireland.

Back to the guest lecture. Dorothy is clearly very good at her job. She knows what makes good journalism, and more importantly, she knows what doesn’t. Her talk convinced all in the room, I’d imagine, that Channel Four’s news and current affairs output is nothing short of sensational.

But it really isn’t.

You see, the problem with Channel Four is that no matter how hard it tries, and no matter how good its news programs are, it will still never get over the fact that they are Channel Four. By this I mean that in amongst all the other programs it shows (which, admittedly, are normally very good) the news just doesn’t have the same weight that it does from the BBC, or even ITV.

It’s no good putting great journalism in between Hollyoaks and Wife Swap – it alienates people. Channel Four bosses realise this, I’m sure, as More4 launched last year to muted anticipation. A hefty advertising campaign — mainly focusing on a documentary on what would happen if George Bush was to be assassinated — meant early interest, but I can’t name anything that’s been on there since.

Even the name ‘More4′ suggests that it’s simply more of the same old thing.
A lecturer at our Uni, Richard Keeble, asked Dorothy a question about coverage of politics in Africa. He suggested there wasn’t enough – a statement that Dorothy quickly put down. There has been shows about Africa, she said. Sadly, Richard had never seen it. Which proves my point again that no-one really watches Channel Four News.

The same happened again when Nick Nuttall, another lecturer, admitted to not watching Dispatches either.

What a shame it is that Channel Four News is wasted. Especially since they have on their team one of the greatest journalists of our generation, Jon Snow.

21 comments »

Posted in General, Student Journalism, The Future

Podding along

March 20th, 2007

Good read on The Guardian’s Editor Blog today. It asks whether anyone actually listens to podcasts. I think no, not yet, but eventually they will.

The article has taught me a new word too: smorgasbord. Love it.

2 comments »

Posted in General, The Future, The Web

Old Skills

January 25th, 2007

In this post a few days back I wrote about how online journalism is taught in universities and, more specifically, how it’s taught at the University of Lincoln.

Today was my first session of the semester. Our assignment is to produce a ‘news-based’ website by the end of term – which is about ten weeks. We will be using Dreamweaver 4 and Photoshop to design and code it, with maybe a little hand-coding too if we’re gonna try and be bit flash.

Refreshing that it’s ‘news-based’, I suppose, but judging my some of the suggestions and examples given it seems like that could be a fairly loose requirement.

I know my tutor may be reading this – he asked students to email him with their blogs – so I’m guessing this is a good time to air my concerns.

My main criticism still remains: I don’t think these are skills we really need. Of course, knowing HTML is useful, absolutely, but what’s really important is the skill of news gathering for an online audience.

We will be doing some of this once our sites are up and running, but it seems the emphasis is on the technology rather than the journalism. Which is all well and good, but I know that if I were to go and write for Comment is Free, or the BBC, or any online news source I’d not be coding the pages. Those websites would hire me on the basis of my news writing skills.

It seems at the moment we’re learning old skills on old software. I’m going to leave university and have to learn it all over again. Except this time it won’t cost me £600 a term.
Internet journalism is blogs, Web 2.0, citizen journalism. It’s exciting. Botching together a page in Dreamweaver is old fashioned, and just doesn’t make sense.

Like I’ve mentioned in my post, my tutor may be reading. So I’ll add that this isn’t a lazy student rant. I want to be an online journalist. The way I see it, I don’t have much choice. When was the last time you read a newspaper front page to get up to date? Hardly ever – simply because you probably know already.

I’ve linked to this blog post before, but it’s even more relevant now. The author opens with this:

How many j-schools are permitting students to graduate with a journalism degree and inadequate skills to pursue a career in journalism?

Lincoln? I may be being a little harsh, but take a look at our unit handbook (Word, 60KB). You can read a break down of the weekly sessions there.

The reading list says a great deal:

Html 4.0 Sourcebook, Ian S. Graham 

Html 4 Bible, Bryan Pfaffenberger, Alexis D. Gutzman 

Creating Killer Web Sites, David Siegel 

Building Better Web Pages, Rebecca Frances Rohan 

Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen 

A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet, John Naughton 

Weaving the Web: origins and future of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee 

Spinning the semantic web: bringing the World Wide Web to its full potential, Tim Berners-Lee 

Where are the journalism books? We’re not here to become web designers.

We’re journalists. Well, we want to be. Units like this do little to help us with that cause.

4 comments »

Posted in General, Student Journalism, The Future

No heroes in journalism anymore

January 17th, 2007

Interesting reactions to my blog post last night.

Martin Stabe agrees:

Lincoln journalism student Dave Lee gets it: “Words are words. They take just as long to write, and are just as valuable, whether they are destined for paper or web.

And in an e-mail, he pointed me in the direction of a blog by Kevin Anderson, who I’ve learnt was the first ever BBC online journalist working outside of the UK. So if anyone knows about grasping new technologies, it’s him. An extract from his post:

There was some talk about exactly what skills students and journalists need in to compete. Do they need to learn how to code? Do they need to focus on A/V skills? Do they need to learn Flash? I’ve always been very wary about suggesting too much investment in any specific piece of software. The industry moves too fast. Instead, I’d echo what Rob Curley says:

Skillset is important. But mindset is most important.

Damn, I wish I would have said that. I’ve picked up the skillset because of my mindset. I can only think of one instance when I said: “That’s not my job.” New tasks are always an opportunity to learn new skills.

I feel if all journalism courses followed this mantra then we (students) would end up being much better off.

Ed Walker, a fellow student journalist studying at UCLan (Preston), backs up my thoughts on the website aspect of a student paper. He is involved with the excellent ‘Pluto‘, and has recently launched the online arm of the paper. It seems to be going well.

Bryan Murley (who writes this blog) encourages me to keep looking out for new heroes. In this post, he suggests some. I only really recognised Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger, as I have read his rather rubbish book. The content is brilliant, but really, the best thing about blogs is their immediacy. Putting them in print just defeats the point.

Anyway, I’m deviating. I think it’s a good thing that apart from Salam, none of these names jumped out at me. It’s all about the news, not the journalist. We are merely messengers. Also, the lack of fame these people are getting is a sign that there perhaps is no place for heroes in journalism anymore.

No journalist came close to giving the true account of the brutality of Saddam’s execution. But a citizen journalist certainly did – his moment of journalistic heroism had more effect on the world than any piece of journalism in the last year, but of course, I’m not going to aspire to be that person.

1 comment »

Posted in Citizen Journalism, General, The Future

I need a hero!

January 16th, 2007

After reading a story about an Anglia News presenter who cocked it up a bit (it wasn’t really her fault) on the Press Gazette site, I decided to have a read of their blog which, it turns out, is now on martinstabe.com.

His latest post is criticising folk like me, young journalists that come out of university or other journalism colleges, with an apparently blinkered view on what the industry is all about.

Usually I leap to the defence of journalism students, for obvious reasons, but he (and all the people he links too in his posts) has got it spot on.

The point, in a nutshell, is that we’re leaving university with an outdated, unrealistic and somewhat romantic notion about the careers we’re heading into.

With this post he discusses, with the help of some student blogs from Cardiff, that perhaps the most conservative of all journalists are also the youngest. A confusing role-reversal – aren’t students meant to be forward thinking and enthusiastic about new things? Seems not, and the stereotype of the old ’stuck in his ways’ journalist seems to lie with the students – not the old fellas in the newsrooms tapping away at their typewriters.

In this blogs short life, I have written about my fascination with citizen journalism. I love it, and it angers me to see it dismissed by many people in the media. But when confronted with all the problems that are underlined in this fantastic post by US journalist Mindy McAdams, I realise that yes, I am coming out of university already stuck in my ways and more wiling to adopt the old-fashioned ways of working than I really should be.

Attitudes to old journalism are to be found even in the most technologically ‘hip’ places. Take The Guardian, for example. It’s my daily read. I love the fact that its website has taken up blogging with greater enthusiasm than any other British paper. But, a fee for blogs is roughly half that of a piece in the paper. Words are words. They take just as long to write, and are just as valuable, whether they are destined for paper or web. A lesser fee suggests lesser importance.

Even my own newspaper, which I founded at university, has a website that is in every way secondary to the main paper. Presently, it sits untouched, unloved and unvisited. For various reasons. Any work that was deemed not good enough for the newspaper was sent to the website as if it were some sort of consolation prize. Again, just as it was with the money side of things, words are words. If they are not good enough for the newspaper, they are not good enough full stop.

So now for my two pence.

At my University, I was asked to make unit choices at the start of my second year. My options were two of the following: Print, TV, Radio, Online/Photography. I chose Print and Online/Photography, based on a love of newspapers and an overriding fear of not being very good at speaking on camera or radio. In a questionnaire about my choices, I had to give a reason for not picking units, and I sheepishly admitted that I’d already made my mind up about my choices before even starting university – let alone year two.

What my course fails to do is emphasise that these units aren’t mutually exclusive disciplines. Print is considered to just be writing and designing – fine, but we’re using examples from papers that haven’t changed in the past ten years.

Indeed, when I asked if I could submit my tabloid design page in the style of thelondonpaper, I was advised not to. Perhaps to make their marking easier – I’d be using different fonts than the other students – but I felt it creatively restricting.
The very fact that Online and Photography are grouped as one unit (a term – 12 weeks – each) shows just how little my university thinks of their importance.

That’s scary, but I don’t blame them.

You have to ask yourself, considering the fast-paced era of change journalism is currently facing, how my lecturers are supposed to cope? They are hired on the grounds of their experience and expertise.

It wouldn’t be unfair of me to say that none of the journalism staff are experts in the web revolution. With the exception of one who teaches the online unit, but he is more of a HTML expert than a Web 2.0 one.

Which brings me to the problems with how we’re taught about online journalism. The unit focuses on building a website. Why? As an online journalist, my job would be to gather content, in its various forms, and then put it in a format suitable for the web. I won’t be making HTML pages on Dreamweaver. Not a chance.

Knowing HTML in principle is useful – but being taught to use Dreamweaver is an utterly useless skill. We’ll only end up being re-trained in a year or two. Teach us the qualities that make a good online journalist – not how to use a piece of software that will be replaced next year.
But then, if none of the staff at Lincoln are, or ever have been, skilled online journalists – I can expect nothing more.

With all this considered, it’s no wonder that students like me come out of university with the sole intention in choosing a set career in one arm of journalism.

It is worth mentioning though that Richard Keeble at Lincoln does a very good job at expanding our perceptions on journalism with the series of guest lectures at the uni (lectures are announced on that website, and open to the public).

So far we’ve had people from almost all fields of journalism, including citizen journalism. In many ways, I consider this more valuable than much of the course itself.

Updated: Apologies to Martin Stabe who I referred to originally as Michael Stabe.

14 comments »

Posted in Blogs, Citizen Journalism, General, Newspapers, The Future, The Web