Following on from last Friday’s all-action newsday-cum-BJTC accreditation visit (entirely successful, with a fresh, no-quibble three-year accreditation in the bag – well done everyone), here’s a behind-the-scenes video of UCA Farnham TV journalism students in action on the day.
Excuse the over-loud dad-rock backing track…
Today sees an experiment in both teaching and accreditation for the journalism courses at UCA Farnham.
Rather than treat the scheduled accreditation visit from the Broadcast Journalism Training Council as a kind of external examiners visit, showing BJTC members boxes of completed student work, UCA aims to demonstrate student skills in action.
The five visiting BJTC panel members will get to see a live, multimedia newsday, with television, radio and online journalism students working together to create packages of news content, and report behind the scenes on what goes on during such a visit. The aim is to turn the tables on the panel and ask them searching questions on the value of accreditation in front of the cameras and microphones.
The run-up to the day, and coverage of the day itself, is featured on a new, dedicated student web site – news.ucajournalism.com – which will be developed as a fully functioning student news site from then on. Students are also going crazy on Twitter and, for some reason, SquareSpace (apparently Tumblr was too difficult to set up). Facebook is doubtless to come. [UPDATE: we gave up on SquareSpace (it costs money) and the Facebook page is here. Like it – go on.]
As ever, any visitors and comments are welcome…
Here’s more evidence, if any were needed, that newspapers are filled with vacuous, self-referential nonsense.
From Saturday’s Daily Mail comes this double-page spread about a Christmas TV advertisement featuring a dog.
That would probably be bad enough, but the ad in question was advertising – yes – the power of TV advertising itself.
So – a TV ad about TV advertising makes a double-page feature spread in a national newspaper. Media is truly eating itself. (Yes, I know it’s the Daily Mail – but still. And I did enjoy the ad. But still.)
And newspaper folks wonder why people have stopped buying their product…
For those who haven’t seen it, here’s a curious item – an alarmist video about the future of media (in 2014) made (or at least uploaded to YouTube) in the far-off days of 2007.
The general thrust is familiar – software-driven news aggregation and user-generated content have combined to drive “the press as you know it” to extinction. But let’s have a look at what’s wrong.
Will this vision match up to reality? Like all such short-horizon predictions, there is truth here, but the real value of such crystal ball-gazing is underlining just how much we can’t know about the future.
Anyone who fancies the glory, riches and kudos of becoming a published author should listen to Sunday’s fascinating BBC 4 Food Programme on food writing.
Much of the focus was on ground-breaking 1950s food writer Elizabeth David, but at about the 24-minute mark came this from food critic and publisher Tim Hayward:
In the past six months the only book deals I’m hearing about are of food bloggers. Publishers like them because they have a pre-existing audience. The audience for a blog is probably about twice the size of what the average marketing department will be able to hit when they launch the book.
Very often food bloggers have been working on something to a style, to a format, for the past couple of years before they are published, so the book is effectively written. I don’t think there’s any other route – in a few years’ time anybody who is getting a publishing contract of any sort will have been a blogger.
And given the move away from actually, you know, reading by most of the under-35s, you’ll need to get your cookery apps sorted out too, as photographer Jason Lowe notes:
Do we need cook books anymore? In the new world of the iPad Jamie will be able to show you how to fillet a sole – it will be a much easier way of learning. But somebody needs to make that small moving image.
So – get cooking, get writing, get blogging and get filming before you even think about getting a publishing deal.
And get ready to insert any other activity for “cooking” and repeat the procedure for almost every other kind of publishing/media too…
Download the podcast here (should be available indefinitely).
As a gentle introduction to 2011, here’s what happens when a simple message is delivered by corporate communications and marketing. So, so true…
[HT: Bren]
As the rest of the UK, Freelance Unbound is downing tools for a, possibly, well-deserved Christmas break.
Normal service will be resumed in the new year, unless the festive media provide an irresistable topic for posting.
Until then, my editorial assistant wishes you all a very merry Christmas…
Anyone wanting to take us back to the solid Victorian values of the three “R”s in education should take pause. If you take a turn round the duck pond in Bath’s delightful Victoria Park, you’ll come across this handsome piece of Victorian sculpture – an urn commemorating the anniversary of the opening of the park in 1880. Or, as this stonemason would have it, the opening of the “Rark”.
It makes me feel a bit better about the current council’s inability to proofread its roadsigns anyway…
In case anyone has missed it, here’s an interesting infographic from Tweetsmarter.com comparing the profiles of Facebook users versus Twitter users.
A couple of interesting points:
These statistics tend to reinforce my belief (rightly or wrongly) that Twitter is very much about interest groups talking to themselves (such as the media, or brand PR), while Facebook is the online entertainment platform of choice for its (mainly young) users.
[HT: Jessica]
Tired of the short-term focus of Twitter’s #trending topics? Here’s a great geeky toy to play with over Christmas – Google Books’ Ngram Viewer.
The Ngram Viewer allows you to enter search terms and see how frequently they are used over time. This is a kind of historic version of Twitter trends – nothing after 2008 at the moment, but its results can stretch all the way back to 1700.
What can we see? How about “engagement” as a search term?
Clearly “engagement” was at its peak in the decade straddling the year 1780. Then it underwent a more-or-less two century decline until 1980, before mysteriously spiking up again. Why? It became much less important socially that people were getting engaged to be married – but much more important that they enjoyed whatever it was they were doing.
Another interesting example is “digital”, using just the American English dataset. You’d rightly expect digital as a reference in books to come into its own with the advent of digital computing – but what are these small spikes in usage doing in the late 18th century?
It seems this was a fertile time for medical discovery – with herbalists and anatomists investigating the medical value of digitalis and how your fingers work.
Google is generating datasets for all the books it scans – from single word usage up to multi-word phrases. At the moment, single word datasets are the most complete in all languages Google is working with. Double-word datasets and above are in progress.
If you want to really alienate your family this Christmas, you can download the Google datasets here and start running your own experiments…