chasing deadlines

Tags

deadlines, magazine, media, miscellaneous, students, writing

If I talked about growing-up yesterday it should be about gray hair today. My students are running me into an early grave.

My third years have are producing a magazine and today I have to send the finished product off to the printers, the deadline has come. Sadly I am still chasing after work, I am four images, two captions and an edited piece short of completion.

So while my students are probably still in bed, turning over and dreaming the dreams of the young I am tearing out my hair and have spent countless hours fixing up their work.

But I must say it is shaping up nicely, if only the deadline wasn’t here. With no time left and my email-bombardments left unanswered, I am left still chasing deadlines hoping for a miracle.

 

commuting, communicating and cork

Tags

cork, Ireland, John Waters, journalism, journalism conference, Mary Fitzgerald, media, objectivity, UCC, writing

Yesterday, I spend half the day on a train. I went down to Cork for a journalism conference and was pleasantly surprised. I wasn’t expecting very much but with some big names and wonderful speakers it really was very good. Most excitingly for me, I met some interesting people.

With many captivating subjects up for debate it gave me much food for thought and ten pages of notes scribbled into my pad. One of the big topics that kept coming up, was one close to my heart, OBJECTIVITY and the need for it. Two of the speakers were at odds about this and one is a large figure in the world of Irish media. His name is John Waters, an Irish Times Columnist, and unsurprisingly he said that there is no such thing as objectivity and everyone should write from their own perspective.

Mr Waters is know for his unorthodox opinions, his love for his own ideas and ranting and raving about what ever seems to tickle his fancy. Knowing all this it was predictable to hear him state that “we are all protagonists” and that this should be reflected in our writing. He went on to say that journalism has nothing to do with reports, which are objective and purely factual. Sadly for him he completely overlooked that the name REPORTER comes from report, meaning to give an account/statement about a situation or event. However the most frighting thing about Mr Waters is that he is actually TEACHING people who want to become journalists, and his complete disregard for the difference between NEWS and OPINION, makes me shudder to think about what kind of journalists his “mini-mes” are going to be.

Thankfully he had a lot of opposition by actual reporters, mainly the enlightening Irish Times Foreign Affairs Correspondent Mary Fitzgerald. As someone who has been all over the world, reporting back from war zones and crises areas she knows the value in staying objective and the dangers when you stray into personalising your articles. She talked about Stoppard and how he said so eloquently that journalism has bowed to commercialism and has now an entirely different purpose “which is to divert and distract and entertain”. She explained that although, maybe even because, this is happening in the world of media we need objective journalism, otherwise what kind of a “media-eco-system” would we be creating? One that has no function other than to while away the hours, which would mean a complete loss of the fourth estate, leaving people in power unchecked and the public uninformed about what is happening behind the smoke screens.

I whole heartily agree with this, and as a journalist and lecturer I hope my student will discover that objectivity is a good thing and that, while you should have and form your own opinion, staying objective when reporting on things is what journalism is all about. After all as Mary Fitzgerald quoted Michael Bugeja once saying:

Objectivity is seeing the world as it is, not as you wish to see it

twitter-y-do

Tags

alan rubridger, great marketing, guardian newspapers, guttenberg, hashtag, internet, journalism, media, miscellaneous, random, social media, twiter, writing

I have never seen the attraction of Twitter, never signed up for an account of even tried to understand why so many people seemed to enjoy tweeting their time away.

However, the first time I thought I  should maybe change my attitude and take a second look at Twitter, was when I heard that Alan Rusbridger, the editor in chief of the Guardian Newspapers, was praising it’s media usage. The next time was when the Irish Times journalist Conor Pope told my students what a great research tool it was. And then when I met up with a good friend and wonderful journalist after Christmas, she told me about the unlimited resources Twitter seems to supply and what a great marketing tool it is, especially for freelancers like myself.

But no matter how many questions I asked her about Twitter, tweeting and threads, she kept telling me that the best way to learn about Twitter was to become part of the tweeting community. Not wanting to add another form of social media to the constant stream of information already bombarding my screen without doing a little research, I dug around on the internet and found a great transcript of a lecture held by Alan Rusbridger in 2010.

He talks about the changes the media has gone through since the very beginning with Guttenberg’s press. It has never been static and has always tried to find ways of expanding its reach, allowing the flow of information to extend further and be more divers.  Rusbridger also convincingly explains the benefits Twitter has for journalism, emphasising that giving ‘everyone’ a voice that can be heard and can influence the media is possibly the truest form of journalism. After all, we all want freedom of speech and to limit the power of large media companies and their control over what we know and have access to.

So after reading the lecture and digesting the 15 points Rusbridger makes about what Twitter does possibly better than any other form of social media, I signed up for my own account, still not knowing how the whole thing really works. Two days in and I am overwhelmed with the stream of information that now floods my screen and mind. However I think tweeting is something that needs a bit of time to figure out. After all we all have our own unique way of communicating and it is a matter of finding out how Twitter fits in.

But since I figured out today what the hash-tag, hashtag or hash tag (#) actually does and means, I feel as if I am just at the beginning of a twitter-y journey, even if I don’t know where it will take me yet. But since I only have five followers so far, if I get lost it won’t affect too many.

So if you want to be part of my exploration this is me @JensineWall and my twitter-y-do.

I am sometimes giddy with the possibilities new technologies offer us for being better journalists: for reaching even larger audiences; for having more influence; for being embedded in the most astonishing network of information the world has ever seen or could ever have imagined.