Article Eight: Japan Earthquake coverage

In a word this is massive. This might the biggest event in world current affairs since 9/11. A 9.1 Earthquake has struck off the coast of Japan causing massive damage. I thought I would be fighting other journalists on the Navigator to get my story up first but I wasn’t. In a way this disappointed me that nobody else even posted a draft on this massive on-going story.

The trouble with on-going events is that work can become redundant within five minutes. Because of this I have decided to keep updating the page, unless there is another large scale even, in which case I will write an entire new piece for the site covering it.

This is a really exciting time to be working on a journalism project and has defiantly finalised for that this is the type of stuff I want to do as a professional.

Before publishing I looked into getting a quote from the Red Cross, unfortunately it didn’t work out and all I got was a link to their blog as a reply.

The next stage of my Japan coverage will hopefully be to go to Helston and work with Shelterbox. They are providing a lot of people and aid to the relief effort. Unfortunately they were quite busy so they said they would call me back. I had a bit of a debate with a colleague who insisted I should have just shown up there and not bothered calling or emailing first. I didn’t feel happy with doing that, as I don’t think it would have been good professional practice.

Main image is from AFP but so far I’ve had no reply from my email asking to use it. The other one is from wiki commons.

Article Seven: Libya revisited

Article seven of my Navigator work was another Libya piece. I feel like my skills as a news journalist are improving greatly, and that I am developing a style. I decided to break the article into three parts. Each part had about 150-200 words devoted to each topic within the larger story.

The first part covered William Hague and the botched SAS/MI6 mission. This was standard stuff. And since William Hague had taken responsibility for it there was not really a whole lot of investigation or need for me to surmise.

The second talked about the military options available to the western powers. I was watching BBC news 24 in the background and took down a quote by President Obama regarding the situation, I added this to my piece.

Part three centred on a possible exit strategy offered to Gaddafi and members of his family. The United Nations website was a source for the statistical data used at the end of the piece, it mentioned more than 1,000 people have died and 200,000 have fled the country.

My pictures from this article were free images from wiki commons. This is where most of my images are coming from, unless I take them myself. It’s a good place to get them as they are copywrite free, and they have a disclaimer saying they are free to use. The downside is they are usually stock images and not as current as some others from AP or Reuters.

Article Six: St Austell Brewery

My sixth article for Navigator was my first piece of field journalism. I had contacted the St Austell brewery for a photo project for another module, but when I arrived I found there was far more going on. The brewery was decommissioning a lot of their old equipment and I was invited to spend several days on site following it. This gave me a lot of good information for a piece that fitted into the ‘lifestyle’ section.

Early starts were the order of the day on the three occasions I had to visit. I left home at 0445 the first day but it was quite an exciting thing to cover and it was worth it. Building a relationship with people on site was critical to my piece, and I managed to build a good one with the head brewer. He took me around the brewery and explained how it all worked. Technical details were only part of the story however.

My primary aim on the piece was to construct a story not just about what was going on but about the people and I think I achieved this.

Arranging the visit to the Brewery was quite easy. I emailed them and they seemed quite keen so I went down for a meeting and told them what I planned to do.

Working on the Brewery piece was quite good but I don’t think writing these kind of pieces is going to be something I would want to do in the professional world. I’m glad that I can write them if required as one cannot always choose what job they are going to be asked to do.

All the images from the piece were taken by me.

Correspondence with the brewery -

Article Five : Urban Inflitrators.

I have been self-reflective this week and tried to give myself a lot of constructive criticism.

The Urban Infiltrators was a massive 1000 word feature that I originally wrote for a project last term. The project was print media, but we never got round to getting it printed so it remained unused. I had told a few people about it and they all wanted to see it, so I checked with Jason and he gave me the green light to post on the navigator.

I feel I made a mistake porting a print feature of 1000 words onto a news site without any editing. The piece was really good as a print spread over three pages but it was a real mess online. I think I learned a good lesson here. After reading through it as an online piece I’ve decided to heavily edit my work down from 1000 to around 700 words. I think it’s now a lot smoother and lighter. I’ve noticed I have the tendency to ‘over cook’ work, adding a lot of words and phrases that just don’t need to be there. I’ve looked back over my other work and streamlined it all, but this is something I need to get a grip on as in the professional world there won’t be the chance to keep revisiting work.

It’s a good piece and I did work quite hard on it so I’m proud of it. It was my first interview too. The pictures were all taken by Ed Brandon, the guy I interviewed so this piece is the first one for Navigator that is totally my own work and composition.

My blog pieces from last term have lots of extra background info on this piece.

http://mmjournalismucf.blogspot.com/2010/10/magazine-production-week-three.html

Article Four: The Libyan Spring

The Middle East is seeing revolt on a massive scale. Egypt’s revolution was covered by another writer but this week I have pitched a Libya story idea to Elliot, the Current affairs section editor and he has said to run with it. I have quite a good understanding of the Middle East and I’ve been following the events throughout.

A standard news piece I broke it down into three parts. As with my previous articles I opened with some history, this time regarding Colonel Gaddafi. The ‘Day of Rage’ protests were the catalyst for the break out of serious violence between Pro-government and Rebel forces so I hooked onto that.

Finding reliable and accurate information from Libya was a challenge because unlike the Egyptian revolution, there is a media blackout. Journalists are seemingly not welcome to report on the conflict.

Al Jazzera was probably the best source of mainstream information I found this week.

The story ends with some information regarding the UK’s involvement. I thought this was vital so as to balance the piece against the domestic problems Libya faced.

Images came from:

Free wikicommons.

www.dailymail.co.uk

www.mypetgoat.blogger.co.uk

Reading week photoshoots

This week we had a break for reading week. Since many of the Navigator staff were away I decided to go out and get some photographs. The plan is to create a galley with about ten pictures in each album. So far the gallery has not been constructed, but a member of staff has been assigned to do it.

My first photoshoot was an urban exploration shoot in Hayle, a town on the north coast of Cornwall. I went down there with Dan Lemos and we both took about 100 pictures so there will certainly be some good ones to use. This shoot was not really planned as such, we planned to take pictures, but we didn’t have a set type of shoot we wanted to do. The result is that these shots are very freestyle.

A second shoot I went on for the navigator this week was to Bodmin Jail. The jail was a location I have wanted to check out for a while, and this shoot gave me the opportunity. There was not really a lot to shoot when we got there in the main jail, its very tourist orientated and didn’t really provide an artistic environment to work in. Outside the jail we found the ‘Naval prison’ which has just been left as it was. This provided a much better environment for photographic work.

Article Three: EDL Homecoming

This week I’ve decided to follow up my first article. The EDL march took place in Luton on Saturday, and I followed the live coverage online throughout the day. This is the first article where I really got to utilise personal contacts. My brother went out for a recce of the town early in the morning, on his way home from work. He managed to get me a picture, and provided a quote. This was good because this article is now very individual to me. I had predicted there was a chance for serious trouble at the march/demo in my last piece, but gladly it didn’t occur.

Much of my research in the run up to the day was done by following forums and Facebook groups. I found some good information from left wing groups on the socialist youth forum pertaining to Feb 5, and a lot of info on estimated numbers from the EDL’s facebook group. A live text service from www.lutononline.co.uk helped on the day too.

My main image was taken from Wiki commons and therefore is free to use in the public domain. This is a really good source of images, but where possible I want to use my own images.