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.

Article Two: Enter the Dragon - China joins the military elite.

Defence correspondence is an area I love to write about. Because the project is also a portfolio of our work I am hoping to post quite a few defence related pieces. I have also just applied for a work placement with Globalsecurity.org, so I will need to show evidence of my ability to write in this field. On the Navigator it seems that the publication will be entertainment and lifestyle based. This leaves a niche for current affairs and news journalism.

I’ve decided to run my first piece on the new Chinese stealth fighter plane. There is quite an interest in the rise of China as a military power, and as result I believe this article will be quite interesting. There is not an awful lot going on in the news at the moment which has really caught my attention so it is a case of sticking to what I know.

To research the J-20 story I’ve visited several websites that I frequent regularly.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/

http://www.janes.com/news/defence/air/

http://www.defense-aerospace.com/

Finding images of the aircraft is quite easy. There is a “leaked” picture of it doing the round on the internet; however I have had trouble finding the source. I have also found some great images on chinatoday.com, so I have emailed to ask permission to use them.

UPDATE: I've received permission to use the image of the fighter from chinatoday.com! (Screencap bellow)

For the second image of the article I found a free image on Wikipedia.org.