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.