Last years WINOL - a little journey back in time

Just sitting here, watching and criticising my news reports from last year.

My very first news report was made for the dummy run we had at Winol. It happened during the week when Armistice Day took place and I made a report on what was going on around campus on this day. It was a very nice ceremony that took place, and I learnt all about working under pressure. This mainly due to the fact that Armistice Day (11/11) took place on a Wednesday, at 11am, and my deadline for a finished story was for 1pm - I made it and was very happy with my outcome. But looking back on it, I know that with the knowledge I have today, I could have done even better!

First story I covered, that went on air, was about being homeless in Winchester and what the councils and the government are doing in general to handle the numbers of people sleeping rough. More than 500 people got turned away in 2008 from Winchester Churches Nightshelter, and manager, Michele Price, let's us know what they are experience through cooperating with the local council etcetera. A very interesting story where my views on society changed quite a lot, and also made me realise how organisations like this do incredibly much to be able to help the sometimes forgotten ones in society.

The following week I got trapped in the middle of a news story as a car smash happened right in front of the bus I was travelling in. Unfortunately I did not have any technical equipment with me and couldn't record anything, but was able to get in contact with the news room and get a few reporters out on the road to cover the story. I felt really excited, at the same time as I felt sick. A very weird thing but a very good learning experience. Instead, I covered the Christmas Lights being switched on in Winchester and from this I made a little interview with the people involved in getting this all together and angeled it with the huuuge amounts of money being spent each year to get this up and running. Quite interesting as I just a few weeks earlier explored the decline of money wihtin organisations that deal with major society issues such as homelessness and now finding this amounts of money going into sparkling lights...

I also managed to produce a report on how Winchester has been affected of the unemployment during the ongoing recession, and I interviewed Martin Tod and Steve Brine and got their views on the job climate as well as the publics. Interesting, but hard to find a proper nice angle, it's much easier to do that with fluffy news!

Throughout this period of time I also helped Maxine to puzzle together her news report considering mushrooms growing in students homes around Erasmus Park in Winchester, and yes, it was disgusting!! An experience that was everything but pleasent, but we were very pleased with the end product!

A period of time where I have learnt a LOT! But it seems I have still got some more work to do before I can feel 100% pleased about my contributions to Winol - if 100% ever will be reached as a journalist.. I think not..

Winol - week 1 semester 2

Oh my God. Most intense, confused, stressful edition so far of Winol I would say. This due to the fact that all of us changed roll for this week and everyone was getting introduced to totally new things than they did last semester, and yeah it does take a little time to get into it if you've never done it before and haven't got a clue what you're doing..

When I chose to go for the role as director I knew it was going to be hardwork - but not that tough! Cue - Roll VT - Standby VT - Move camera 1 to reposition presenter - Move presenter during next VT - Camera 1 for handover in 10 seconds - waaaaah! I am surprised that I came out of the this production alive - but at least now all we can do is get better.

After the bulletin went live I felt absolutely rubbish and disappointed. Even though I kept hearing that I had been doing a great job for a first attempt, I couldn't help but feeling low and gloomy about it all. It took me hours before I could look back on what we all had managed to pull together from scratch and actually see that what we did was not too bad, and the final production was better than I first thought it was.

Saying this, yes there are so many things we need to get better at, and firstly and mostly I'd say planning and working as a team need to work better than it did this week. Winol isn't something one individual can get together and broadcast on his own, it's all about being a team - which we kept repeating til our ears were bloody on Wednesday afternoon. And I think coming out of this - what everyone thought - disaster, we will do miles better next week. It's all about experience - and boy, did I gain experience and knowledge about things I never thought I was able to do myself this week!

Roll on week twoooo!

And don't forget to tune in here for your news concerning Winchester and Hampshire!

My Page Rank

hmm dunno but I think this is getting better  :)

Internet and all its wonders...

Joomla and Module managers, Quicktime and Final Cut Pro, Youtube and Bandwidth, Livestream and Autopilots... Gaaw!

Do you feel like it's just not your thing? Well, here's my attempt to clarify some bits and pieces for you:

JOOMLA

this is a leading open source Content Management System (CMS) platform which enables us to post items, update and change, and finally upload them to our website. It enables us to work with our text stories, and keep our website looking simple and nicely constructed, which makes it much easier for the readers to come and enjoy their stay.

Basically, use your login and your password details that you have obtained earlier (the same ones you use when logging and handing in your story) here to get started. (You need to be an administrator to be able to do this, which the production team and the editors should now all be selected as - let me know asap if it still doesn't work for you and we will sort it out!)

Once logged in you've got eight different colourful icons to choose from. We are going to pay most attention to three of them; Add New Article, Article Manager and User Manager.

Add New Article: this is the option that we've had access to since we started, and all it does is basically to upload your new stories, articles and features into the wonderful world of Joomla. They will then stay here until the subeditors, and the editors have proof read them and confirmed that they are fair and accurate and then finally tick the box and upload them to Winol. So, as an author all you really do have access to is posting stories, but not uploading or editing them once they're posted - this is what the production team and the editors will do on Tuesday afternoons between 3-6pm - and therefore the deadline for the written stories from all journos is on Tuesday's at 3pm.

Article Manager: Through this option the subs and the editors can proof read and edit the articles that have been uploaded. The articles not yet published on the website will still have a red cross right next to them which indicates that they are hidden from the public, and should also say Ready for Production in the headline which means they've been put on their and the author is happy with it. Once a sub editor has proof read - that is, checked grammar, spelling mistakes, made sure names are correctly spelled, football scores etcetera correct and so on - you have to remember to save what you have done and add Ready for Publishing and your initials in the headline which indicates that it is now time for the editors to have a final read through before publishing.

If you discover spelling mistakes and such, Change - but if there are bigger problems that needs changing, contact the journo responsible for the article and make sure they change it ASAP! The articles should be around 200-250 words, except if there is a big investigative article, or a featury kind of article.

User Manager: In this menu you will find everyone that has registered with our website and their rank within the system, what they can and can't do. As I already said, everyone should now have their right 'title' here but if anyone is unsure about this, do ask and I will look at it. An administrator can change the 'title' if the person is ranked lower than him or her, but not the other way around.

Also, when you first log in and arrive on the frontpage, you have the option Extensions --> Module Manager up top of the page. Through this you can change the appearance of the website - where you want the header, the ticker, the video output etcetera. Chris will talk more about this in the following lectures but an example can be found here.

Enough about Joomla for today. Tomorrow, Livestream.

Ready, Stea(u)dy ... Semester Two!

Year two, semester two - time IS flying!

I'm now into my second semester of my second year as a journalism student and cannot believe that means I'm actually halfway through this course! Time to reorganise WINOL and get assigned to new tasks, exciting and terrifying! After last years stress and struggle as a news reporter, I decided to try my luck as a sub-editor/director to be able to gain some more knowledge in how to actually handle the productive side of things, for example uploading stories, both text and video to the web, getting all the technical bits and pieces together to be able to produce a finished bulletin at 5pm every Wednesday... I'm looking forward to my new role, and will hopefully feel as if I gain as much new experience as possible throughout these weeks before the Easter holiday that's coming up in March/April.

This semester we've decided to focus on the news and sports, and produce video stories and text stories (for the web bulletin and the site) and keep the website up to date with what is going on around us and effects us everyday - to do this we have cut out the features that we tried to keep up with last semester. Luckily, the third years are gonna focus on keeping the features alive on our website through he feature magazine, LIFE, that can be found on the website as well.

Hopefully there will be time to cooperate with both the news and sports team throughout this year, so that I can develop my skills with technical equipment, get even more news sources, new ways of looking on stories and so on, to provide me with a wider and deeper understanding in how the entire news organisation works.

I am very much looking forward to it!

Nietzsche - simples!

I have definitely not found Nietzsche easy bed time literature, and I cannot say that I have enjoyed reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But what I can say is that through this intense week when my life seem to have been circulating and focusing on Nietzsche, and nothing else, I have started to realise that I begin to understand his ways of thinking and philosophising, his way of connecting one element in life with another to reach his final ideas... But he is still one very complicated man. And no matter what, I'm sure he always will be.

But, thankfully, my tutor Chris Horrie has simplified Nietzsche and his works for us in his blog, and if you have tried to read my previous blog posts and still cannot understand nothing; do have a quick read on his blog.

Thanks Chris!

Sex! Nude! Spears! Lohan! 9/11! Terrorism! Viagra! Poker! - in a Charlie Brooker-ian spirit

Anyway, because it contained the words "9/11 conspiracy", the article generated loads of traffic for the Guardian site, which in turn means loads of advertising revenue. And in this day and age, what with the credit crunch and the death of print journalism and everything, the use of attention-grabbing keywords is becoming standard practice. "Search engine optimisation", it's known as, and it's the journalistic equivalent of a classified ad that starts with the word "SEX!" in large lettering, and "Now that we've got your attention . . ." printed below it in smaller type.

As I was spending my time reading old blog posts written by Charlie Brooker, who is absolutely fantastic, I stumbled upon a post explaining how to attract more traffic to your site, and how important it is today when journalism is almost getting extinct, and the little competition for an audience that is still left, is tiny compared to what it has been. As my head line tells, these are a few of the words that people seem to (or seemed to a couple of years back) look for when googling about on the world wide spider web. And, as a journalist, it is important to know what to write about to attract your audience, even though they might not have had in mind to visit your blog/newspaper when they surfed into google less than a minute ago.

The Internet is a weird, and sometimes vicious, place. Hopefully I will one day understand how to sex my blog up to gain more readers. Master the skills of how the human minds work, and what they need from the Internet - and what their is that isn't already being provided. Maybe some nude pictures... Or maybe not. Nude sex and rock'n'roll.

Long live the Internet - and long live Charlie Brooker!

Mentally disorientated and unselfish

Nietzsche’s philosophy builds upon equality and people being unselfish and true to one another. He says that philosophers serves people’s superstitious ideas, and not the truth, which seems to annoy him a bit since the truth, for him, seems to be one of the most important building parts to get the society to work. I do agree with this, look at a relationship between man and women, a work place – boss and employee, a family – parents and kids; if the opposites in these relationships are not true to each other it will not work out in the long run and chaos will develop from something that should be a base in your life.

An action is good when it is unselfish. (p119)

Nietzsche’s theories criticise many parts of the human’s life and also the ways human beings choose to live their lives. He says, for example, that religion – Christianity – is something people use to comfort themselves, so he did not actually criticise Christ but the believers and the beliefs. He also criticised the different morals people seemed to base on an abstraction. Nietzsche was a person hard to please; he found negative angels too many aspects of society and his fellow citizens and their ways of believing and moralising their children. But in all honesty I agree with his theories, to some extent. Society is still today not perfect, and will never be, but I think that if higher authorities together with the citizens in their country could cooperate in a friendly, more equal (as in power etcetera) way, less people would probably suffer from less wealthy conditions and starvation – but on the other side of the coin, the wealthy people ruling and deciding over our nations, would probably lose out on quite a bit of their fortune and fame – and I am not sure they would be willing to do this... People with power and money are, in my opinion, far too greedy and selfish. As Nietzsche believes; human civilisation can destroy itself.

Towards the end of Nietzsche’s life, he suffered from mental illnesses, and he died in 1900. Many philosophers have unfortunately ended up suffering from mental problems, whether this is from the philosophy in itself or due to other reasons, I do not know – but I can imagine myself ending up mentally disturbed if I kept philosophising for too long. I better just stick to the facts and build up a boring life based on knowledge and existing facts that I can feel, touch, see and eat.

More information about Nietzsche, his life and his literature can be found here - do pay a visit, it is actually quite interesting and it makes things a bit easier to understand!