Application for the Campus Magazine

This was originally written during the summer of 2010, applying for a columnist's position on the now sadly-defunct campus magazine.

Tim on Tim: The Definitive Article

It's easier to write in the third-person than the first, especially when the topic is oneself. Tim is a twenty-five-year old undergraduate Journalist at Leeds Trinity University. For the past seven years, he's been a fully-employed administrator for everyone from the Probation Service to corporate multinationals to local air-conditioning companies. Prior to that, he was a student and Sixth Former at Hymers College in Hull – he decided at the last possible minute not to go and study Computer Games and IT at Essex University in 2003.

The choice to study journalism wasn't a hard one; Tim's always known he can write well, and has freelanced for music magazines as a reviewer several times. Music journalism might not be the ultimate future for him, but it's definitely an option.

Speaking of music, Tim has some skills in that direction; he plays bass guitar, and performed with well-known Leeds Goth band Legion for a year and a half. He's currently attached to Distorted Pictures in the same role, but also cherishes the notion that he could be a lead singer one day.

Tim has been into the Goth scene since the mid-nineties and now owns precious few clothes that aren't black. It's important to note he isn't a devil-worshipper, doesn't like Marilyn Manson, won't wear eyeliner and doesn't murder indiscriminately. He'd love to be in a position to dispel the ugly rumours about Goths and is happy to have people ask him about the culture; rather that, than get chased by Chavs, because running in a trenchcoat is actually pretty damn difficult.

Above all, Tim enjoys being old. He likes music made before he was even born, prefers Doctor Who made before 1989, and read the Watchman comic twenty times before the movie even came out. Yes, he knows they changed the ending; No, he doesn't understand either.

He'll never understand wearing trousers halfway down your arse, or why televised talent shows are so successful, or the ongoing appeal of Jack Wills. If you want to wear pyjamas all the time, just do it – he'd be quite happy knocking about in his dressing gown, personally.

Any potential music journalist wouldn't be able to survive if he just liked Goth music; Tim's tastes are eclectic at best, running from Classical Symphonies, through early N.W.A and Beastie Boys, to modern acts like Kasabian and Lady Gaga. Yes, that's right, Lady Gaga; she's really just a direct descendant of such legendary electro-weirdoes as Kraftwerk and Gary Numan and Jean-Michel Jarré, even if she doesn't strive to hide the fact that she's just a reprogrammed Terminator. Seriously, just look into her eyes; nothing but glass, plastic and seething homicidal rage.

In his University application for this course, Tim cited Charlie Brooker of Guardian and Screenwipe fame as a definitive role model. Secretly, he suspects he's nowhere as angry or mean as Charlie, but so far Tim continues to write in the same vein and long may it continue!

Community News Hub Launch - Article

Community News Hub launched with Guardian Local

An innovative new project to encourage people to get involved in local news has opened its doors at Leeds Trinity University College.

The Leeds Community News Hub was launched by Meg Pickard, head of digital engagement for Guardian News and Media, who talked about the importance of connecting communities with the news.

The Hub, which is being hosted by Leeds Trinity, aims to encourage communities and groups to get more involved in the local news agenda and to collaborate on stories and content ideas. It is working in association with Guardian Local, whose beatblogger John Baron has been working in the city since earlier this year.

Catherine O'Connor, Head of the Centre for Journalism at Leeds Trinity, opened the event by talking about how changes in the news media meant there was a constant need for reflect ion on the role of educating the next generation of journalists, and beyond.

“We have always expected our students to go out into the community, understand what is going on around them and make their own contacts. But, now, we are looking to change the dynamics by giving community groups and organisations access to experts and events which we hope will help to encourage people to get more involved with the local news agenda.”

Meg Pickard spoke about the need to identify different communities, and warned about the trap that other news organisations have fallen into of assuming an 'audience' of consumers can be described as a community.

Although a target market might be geographically close, have a combined desire or be striving for a similar objective, the key to defining them is whether or not they are communicating with one another, she said.

The premise behind the Community News Hub is to identify, engage, and then work with communities rather than treat them as mute consumers or sources.

'User-generated content' was described by Meg as and “ugly and inaccurate” phrase which should be abandoned because it failed to describe the honest desire to tweet, blog, publish a photo, and so on. It described a sterile line of progression, a consumer-led story that is outdated at a time when more people are waking up to the opportunities presented by collaborative work.

Meg stressed the need for the media to provide the tools, the platforms, and the inspiration to bring the community's stories to light, but then not get in the way of that story being told –a positive message at a time when the debate between pure and citizen journalism, or blogging, is still dominant in the press.

She spoke about how the Guardian developed a tool to allow readers to sort through the files released on MPs expenses, encouraging the user to “audit their own MP” and highlight the contentious figures in the piles of online Treasury paperwork. Meg candidly admitted: “We would not be able to hire enough people to do that much work.” In total, 27,000 unique users helped to sort valuable data from the overall picture and allowed the Guardian to dig much deeper into the scandal. More importantly, she stressed, the paper was not aiming for an old-fashioned scoop, but the opportunity to show a personal connection between constituent and MP.

One of the questions from the audience was whether this form of 'crowd-sourcing', using reader help to work through vast amounts of data, was exploitative and endangered the careers of regular journalists. Meg defended the concerned citizens who engaged in their expenses stories as “not journalists”, but rather analysts of the data, highlighting the relevant areas for a Guardian reporter to investigate in greater depth.

In a blog about the event, Guardian Local editor Sarah Hartley said: “This is a hub for anyone interested in local news for Leeds – not a space owned or operated by The Guardian, instead a hosted space for the benefit of the local community where knowledge, expertise and skills can be accessed.”

Read the tweets from the launch here.

See what the Set the World at Nought blog had to say about the event here

By Tim Hood

This is also featured on the Leeds Trinity Website

Opinion Piece II - Writing for Assessment

In this scenario, we wrote a six-hundred word opinion piece on the topic of David Cameron's 'Big Society' concept, which was then assessed by another student.

There isn't any group who won't benefit from the implementation of Cameron's 'Big Society' proposal, the dramatic 'devolution of power from the elites in Whitehall'. By dumping responsibility for local government spending in the laps of the citizenry, irate residents will now be at the throats of their Councillors, rather than their MPs, who can now fiddle their expenses and vote through policy without distraction.
By permitting the establishment of independent state schools at the same time he has cut the education budget, he has provided more pupil spaces and the freedom of teaching ethics at the same time he has taken away the funding from the education sector needed to expand regulatory bodies to monitor these new institutions.
As local residents are being buried in an influx of expensive bureaucracy and irrelevant policies, they will be less inclined to pay attention to the deep divisions within the Coalition central government, allowing Cameron to rein in those wayward Liberals not yet bribed with a sniff of power. As the public sector reels from nearly half a million job cuts, the Prime Minister can proudly point to his fabled 'third sector' of volunteers now in work – for little or no pay, with minimal training and woeful oversight by a skeleton staff of civil servants.
As the scheme is slowly and painfully applied, Cameron has already deployed his excuses and can toss any complaints onto the fire of 'it would be naive to think society would miraculously spring up if government rolled back' . As we tighten the belt ever more on our economy, the Prime Minister has assured us funding will come from a 'Big Society Bank' comprised of funding received from dormant bank accounts across the UK. I'm glad I'm playing my part then; when I tried to recover an account held in my name by an elderly relative, I was informed it had simply been too long since the money was accessed to be returned.

Even so, the Financial Times informs us this initiative will net a mere £60 million for the project, even as Cameron can proudly say no money is coming from the strapped Treasury. Meanwhile, he can quietly get on with spending £600 million to chase £1.5 billion in benefit fraud, whilst Vodafone walk away from Revenues and Customs with £6 billion in waived taxation.
It would be nice to believe in the noble sentiments behind a dramatic reform of government and the involvement of the local resident in the running of their community, beyond picking which coddled non-entity of an MP comes from the party you dislike the least. Cameron proposed it as a policy back during his leadership bid in 2005, when the economic situation was a lot less dire, so presumably it was indeed his passion and drive to reform England. Now, it seems his passion and drive is to maintain his grip on power by burying the clamouring masses with more committees and non-governmental bodies than it knows what to do with, a solid Tory concept.

There are amusing echoes of Yes, Prime Minister in this strategy – Sir Humprey himself would be applauding as David Cameron simultaneously sells a mirage of 'local accountability' to the voters, whilst tightening Whitehall's grip by divesting it of its responsibilities at a regional level. So, there isn't a single group that won't benefit – there's just one, single, Prime Minister.

Hyperlocal Concepts in a Normal Frequency Lecture

Much kudos today go to Guardian beat-blogger John Baron of hyperlocal Leodesian blog-hub Guardian Leeds who came into Leeds Trinity university to speak to the raw clay that is the Specialist Reporting class of Second Year Journalism. As you can tell by that immense intro we're still a rough and ready crew, but John took us in hand to explain the concept of hyperlocal sourcing, reporting, and blogging - and how he does it.

It seems he regularly starts at six in the morning - a cold dash of shock for the rookies in the room - and must ensure that the site has at least three news stories to run in conjunction with the guest blogs he features. Every morning my twitter feed has an update from @GdnLeeds linking back to the site, and there's always three tantalising headlines made all the smarter by the space limitations.
At least one is a blog-post from some Leeds-based citizen journalist covering a topic close to their heart. John admits that these entries, often lacking any conventions a seasoned journalist would apply, actually seem to be the most popular draw for his site. He cites the "honest interest" of the author, and readily states it is probably better produced than by some journalist who had "siphoned off" the story.
On the actual news front, we heard that rather uniquely, John doesn't have to push for exclusivity - and see what the chase for the break has done, and is doing to the News of the World. The remit from Guardian HQ is more to engage the readers, and "tap into what they're thinking and talking about". In a noble gesture, the main requirement is for the beat-blogging websites to "open up democracy", and John is candid about his main objective being the scrutiny of the murky workings in council meetings - and in Leeds it seems that we have a real need for some objective observations!
Asked later about how operating as a 'one-man band' felt in contrast to a busy newsroom, John admitted that he did occasionally feel a little isolated from his fellow beat-bloggers and London based editor, but it was more than balanced by the freedoms a blog can have that a regular newspaper or broadcaster wouldn't have. He explained that a blog can follow up a story several times, even if the mainstream media downgraded or dropped the story for it's "lack of newsworthy content".

So how is his peformance measured by King's House? According to John, it's not just on unique site visits - at least 30,000 he proudly reports nonetheless - and pressure has never been mounted by senior staff at the national office. He does however recall their increasingly contentious poll on Whether Leeds is a 'Chav' City which led to some very inflammatory comments that eventually crossed the Guardian's own code of conduct. A contrite Guardian: Leeds withdrew the poll accordingly and posted a prompt apology which inevitably spawned yet more commenting! John drily commented that he was rather hoping people would forget and move on from it already, but he quickly affirmed that what happened was everything intended by the Guardian in their experiment of crossing regular journalism with hyperlocal blogging. He had nothing but kudos for his readers who expressed their opinions and interacted with the website - even if it was a provocative tidal wave of interaction!
He explains that this experimental spirit has meant Guardian: Leeds has changed since launching in January of this year, and will probably change again before they are up for evaluation at the start of next year. It's not clear how that assessment will take place, but John is again quietly proud that visitors to his site who are interacting outstrip those of fellow beat-bloggers Hannah Waldram at Guardian: Cardiff and Michael MacLeod at Guardian: Edinburgh.

In the Q&A, it was asked how the Guardian had decided on these three cities. John explained that Cardiff and Edinburgh were fairly obvious choices as capitals, not only of countries but of culture and society. Leeds was a more difficult choice, but was in part politically motivated - prior to the most recent election, Leeds City Council was run by a coalition of Tories, Lib Dems, Independants and even a BNP Councillor which would clearly be a contentious group generating some interesting stories - especially in those pre-coalition government days.
Indeed, Leeds-based stories generated by John have even made it to the main Guardian website although he admitted it was only a story about the meer-cat community at Roundhay Park - "pictures of cute animals always seem to go over well online!"
Being based in Leeds, LeedsEyeView asked how his relationship was with the other news outlets in Leeds, namely the Yorkshire Evening Post as the leading print and web media service in the city. John immediately became diplomatic, and he carefully explained that he had a "lukewarm" relationship with the Johnstone Press published newspaper but he was quick to refer back to editor Alan Rusbridger's predictions of 'isolated online content' versus open discussion between news providers, an idea he promoted previously to Leeds Trinity students at Journalism Week earlier this year - and an idea the YEP don't seem "interested in."

It is clear the paper shouldn't view Guardian: Leeds as a threat or an adversary. John described how the Guardian perceived a "democratic deficit" in reporting in Leeds, such as the coverage of council meetings he pursues with such vigour. As well as this, Guardian: Leeds intends to be a hub of Leeds based blogs, that spirit of collaboration that Rusbridger has constantly promoted, and where John's work has the edge over the established media in Leeds.

Workshop Exercise - Opinion Piece

My second year on BA Journalism has begun, and in the Practical Journalistic Styles we have now begun studying Opinion Pieces rather than pure news writing. The group nominated several topics to try and write an off-the-cuff piece, and I chose the X-Factor's deplorable attitude towards its more...unique competitors.

If there is anyone to blame for the rise of the Mocking Culture on reality shows like X-Factor, it is probably that Grandfather of all Saturday Night entertainment, Bruce Forsyth. The Generation Game was a fantastic chance for Doris and Nigel of Basingstoke to attempt to craft pottery or assemble an artillery gun, and fail miserably for the amusement of couch-bound Britain. Of course, this was all in the seventies and eighties when nobody felt guilty, thanks to grinning and gurning Bruce-y and his “Well Done, Well Done!”
Doris and Nigel had given it a good shot, and although their pots looked like recently-crashed meteorites and their artillery gun blew out the lighting gear, everyone had enjoyed themselves and put on, as the British loved to say, a “Good Show”.

Unfortunately then came the rise of Youtube and Facebook which caused an accompanying plunge in moral values. Trust the Germans to invent the word schadenfreude, taking amusement in the misery of others. Bruce-y ballroom-danced into the latest reality concoctions and left the shepherding of England's interest in, and utter inability to perform at, talent shows to ...the Crown Prince of Evil Simon Cowell, riding the wave of hate-filled humour. He was a record company executive, the embodiment of pure evil that had puppet-managed popular music since Stock Aitken and Waterman first glued together bits of older songs, and now he had a throne and a desk and a voice like a gravel-filled shotgun.

And a brilliant mind, Cowell knew that it would actually be very easy to find legions of identikit stars, all blank personalities and airbrushed good looks. He could end up with a glut of Vickers and Murs and McElderry's, autotuned up and mimed out and overwhelming even the MySpace generation. He needed to ration these Airfix-kit-kids, but give the ravenous immoral channel-surfers of the United Kingdom something to devour mindlessly. Take a lesson from daytime television and the undisputed King of the Underworld, Kyle and his gag-inducing 'chat' show.

Britain's love-affair with its own seedy underbelly was about to get prime-time placement, and the most deranged council-estate sub-evolutionaries were going to get their own piano-solo sob-story, before being thrown to Cowell's grating barrel-blast and your mocking laughter. Not that you're to blame, or Cowell, or the faceless suits at Talkback Thames, or even Prince of Lies Kyle...no, we were lost the day Forsyth took the respectable veneer from normal people playing dress-up and pretend on Saturday night TV.