Written for the December issue of the Oxford & District Branch NUJ newsletter.
When I set off for this year’s ADM, I had a jumble of different worries in my head. Would people be unfriendly to me as a newbie? Would it be a world of Machiavellian backstabbing, or a snooze-inducing bureaucratic slog? Would I have to actually stand up and speak?
An article I wrote is the cover story for the latest edition of Metal World, the quarterly magazine for the International Federation of Metalworkers (IMF). I was very excited to see the feature in print today, accompanied by Andrew Wiard’s excellent photos.
The ADM for the National Union of Journalists happened over a week ago, but this is the first time since then that I’ve been able to sit at my home computer and collect my thoughts about it. Even now, this is going to be a rushed "what I did on my holidays" post, because I have to go off and do other things. In summary, I’m very glad I went, and very grateful to Anna (secretary of the Oxford & District branch) for giving me the push I needed to go along.
Good surprises:
The Times website was criticised for its coverage of Saturday’s “Mili-band”, the climate change protest where hundreds of people formed a ring around Kingsnorth Power Station in Kent. Robin Henry’s piece was illustrated with a stock photo of helmetted police in a riot situation. (This has now been removed, after reader complaints, and replaced with a stock photo of a power station which may or may not be Kingsnorth.)
East Oxford’s most famous event will be taking place in a different location this year. The Cowley Road Carnival, Oxford’s largest community-led outdoor event, will be held in South Park and renamed “Carnival in the Park”.
The move is happening because the event’s organisers are not confident of securing enough funding to close Cowley Road and turn it into a car-free space for the day. Closing the road incurs significant costs because of the need to re-route buses and ensure the safety of the thousands of attendees.
Twitter is full of the claim that the Green Party is “anti-science”. Some of the people making that claim are on my own feed; they’re people I like and respect. So I’m disappointed that so many of these self-appointed champions of science seem to be basing their claim on the same Times article, while others don’t bother to give any source at all.
The #amazonfail furore made me angry, but not for the reasons you might expect. I’m angry at the sheer numbers of people who put their energy into mobilising against Amazon. The whole affair showed us just how easily Twitter and blogs can be used to spread a message about a company’s unacceptable actions (in Amazon’s case, removing LGBT-themed books from their sales rankings) and to generate massive amounts of negative publicity. Perhaps a month after the problem was first spotted, the complaints reached a tipping point; after that, it took just a few days to give Amazon the PR headache of a lifetime.
And I’m furious that it happened this way. Perhaps I should explain why.
A friend just sent me a link to this Tom Tomorrow cartoon about the death of reporting. You see, we’re not really living in the Information Age at all. We’re in the Opinion Age, building wobbly castles on a shaky base of not-quite-fact. (That’s partly why it’s also known as the Age of Stupid, but more on that later.)
Staffing is one of the biggest headaches for many community newspapers. While even the most understaffed regionals usually have somebody in the building during normal office hours and somebody to take messages over the phone, community newspapers don’t have that luxury. The usual scenario is to have just one or two part-time members of staff.
Freelance journalists often talk about the feast or famine work cycle. (When I say “talk”, I mean “complain”, of course.) I’d like to find a better metaphor, though, one that conveys the reality of the experience. The word “feast” conveys leisurely eating, but the feast periods in my freelancing life are all about the opposite: frantic production as opposed to relaxed consumption.
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