You can see my recent work at the following links. These include: a story about disabled access in Salford, a business feature on Salford City Radio, my coverage of an academic conference on The Fall and an interview with Turkish rock artist.
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Thursday, 24 July 2008
My Recent Portfolio
Friday, 18 July 2008
Manchester Media: Salford Online
Salford Online is a news and community website serving, well, Salford.
Long perceived as Manchester's "scruffy neighbour" (see here for the offending article), Salford has for years been playing catchup in terms of coverage and media outlets. Salfordonline attempts to redress this balance, and is looking for new amateur journalists and writers to cover the vast variety of stories on offer.
It's led by editor Brian Everall and a very small (ie single figure) team based in Eccles, but constantly provides high-quality journalism despite this lack of resources.
You may recognise star reporter Tom Rodgers from this site, or from his articles in the Paul Foot award-winning Salford Star (produced by mad scally Stephen Kingston) and on crossrhythms.co.uk!
Thursday, 29 May 2008
Watch TV Online
Want to see why thousands of people are refusing to pay their TV licences (not including me, of course) to see Strictly Come Shite and BBC "News"?
Visit www.all2c.tv, a new aggregator for TV-streaming sites, packed full of wonderful TV shows like the award-winning The Wire, which Brit TV execs in their infinite wisdom decided to turn down; Battlestar Galactica, a new, intelligent, gripping, politics-heavy spin on the 70s camp classic, and many, many others.
Just visit the site, search for the name of the show, then click on the episode title of your choice, and you're away.
WARNING: Will result in lengthy sessions at the computer as you delve into thousands of hours of entertainment.
If you've saved money on boxsets through this tip, why not send me a donation, my details are on my Facebook page. Cheers!
Thursday, 1 May 2008
Journalists Pissed off with PR - Official!
The PR vs Journalism war continues. Saw this and had to give you the link. It's a genius article about how not to handle journalists.
Click Here to Read More..
Monday, 21 January 2008
Manchester Magazines
I've been trying to get in touch with Bob Magazine recently, but mail to info@ and alan@bobmagazine.co.uk has been returned undelivered. Maybe they're just ignoring me, but who running a free magazine would turn down free writers?
Bob has a nice indie-looking ethos: the website is written in fairly witty/ironic style, so I immediately wanted to get involved. If I'm going to write for free, I may as well write what I want, rather than more boring bar reviews. By the way, if writing nighttime entertainment reviews are your thing, and you need some experience for your portfolio, go on to the MyVillage forums to sign up. they're very keen for new writers, and if you live in a city they'll practically bite your hand off.
Bob issue 2 was reviewed by Mancubist, and he wasn't too impressed (see here), but as I know from personal experience, turning out a free, independent magazine on time, and having enough cash to pay the printers is an overwhelming and stressful business.
I also tried getting hold of a copy - apparently issue 3 is out now - but many of the outlets I tried (Northern Quarter bars and shops) had no stock or "hadn't heard of it", so it may have been out of commission for a while. I'll continue to research this, I wouldn't want to sound the death knell if Bob is simply on hiatus.
So I'll wait, and update the status of this article as and when I find out more.
Wednesday, 16 January 2008
Graduate Jobs with Adfero Manchester
A while back I went for interview at the Manchester branch of Adfero - based in the Portland Tower in the centre of town. Their service is to write tailored news feeds for a variety of company websites, to boost SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) rankings and increase web traffic to their sites.
I thought I'd share with you what I learnt about them, just in case any of you were going for interview and didn't know what to expect. They've got offices in London, Manchester and now Leeds, so chances are if you're a graduate who likes to write, you'll hear of them. Salaries start at around the £16k mark. I've had a couple of mates work for them, and they said that Adfero were slave-driving bastards; but in a graduate journalism job, what do you expect?
Now that Google basically runs the world - when was the last time you searched for something on the net without using it? - companies are having to be more inventive to stop their marketing voices being lost in the crowd. Google's rankings are organised by "page impressions", i.e. the more times people view your webpages, the more ranking points you get, and the further up Google's list you will go. As research (and common sense) tends to show that the general public click on the first five links of a Google search page, competition for those places is very high.
All sorts of companies employ Adfero to move higher up the search engine food chain. I was told at interview that each DirectNews Correspondent, as you will be called if you are successful, has several sites or companies that he/she works for, and your job is to find out or create five or six "news" pieces for the sites under your charge.
So for example, if you are given a Liverpool business site, a staircase manufacturer site and a heating oil information site, each morning you would scour the net looking for news relating to business practices, takeovers and mergers in the North West, how to stop wood from creaking, and the price of oil per barrel in the world markets. You will then re-write these "news stories" in the Adfero format.
Each news story is written to a fairly strict code; Adfero promote this uniformity as a way to avoid potentially damaging third-party references and to keep a consistency of tone to their news stories. The structure (as explained to me by a mate who's now working in Liverpool as a journalist) is as follows:
Each news story should be around 170-200 words in length, you're writing for the intelligent layperson, so you won't have to explain simple financial or trade facts (what the Dow Jones is, for example.)
You will most likely be writing your stories from various sources or 2 or more press releases on other sites, so choose one angle and stick to it. This angle should be the most interesting/shocking/amazing thing about this particular piece of news. There may be a temptation to include too much information in your story; this will unbalance your story and you will run out of time .
Very important: DON'T speculate or insinuate anything in your new stories. Sentences of opinion or conjecture like "Labour have struggled", or "people have found it hard" do not go down well with Adfero. They want objective fact and hard news (facts, figures) as far as possible.
Opinions can be given, but only by people quoted in your story. This avoids anyone getting sued for libel/slander/all those other expensive things.
This 200-word story should play out like this:
1st sentence - The most exciting thing about this piece of news.
2nd - Expand on the above.
3rd - Give some facts and figures relevant to the story, or lead into your quote.
4th & 5th - Two paragraphs of block quotes: can be a respected industry figure backing up your angle, and giving opinion on the way this particular thing is likely to go in future. You can even lay down two block quotes representing both sides of view if you're feeling particularly even-handed. E.g -
Mr Matthews, CEO of Oil Direct said: "Oil prices have been rising year on year due to fluctuations in the world market and the instability spreading through the most productive regions."
Scrumpy, who lead protests on oil prices at this year's May Day riots in London, responded, "What the oil industry says is just shite. Oil has never been more expensive due to board salary increases and overspending on boats, cars and chandeliers."
The 6th & 7th sentences should give your story context; setting it in the wider world. You can do this with figures, relevant facts, or descriptive overview of the industry.
By the way, you'll never get your name on a story as a Direct News Correpondent, all work is copyrighted property of Adfero.
The tests we were given in the interview were a) a sub-editing, i.e. checking spelling, grammar of a 300 word document, b) the above writing test, including 2 press releases and c) your standard psychometric bollocks: 'If a cat relates to a dog as A relates to B, what does C relate to A if C is a horse?'. There's no real way you can prepare for psychometric testing, but you can get a decent idea of what questions will look like by Googling (see?) psychometrics.
One important thing. If you don't know the answer to a psychometric test, DON'T guess. They will take marks away from you if you get it wrong, but not if you leave it blank.
That's a little introduction to Adfero; if I can think of anything else, I'll post it. Anything to help Manchester/Leeds/London writers who can't get a job elsewhere!
Friday, 14 September 2007
Last Night's TV
Advert:
The Sun - We Love It
The Sun's new ad campaign is a just indication of the collective inanity that drags the paper down. The Sun can be clever, incisive, witty even. It has fewer typos than the Guardian. Its headline-writers are the best in the business. But this ad campaign: dear oh dear. It depicts glamorous ladies in skin-tight black catsuits (cleavage abound), flying helicopters across the globe, which drag enormous nets full of black-and-white footballs, dropping them on the unsuspecting public. Builders and truckers grin wildly, and do keepy-uppies in the street.
The balls rain down, filling roads and pathways. Women cowering under newspapers dodge them like their life depends on it.
Right then; not only is it suspiciously close to Carling's "Love Football" campaign (shown during the last World Cup), it also posits women as uptight killjoys who would run through a brick wall to get away from a football. And all this during the Women's World Cup. England are doing well, playing well, and have flashes of inspiration from the boot of Kelly Smith.
The Sun is not only ignoring women's football, it is punching it in the uterus and calling it names.
If they want to look like witless, brainless morons, they have succeeded.
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