My Recent Portfolio

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.

• Accidents Waiting to Happen

• Radio

• Fall conference

• Paula Darwish interview

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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!

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Salford University MA Journalism

So, that was it then, i went for my Masters in Journalism interview at Salford Journalism department at Adelphi House, Salford. There's a little picture of it on the right here, in fact.

Adelphi House is a pretty imposing red square block of a building. It's right next to the River Irwell and can look quite pretty on a nice day, as you can see from the pic below.

Don't get confused like I did and head for the Culture, Media and Music Department, which is about 500 yards from Adelphi House in a north-westerly direction, across a car park which is pretty windy, grey and desolate. It's the picture I had in my head of what Salford would be like, all burnt out buildings, flat spaces with very little scenery. A pictorial representation of this is shown in the pictures below.
So, the interview. It really wasn't as difficult or challenging as I thought it should have been, just a little 10 question news quiz e.g.
1) Who is Edward Timpson (Tory winner of Crewe and Nantwich by-election),
2) What do Robert Knox and Ayar Aslam have in common (both teenagers, both recently stabbed),
stuff that had been in the news in the past week or so, and a couple of technical questions e.g.
3) What is a leader/byline/masthead,
4) Who are the PCC and what do they do.

From a group interview I was expecting us to explore an issue and for each of us to take a certain position on that issue. What actually happened: we were asked the one fuckin question I hadn't prepared for, the question that people applying for graduate jobs hate to hear: "So, tell me a little bit about yourself." What do you want to know? I'm quite lazy, I don't learn things very quickly, I hate work, I like to know obscure facts and figures, I'm distrustful of authority and I love my bed. That's about it, in a nutshell.

Tell me a bit about yourself, I dunno, it's such a dissembling question, like the interviewer really does want to know that you like Curb Your Enthusiasm and you and your dad smoke weed on a regular basis, rather than doing the graduate thing and "selling yourself". Well, you say, I've been interested in this course since I moved to Manchester, I've been writing for Company A and Company B and etc etc etc. I really can't be fucking arsed to sell myself any more. I've been trying to hock myself out to companies and for jobs since I left university and it's just completely hollow bullshit. They know it, and you know it, and neither of you are willing to admit it.

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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.

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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!

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