You may be suprised to read (if you don't come here very often) that journalism is among the worst-paid of all professions in the UK.
So here's a few ways to get the rent cheque sorted if you're a struggling journo/writer. All it takes is your talent, a few envelopes and a couple of stamps.*
Paul Foot Award
Deadline: 1 September 2008
Categories: Investigative journalism, published in print or online 1 Sept 07 - 31 Aug 08
Prize: 1st (£5000), Runners up (£1000)
Sponsors include: The Guardian, Private Eye
Contact: digby.halsby@midaspr.co.uk
Rory Peck Awards
Deadline: 2 September 2008
Categories: News; Features; Impact by freelance camera operators in TV news and current affairs.
Sponsor: Sony UK
Contact: awards@rorypecktrust.org
Eloquium COPD Award
Deadline: 21 September 2008 Categories: Consumer; Medical; Broadcast
Sponsor: Boehringer Ingelheim
Contact: www.eloquium.org
Plain English Campaign Awards
Deadline: 30 September 2008
Categories: National paper; Regional paper; TV programme
Contact: info@plainenglish.co.uk
*contacts are still everything, sadly. You may have a greater chance of winning the Paul Foot Award if your dad can pass your work onto Ian Hislop's desk, for example.
Thursday, 14 August 2008
Earn money from freelance journalism!
Thursday, 24 July 2008
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.
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!
Tuesday, 3 June 2008
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.
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
Librarians: A Dissection
As a library professional, one often feels that it would be better for us if no-one ever used libraries, if all the books should just stay on the shelf, perfectly primed for learning.
It's like filing, only horizontally. Placing the books in numerical order from left to right doesn’t sound that difficult, but
1) It’s hard, sweaty work, especially in libraries as the heating system is often in full flow.
2) You can develop a real crick in the neck from tilting your head to peer at book spines all day long
This is fairly simple. Unless of course you work at Keele University (which I did), as it’s one of the only libraries in the country that still uses the American Library of Congress system, where the books theoretically range from AAA000 to ZZZ999.
You can see the colour draining out of them (and for some computer scientists, they’re already pale).
There’s a lot of Virgos in this field. There’s also a lot of OCD-style behaviour exhibited.
If they work in the information searching section, guaranteed they’ll be amazing at pub quizzes. All that time spent researching random data has given them superpowers of information-handling.
They may be able to name the all members of Aztec Camera, The Spin Doctors and The Polyphonic Spree (depending on how current their tastes are). They will be able to tell you what all the flags of the world look like, and what the sizes of Champagne bottles are, in order.
A toast, then, to these unsung heroes of the educational system. Cheers!
Sunday, 28 October 2007
Brain-dead? Try this!
Clients and colleagues getting on your nerves?
Clearing your inbox no longer creatively fulfilling?
Join skivers across the country, and regain concentration: take a ride in the lift! Oh, shiny beacon of hope in the bored worker's day! This humble contraption can be four by four feet of peace and silence in a world of office chaos.
The first recorded evidence of a lift was recorded by bath-lingerer and all round genius Archimedes in 236BC. Eureka indeed. I'm sure if Archie was here today, he'd be skiving his engineering internship by riding the lifts with us.
Travelling upwards in the world, however, can be an unsettling experience. The obligatory Hollywood "Elevator Shaft Scene", an action movie staple, has scared off many a potential passenger. I, for one, can only imagine the tension in the rope when larger gentlemen join our crowd.
But for those who dare (even when the 8-person limit is exceeded) there is much to gain.
Put scare-stories and Casualty episodes to the back of your mind, because riding the lifts is:
1) Statistically the safest form of transport you can take. There are actually more accidents per hundred people walking to the shops than there are riding the elevator.
2) A great way to look like you're hard at work while taking a much-needed mental break. If you're travelling from floor to floor, and happen to be joined by a colleague, logic dictates that you're needed for work, wherever you're heading. Little do they know that before they arrived, you'd been miming to Britney, squeezing your spots in the mirror and attempting to sleep standing up for 15 seconds at a time.
This trick is essentially a more sophisticated version of what the office manual calls HITS syndrome, or Hiding In The Storeroom. It can also be combined effectively with Tip 2, the Flapping Piece of Paper (see here).
NB. If your elevator has glass sides, and you continue ascending out of the top of the building, you may either be in a shopping mall, or a Roald Dahl story, and as such, will not be available to work. Congratulations!
Thursday, 26 July 2007
Brain-dead? Try this!
Are you whiling away your hours in a job you hate?
Can't wait for the weekend?
Can't be motivated to change careers, or make a move elsewhere?
Cheer yourself up with these tips on surviving office life.
Tip 1: Font Of All Knowledge
Instead of worrying about your future, why not make the days go faster? Explore the fonts on Microsoft Word! Now when you're bored off your arse, writing a 100-page marketing report for your boss, you can pretend instead you're scribbling away at your first children's novel, with the delighful font ABCPhonicsOne.
For every capital letter you type, this font gives you a little drawn character! Y is a youth with a yo-yo slouching against his capital. G is a gorilla with a banana. E has an elephant spraying water all over the shop and D is a dinosaur whose long shapely body goes through the space in the middle of the D.
It's ace!
Thursday, 14 June 2007
What a Nice time
Howard Marks aka Mr Nice aka Senor Nice made an entrance in The Roadhouse in Manchester on Monday night, shuffling onto stage, a suspisciouly sweet-smelling rollie in his mouth, looking like Ronnie Wood, only older and more craggy.
There's no doubt Marks' colourful life is a great read, his life from small town Wales to princely Oxford undergrad, via acid and connections with the secret service, doing massive dope deals into this country made him a cult figure.
His articulate rhetoric makes him a captivating speaker - he had us, 150 normally apathetic, slouched-shouldered stoners eating out of his hand, his voice grand and slow, glasses perched on his nose, unleashing a passionate, deep Valley accent, which rose to a gravelly bark and fell to a gentle lilting whisper.
The premise for this one-off show - an cunning move which The Roadhouse should be applauded for - was to talk about the impending smoking ban, which comes into place on July 1st this year (a date in many friends' diaries, currently puffing their way through 20 Royals in the local boozer). The ever charming Mr Nice gallantly admitted that "I'd never even fuckin' thought about it till the management asked me to speak yurr".
He delivered a hastily assembled but erudite lecture on the history of tobacco, tongue firmly in cheek throughout. By the end of this half-hour monologue, full of myth, dope stories, inventive and poetic language, we'd come to expect nothing less than brilliance from Mr Marks, philosophy scholar and raconteur extraordinare.
In 1550 Jean Michel Nicot made a grave error, Marks revealed, in choosing to import nicotiana tabacum - the most common form called tobacco - back to Paris, shipping tons of seeds and leaves from Portugal and the Americas.
There is a more potent genus of the plant, which contains twenty times as much nictotine in its leaves. If Nicot had travelled south, to Argentina, he would have discovered nicotiana rustica, a variety of the plant which is closer in its effects to LSD than its distant cousin.
Rustica is still a ritual drug employed by shamens in southern Argentina, used to commune with the spirits through smoking huge pipes or cigars. The plant is also used in medicine, prescribed for tiredness and hunger supression, making it an ideal companion for farmers tilling the slopes or walking the huge distances to markets.
It can also be used as an enema, and the smoke is often exhaled over patients to aid recovery.
The ethnogenic banter continued: Marks swiftly moved on to his own experiences, moving from lecture to stand-up monologue.
The real meat of the performance came here, as we learned that when the biggest dope dealer in British history left his maximum security prison, his first, mad thought was to do another job: "It'd be the biggest surprise in the fuckin' world! They'd never expect it."
So he inspected opportunities and found a wonderful loophole in Swiss law; it wasn't illegal to grow cannabis, only to consume it. Cue a montage of fields, no, forests of lush green weed, growing legally on Swiss soil, thousands upon thousands of plants, some up to 8 feet high.
"I bought an alp, basically. Then another......Every little alps. Ha ha."
I'd never seen anything quite like it. The gear was shifted in an audacious fashion, sold as a sleeping aide through a internet company. Kilos of cannabis were stuffed into pillowcases and sold for around £5,000 (allegedly). A good market price, I feel. The company also made money selling cannabis oil to Anita Roddick's Bodyshop:
"They asked us for five litres of cannabis oil with the THC removed. I don't know if you know this but you have to grow a ton of weed for a litre of oil. So we just grew five tons. I can't quite remember what happened to the leftover THC....."
Whatever the event, Marks' name was in none of the company accounts when the case eventually and unsurpisingly came to court.
When the floor opened to questions, the floodgates opened. Here's a selection of the best:
What's your favourite drug other than cannabis, and is there a drug that you haven't tried?
I like coke and E, I'm not much into acid, but some of my kids take that on a fuckin ecstacy comedown. Christ. Err......hang on, let me see.......well I'm careful about ketamine. That's shafted me royally a couple of times. Other than that, there's probably thousands of variations of American prescription drugs that haven't been passed my way. I've had DMT 4 or 5 times. I prefer it to acid, it's a natural substance, you know, we produce it when we dream. I think that it's very important. It can be, in the right circumstances, the interface between life and death.
Drugs are supposed to affect your brain in terrible ways. How do you think they've affected yours?
Positively; wonderfully. The very fact that we have receptors in the brain for these drugs to latch on to, suggests that they're part of our evolutionary make-up: people were meant to take drugs, and have been doing in almost every human society since their conception.
What will your next book be about?
It's a travel book, mainly. It'll be called Tripping, if some of you clever lot get my double meaning. Well, I can't carry on about getting of my tits until I'm 80, can I? It's funny, my legitimate front for a lot of dope deals was a travel agent, so I'll be coming full circle in a lot of ways. I'd love to write about Jamaica, that's the best destination on earth: Rastas, rum and reggae.
Do you ever get the munchies?
Of course I get the fuckin munchies. My favourite are Sugar Puffs. They're fuckin great. My wife always makes puts breakfast out for our kiddies for school. I come down at 4 in the morning and bosh the lot.
Who's your favourite drinking/smoking partner?
Well, Shane McGowan has to be up there. He's the only man I've ever seen being carried into a pub. Fully sparked out, straight up to the bar. That shows real dedication, you know?
Howard Marks. Legend and inspiration. We salute you.
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