Parents ambitions - WHYSI have recently completed a History degree, and have spent the past few weeks terrified of final exams, panicking over my dissertation and not getting enough sleep.
I am proud that I have finished a university degree, and am on course to beat my parents university degree grades. In completing my degree I have fulfilled both my parents and grandparents expectations of me. I am raising the bar for my younger brother and sister since I will hopefully be going into postgraduate study.
My grandparents had very different aspirations for my parents. Although they both wanted their children to go to university, it was expected that as soon as they finished university they should go straight into work. My parents are more relaxed and have accepted my decision to go travelling.
What I would like to know from the WHYS community is if they feel they have met the aspirations of their parents, and what do they aspire from their children? My dad went to university and my mum went to a poly technique so I have always been pushed in the way of higher education. My parents would eventually like me to marry, have a high paid corporate career, work abroad for a while but ultimately settle in the UK. (Not too close
to them since they don't want to be nannies for all my children :D )
Is this the same for people the world over? Do people think that people have different aspirations for their children owing to their generations thinking?
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Happier TimesWell for those of you who have been worrying about my pessimistic rants on this blog, fear not the end is in sight!
At the moment I am supposed to be revising for my finals!! Which is slightly scary to say the least!
I did get my dissertation in on time, and I should be hearing about it in around 2 weeks time. On reflection I generally enjoyed the experience of writing a dissertation. The last fortnight before the deadline was incredibly stressful, to the point that I started dreaming about word counts and footnotes. But the research and the writing were both enjoyable. I do really like history after all, and I think I will probably miss it once I have graduated.
Who knows when I am a bit older I might even attempt a Masters! My lecturer Julie Gammon was saying how Southampton runs an eighteenth century masters in conjunction with the English department.
Perhaps it is something to return to a bit later, as my dad keeps on reminding me I need to get a real job soon!
I am in the process of looking for jobs that interest me. As I have a place at Cardiff University to study journalism next year I am really looking for some more experience in the media industry before officially starting my course. But as ever with the media, it can be quite tricky to find paid work :D
Still lets put away scary thoughts of the future, and concentrate on the fact that I am going to see everyone's favourite Archaeologist tonight.. Indiana Jones !
I will post a review tomorrow but I have very high expectations of it :D
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Blank Page on WHYSThis weekend I am being lucky enough to become a moderator on
World Have Your Say
We will be discussing what it takes to become a freedom fighter and idea's about cultural influences and language.
Check it out :D
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Slightly random At the moment I am in the process of writing a ten thousand word dissertation for history BA. It's a micro-history on the life of Mary Blandy, who aged 32 was hung for the murder of her father. She poisoned him with arsenic so that she could get his money and run away with her not very handsome and married boyfriend. That is essentially my dissertation in a nutshell.
It has also meant that recently I have not been actively consuming the news. I passively watch the news on TV and procrastinate away from my work by reading the BBC News website. However in a recent interview I was accused of not having enough world experience. Essentially because I did badly in a current affairs test I was deemed naive about what is happening in the UK.
What is ironic is that I got all the questions about international politics correct. This is probably a direct result of me procrastinating on WHYS and engaging in some very interesting debates about the state of Iraq, and the political situation in Zimbabwe.
So dear friends, please excuse me if I can't remember all the members of the shadow cabinet and if I get the liberal democrat leader confused with the liberal democrat London mayoral candidate.
My thoughts and my focus are stuck on 1752.
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World Have Your SayI try and listen to a diverse range of new output but because I am also supposed to be writing a dissertation at the moment, I am currently relying on news podcasts.
Yesterday I took part in an on air discussion about a states right to pass a law which would prohibit women from wearing sexually promiscuous clothing. I ended up having a debate with a Kenyan lady from a women's civil rights group, Laura from Minneapolis in the USA, Lubna from Bagdad and Savannah from Ghana. It was completely overwhelming since I had missed about half an hour of the program owing to problems with my lap top. Still after getting to grips with the discussion had moved on to, I thought I debated quite well. Standing outside in my boyfriend's garden discussing what is appropriate clothing with people from all over the world, perfectly normal in my ideal world. It broadcasts on the world service but if you want to engage in the debate look here
World Have Your Say Blog
I really enjoyed myself, and I love that modern technology allows people in the world to discuss such issues. It was also slightly mind boggling at first to get my head around the fact that I was talking to women in 3 different continents about the same issue.
Especially on the same day that the United Nations has announced that women all over the world face discrimination.
As George from the USA said on the world service blog, it really seems like women are the last political frontier.
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Disability, Journalism and SportAfter visiting Bath last week for the National Student Radio Association Conference with Sam, a good friend of mine who happens to be in a wheelchair, I thought I would investigate what access the media provides to disabled students who want to be journalists.
Sam wants to be a sports broadcast journalist, and has a regular show on Surge mainly focused on football punditry. Although he is slightly bias towards the attributes of Crystal Palace, he does do entertaining and generally impartial punditry. At a broadcast journalism careers event, he received a very positive response from a BBC Local Sports Journalist (possibly because he knew more about the local football teams than the Journo whose job it was to cover these teams). However he faces a unique challenge which he has explained to me a few times over the past few years, since only a handful of the premiership football clubs have good disabled access.
After sitting behind the disabled seating at London Wasps Matches (they play at Wycombe Wanderers ground) I very quickly got over the notion, that disabled fans were any less fanatical about sport than able bodied fans. One particular fan who has lost both his legs, is well known for hurling hilarious abuse at the referee, to the point that Lawrence Dallagio knows him by name.
Jenny, a blogger with ME on the BBC Ouch Website is further proof that disabled people love sport. Yet the only disabled journalist covering sport that I know of is Dame Tanni Grey Thompson, and her coverage of the run up to the 2008 Paralympic Games. This is not to say that there are not any disabled sports journalists working, it's just that you don't hear about them.
Jenny's Blog
Although saying that I have no doubt that Sam will overcome issues of access since he is very very determined.
The reason for this blog was that I noticed on the ITV jobs website that there was a new traineeship open only to disabled people, to be an office runner/ junior researcher. ITV is evidently trying to increase its diversity portfolio by hitting quotas. Unfortunately on closer inspection it appeared that ITV had not quite thought the traineeship through. The job was based on two sites, a 10 minute walk apart but the description gave no further information than that. If a wheelchair bound individual wanted to apply, they had no information about the access to these two sites.
Nick Bishop, a student on my course who wants to be a print journalist wrote a very funny, but insightful article about access into London's top ten best restaurants, as voted by Time Out Magazine.
Nick's Article in the Guardian Newspaper
He has Cerebral Palsy, but this has not stopped him doing anything at university. From personal experience he tends to be the life and soul of most parties! He is also a great journalist as his article proves. We are both currently applying for Postgraduate Diplomas, I just hope that when we have both graduated from these degrees, we have equal ease accessing media careers, we are both so passionate about.
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Coverage of Madeline McCann, is it ethicalDuring one of my journalism work experiences I was asked to research into a possible story on the disappearance of Madeline McCann. This particular work experience had no direct link to Madeline's family or disappearance. The audience of this particular program did not live in a geographical area which might have had any relevance to Maddy, the only link to the story was that people were interested in the case.
People are so interested in the continued hunt for Maddy that Sky News still maintains a large portion of its website just dedicated to her. British newspapers have been ordered to pay the McCanns compensation for "making up" stories about their possible involvement in Maddies disappearance. In part you can hardly blame them for faking new developments.
I was on holiday in Praia de Luz the week that Kate and Gerry McCann were named as offical suspects in their daughter's disappearance. Within 12 hours of the story breaking the entire area was swamped with over 20 different broadcast trucks, and plus 40 journalists seeking a new angle on what was in effect an old story.
With that much competition it is not really surprising that newspaper editors stretched the truth a little. The laws in Portugal mean that the Portuguese newspapers cannot publish certain details about an open investigation. From my perspective it looks like the Portuguese press leaked some snippets to the British tabloids, and then reported what the British press had said.
The real questions that most media agencies are yet to ask are: when can we stop talking about Madeline McCann, and can we still justify the coverage of her case as serving public good?
A prime example of a piece of non ethical journalism was that the first official suspect of the case Robert Murat was exposed by a Sky Journalist. I don't claim that he is guilty or innocent, but if he is innocent then a journalist has ruined his life over the past year by 'exposing him', and if he is guilty then the journalist prevented the police following their line of inquiry and perhaps prevented his arrest.
Should journalism be ethical, or is it more important to sell papers? Are the media still aiding the hunt for Madeline or are they hindering the investigation?
Answers to these questions I am yet to find resolution to.
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Student Radio Association Conference in Bath 2008I have just returned from the Student Radio Association Conference in Bath which was a highly exciting affair. Student Stations only get together on mass approximately twice a year; at conference and at the Student Radio Awards in November. At the awards we are all directly in competition with each other and tend to stick to our individual station, so the conference is a great networking/ party opportunity.
We had a great variety of speakers from across the BBC and Commercial networks. A particular highlight for me was a news breakout session run by Ross Tilley from Smoke (university radio at Westminster University). It was interesting since out of approximately 25 people only 3 of them were on Broadcast Journalism Courses. Some stations reported that they had problems with their Journalism Departments, since although they have the talented Journalists; these students refuse to get involved with student media. They preferred to be competition, which pushed the student stations to get access to resources.
This I think is both a shame and a benefit. The winner of the Gold Student Radio Award for Best Journalistic Programming last year, was part of a student news team made up of Broadcast Journalist Students. So considering that Surge won Silver demonstrates that you don't need the technical training to create great journalistic content. However student journalism on student radio is a unique selling point to a student audience. It doesn't matter how many times your alter the playlist, if you don't have a good news team then a student station is at risk of sounding like an under funded commercial station.
The only problems with the conference was that the hostel in which we stayed smelt of off carpet, and that some stations seemed to use some of the sessions as their personal problem solvers. It was great to discuss the different aspects of student radio, but some sessions became dominated by the problems of one station. A good example was that a two hour session on radio creativity and podcasting was dominated by the playlist problems and debt of Salford University Radio. This meant that the group only got about 15 minutes to discuss podcasting.
Student radio is moving onto online owing to the cost of broadcasting on AM or FM. So a discussion on podcasting and new media would have been really useful, especially as I have personally experienced how easy/good it is to capture a radio audience through podcasting.
Quick thanks should go to this years SRA exec who overall ran a fantastic conference and URB (University Radio Bath) who were the hosts of the conference. Thanks also to Liam Hornsby who organised the travel arrangements of Surge to get to Bath.
x
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Broadcast Journalism So this is my first blog on my new website!
As you can see it is still under construction, so its very basic.
I am interested in a career in Broadcast Journalism and will be primarily using this website to showcase a selection of work that I have created over the past few years.
Feel free to browse and if you have any questions about the content or journalism then do not hesitate to contact me.
All audio uploaded onto this site is copyrighted and should not be used without my permission.
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