The Press Gazette Awards

I went to London this weekend for the Press Gazette Student Journalism Awards with the reps from Sheffo.

All the post-grads had been shortlisted as a team for our local election coverage, and Rhoda was up for Best Student Interviewer.

Rhoda won, which was excellent, and then proceeded to amuse us all by clambering across the lighting rig to reach the stage. We cheered her desire to venture where no other student journalists dared, clapped her efforts to take the path of most resistance, and hi-fived her refusal to look happy about the award on stage.

The rest of us, the Election Team for which I was simply a reperesentative, lost out to Homefront, a glossy magazine. On reflection, we didn't really have a hope in a category where every other finalist was a highly polished showcase periodical. Our huge cross platform effort, produced live and unedited over two days of elections, was probably just too sprawling to be taken in by the judges. It's a shame as it's some of the work I'm most proud of this year, and the closest we've come to real newsroom pressures.

I hope that doesn't seem too churlish. It's a shame we didn't get to see the other entries properly and I'm sure they were fantastic and well deserving. I just don't feel like we were really in the same contest.

The idea of entering each medium separately next year was discussed with perhaps the website or magazine alone standing a greater chance than the whole cross platform extravaganza, but this would destroy the whole purpose of converged work.

Still, we discussed our loss on the way home and concluded you can still put "Award winning" Election Project on your CVs, as the tutors at least won awards for it. And when you talk it over at interview, they never need to see all the typos that spoiled the final product.

The powerless society of Journos

My fellow Journalism students are all spending their bank holiday preparing for an exam tomorrow.

I just took a quick survey of Facebook statuses to see how everyone is feeling about it. Results include:

"feels nervous"
"wants to die"
"is getting the fear, and getting off Facebook"
"has noticed that with 12 hours to go everyone is on Facebook..."
"is feeling the fear... and doing it anyway"

"has got no motivation - anyone up for August retakes?"
"is contemplating suicide"
"proposes non-voluntary euthenasia as a better source of 'public administration'"
"is man-crying into his dinner"
"please shoot me before tuesday"
"is falling asleep"
"I heart local government"

And these are mostly people who arn't even taking the full NCTJ examination, just the internal one.
The poor bastards doing the full exam are too busy for Facebook. Imagine.

In some ways we're lucky. Labour seem to delight in changing the structures of governance so fast that an authoratative source of info is almost impossible to find, disrupting accountability through reform.
Thank heavens then for Wikipedia, where nothing's more than two clicks away. Concise, accurate and searchable; it's an invaluable tool of democratic oversight.

Makes you wonder why we really need to learn anything.