A few students are running blogs. I think any student who in 2008 does not run a blog must be daft and - in addition - may well be morally suspect. Blogs are free and you can set one up in a minute. Running a blog has the following advantages:
(1) It gets you to write something accurate, to be viewed by the public or (at least) potentially by all the other persons on the journalism course (soon to be courses) right here at Winchester, every day or pretty much every day. That is great practice. The one thing that the course can't give you is daily writing practice. The reason is that there is no way we can mark 200 pieces of work ever day. Naturally the daily practice will make you better against the clock when it comes to assessed work.
(2) It means that you can contribute something to the course and to the group you are in (in fact the whole student cohort) instead of just taking all the time. Part of the success or failure of the enterprise we are engaged in is how well it works overall adn the more you can contribute to the success of the course, the better it will be for you personally as well as the group as a whole. Blogging starts to break down the pernicious idea that you as a student are some sort of client or customer, instead of a co-creator. So running a useful blog means that you can become a useful person within a specified group, and that has got to be good for your self-esteem. Journalism is a team activity. It is a pain having somebody in a team who really doesn't do anything other tha, perhaps, constantly moan. So by bringing something to the party via a blog, we can overcome that.
(3) Although there's no 'marks' for blogging, I read the blogs from time to time and it gives me a very good idea of who has talent and who is working hard. There's no prejudice in the assessment system, but since we work so closely by necessity in journalism. One very good thing, that the best students I've worked with in recent years do, is blog what they have read in the papers that day. So that combines the two ABSOLUTELY CENTRAL things that you are supposed to be doing - reading the newspapers each day, and practising your writing. If you get into the habit of flicking through the papers in the morning each day and then updating your blog with items of interest (best of all with examples that illustrate current points in your studies, or in the teaching) then that is just about the most effective thing you can do. It would only be an hour or so a day, and you would notice a rapid improvement from doing that.
(4) If any of you are contemplating careers in journalism then it will be very hard to explain to any prospective employer why it is that you have not even bothered to run a blog. At the college I was at last year (number one for BJTC journalism) ALL the students were set up with blogs at induction. So you are competiting with them for a start. On the other hand many other places don't do blogs (yet) so there's a chacne to get ahead. But if you don't want to work in journalism - that's fine, don't bother blogging.
(5) As I dimension of (4) above employers I have discussed are now sometimes doing google searches looking for new employees. That might also use facebook. If you have not got a blog, this can't happen.
(6) If broadcasting, rather than writing, is your thing you have to remember that the two things are no longer opposed. It is more or less as easy to add video content to your blog, as it is to add words.
For example here are two that I got students at my previous course to set up. They are both now working in TV journalism at a good level. One (Victoria Cook) has kept her blog going - you can go back in time to when she was a student, and see what she was doing there. There's another one here, displaying 'packages' done for Westminster News Online or WNOL (which was a very similar thing to the soon-to-be-launched Winchester News Online (or WINOL). It is by James Hassan. This also shows you the sort of standard you need to be at on WINOL (not exactly these pieces, but WNOL as a whole was judged by the BJTC to be the best student work in the country). My feeling is that there's a way to go (for the third years) but it is not impossible that we will be at this standard by the end of the year - the work rate needs to go up though.
First years I feel are working at a pace which, if we will keep it up, will reach this standard (many of you during feedback week emphasised the improtance of the fatal errors system and said that it helped identify the standards very clearly and, also, made it impossible to cruise along doing no work, or very little work). I have made no systematic attempt to get the first years blogging. The reason for this was the fact that I think the way the induction was organised was very strange, and I have asked the college to change that for next year. There just was no time when they organised all the arriving first students to sit down and be briefed about the course, to sign up with the coursesite and get a blog established. That lack of an induction I think is something that should be mentioned in customer questionaires and so on, since it has generated a lot of problems and a huge amount of work for me in trying to catch up with people retrospectively. Despite this two students already have blogs and which they run not really to comment about journalism (one does that, more than the other) but are just generally talking about life in general which is fine. It would be better if these blogs were adapted to be more like the ones featured above (from Westminster), that they have less swearing (in one case) and more stuff based on following the news and reading the papers. Maybe these students could run a more work-related journalism blog; and another one just for fun - any person can have an unlimited number of blogs.Please go and visit those blogs now and leave comments (bloggers like that) and perhaps they will give an easy user guide on how to set up your own blog based on their own experience (it is very easy to do this). You can navigate to these blogs via the "Students - First Year" link on the left of this page.
Third years are not regularly blogging - but there's an excuse if you are writing a lot for WINOL at the moment. However what you can do (as with Victoria and James examples) is ALSO upload your articles and video to your blogs. That will give you some protection against the complaint of being badly re-written (for example) by another student who, to be fair, is simulataneously learning how to edit. Also even if your early efforts on film seem not so good, it will provide a growing portfolio of work. If you mix that together with comment on things you've read in the papers, links to journalism you admire and so on, it all starts to become very plasuible and - most importantly - very useful to the rest of the group. You might think 'why should I bother sharing things with people who don't even bother to read the papers'. That's a good point. But you wouldn't call off a 'bring a bottle' party because you think somebody is going to gatecrash, and drink your booze. That happens. It would be a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face to let such annoyances control the agenda. Such people are best ignored as an inevitable part of the downside of life, like toothache and bad weather.
The second years I think are improving because of the fatal error system. Last year I tried setting up blogs with them, but it was (with about I think three or four honourable exceptions) a waste of time and, very often, a bit embarassing. There's only one student who is regularly updating a blog and that said it is really an exceptionally good blog - and very much a 'work' blog about issues treaching issues on the course (eg a very good and useful discussion of interview technique). The blog is by James Kenyon (navigate via second years). I have not had the pleasure, by chance, of ever having had this student in a seminar group, and he never sent me a picture - so I have no idea who he is. But he is clearly a very good student and has a fighting chance of getting a career in journalism - not least because he will be able to say to employers that he has already been publishing journalism (or a sort) on his blog pretty much once a day, or once a week, for two or three years. That is going to be far more convincing than a student who starts one up (because I am sure that everyone will have to something like a blog). If some of the second year blogs come back to life then I will link to them again. But they seemed to stop when I was no longer lecturing these particular students. It may be therefore that the students think that they only need to read or write about journalism for my benefit, or to impress me or get marks or something. That is completely the wrong idea. At least you all have the benefit of having set up the blog in February of last year, so you can show a continuous record of publication since then - if you bring them back to life.
Finally it would be good if I could have a volunteer at some point soon to go through all the student blogs once a week a produce a summary of the blogs. Maybe that could be done on a weekly basis. That was a really great thing to do (which worked really well at Westminster - I remember Ms Cook doing it for a couple of weeks). It is a way of you contributing to the course as well, instead of just being on the receiving side. Also it means that learning can take place from student to student, instead of everything coming via me. At rthe end of the year we can have a BAFTA-style awards ceremony for the best blog, funniest blog, most nasty blog, etc, etc which will be a good way to see out the year, along with the WINOL TV 'bloopers' tape I am secretly compling. So this is a long winded way of saying:
(a) Thomas Hobbes should publish a simple 'how to' guide to blogging on his blog (get to it via the navigation on this page). This (in the words of his famous namesake) should be Nasty, Brutish and Short.
(b) All other students should read McHobbes's guide to setting up a blog, ignoring the various bollo on there such as where he compares me to a Hamster. This is a libel but as y'all know, he has the defence of fair comment, meaning that this genuinely is his opinion (say he is on hallucinatory drugs); that he said it without malice (eg, not because he has been paid to say this by Angus Scott as a bet, or 'for a laugh'); and that it is based on fact (eg that TH has indeed seen me lecturing or just walking, or perhaps scurrying, around the place, and that he is not just making it up). It would be harder to defend by means of 'justification' (though you could try) meaning that you would have to prove in a way that would satisfy a jury that on the balance of probability a fair minded person - the person on the Clapham Omnibus - would think it was a stone cold FACT that I looked more like a hamster than a human being.
(c) All first years should set up a blog. Second and third years should revive their blogs - and since it has been in the news and flagged up by Paul Dacre (and since it is the point of the law lecture this week) all first years should blog something on the subject of privacy and Human Rights. I will flick through those blog entries and it will help me get to know you all a bit better and where the strengths and weaknesses are. It should be fun to blog about the Daily Mail and privacy anyway. Second and third years should blog something about Dacre as well. All of this, like attendance on the course itself, is entirely voluntary.
(d) A volunteer will go through the blogs, perhaps weekly, and write a review of the blogs. The best blogs maybe should feature on columns on Winchester News Online (be patient second years you should see the launch of this on Thursday of this week.
(e) We will organise a section on the site, which will link to all the best blogs about journalism (eg http://www.wordblog.co.uk/ - Andrew Grant Adamson who, behind the scenes, has been helping to set up Winchester News Online). Another good one is David Dunkley (who came to speak to mainly the third years last year) The View.
