Final CJII show

Yesterday afternoon our CJII team applied all they'd learnt over the last few weeks to their two half-hour radio shows on citizen journalism, the Bristol elections and Bristol's transport problems. Each show combined reports on researched topics, vox pops and live studio interviews - what an accomplishment! 

Kally and...

...Ade on air

Ujima team Roger Griffith and Paul Hassan had worked hard to help the participants understand how to structure the programmes and with additional input from David Goldlblatt, an experienced radio broadcaster himself, some essential skills were acquired on interviewing live guests.

Sibs and Ahmed interview Dr David Sweeting under the watchful eye of Roger Griffith

There were inevitably a few mistakes - unplanned re-ordering of a couple of items, some overlong pauses, a few problems with levels, all of which could have been minimised with more practice, but  these were minor drawbacks compared to the overall results of a varied, engaging and coherent pair of programmes. A good follow-on from last week's show on the Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone and satisfying way to end the project.

Jon Rogers - former Lib Deb Councillor

David Goldblatt - Broadcaster, writer and our Citizen Journalism guide

Gratified smiles after successful live broadcast from Ahmed, David Sweeting and Sibs

Surprise broadcast opportunity!

Throwing our citizen journalists in at the deep end - Roger Griffith arranged for them to have a quick intro to live radio on Ujima's Drive Time show where the team introduced themselves and talked about why they'd decided to take part in the project, they did well!

The 'mayor' and 'PCC' get a grilling from the trainee journalists

'Sue Mountstevens' and 'Mayor George Ferguson' get a grilling from the team

The highlight of the second session of MayorWatch part 2 on Tuesday was having some allegedly high profile 'guests' at our venue for the day, the Pervasive Media Studio, who agreed to be be subjected to questioning about their actions by our citizen journalist team. The 'guests' were actually our own David Goldblatt and Paul Hassan who took on the remarkably convincing roles of respectively George Ferguson, Bristol's first elected Mayor (without the trademark red trousers), and Sue Mountstevens, the Police Crime Commissioner (PCC) elected at the same time as the Mayor.

This interview session took place after our participants learned how to effectively track down useful sources of information on the internet about their subjects, assess what they found and begin to find topics that they felt needed some fleshing out by the 'Mayor' and the 'PCC'. This research and the subsequent development of useable interview questions was guided by David Goldblatt and Paul Hassan (before they transformed!) and Roger Griffith who also conducted the interview process. Roger invited the interviewers to ask their questions, the 'guests' would reply and the journalists would then come back with a second question - something that they had prepared but that should also respond to points made by the guests. During the debate Roger would ask the journalists to pause at certain points and think whether they'd been given the information they's asked for, consider asking the questions in a different way, and remind them to keep focused. 

This procedure provided some very valuable insights into the successes and weaknesses of the interviews so the trainee journalists began to see how they could approach a topic from a different angle; should only contest a statement by their interviewee if it can backed up by appropriate statistics or facts; ask carefully focused questions that could deter interviewees from providing generic information, and keep on track with their responses. The group learned that active listening is as crucial a part of interviewing as asking the questions. 

Next week's session will be at Ujima Radio where the young journalists will begin to plan their radio programme and have some technical training in the studio. We'll also introduce them to using Twitter (we're @BSmayorwatch) and prepare some content for the forthcoming blog.

Each participant told us at least one thing they'd learnt in the session:

Transcript:

• How to ask effective questions
• I learnt more in depth about what's going on around me, I didn't really know much about the police crime commissioner and that but I learnt quite a bit in the research and look forward to doing some more research into it.
• What plans are actually going towards transport and what the Mayor is planning to do about it
• I've learnt about the environment - transport, the buses, cycling 
• Research - being able to fact-find as opposed to just having your own theories, I guess it's empowering tools to know what people are saying, what they're doing, what's written out - documents.
• I learnt about the Bristol Enterprise Zone, and the Bristol Green Capital and the Bristol Pound. And I learnt about active listening and also different interview techniques and how to better interview the interviewee.

First session of 'MayorWatch 2' citizen journalism project

The first, introductory session of our latest Citizen Journalism 'News from Elsewhere' project took place at St Paul's Family Learning Centre on Tuesday evening (26 March 2013). This is a follow up to the Bristol Mayor Watch project last year where a group of young people tracked the process of Bristol's first Mayoral election. It's the same partnership as last time between Watershed, Ujima Radio and David Golblatt with, once again, welcome financial support from the University of Bristol, but also from Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone. This time we're looking at what the Mayor, and the newly elected Police and Crime Commissioner, have been doing in their first 150 days in office, with a focus on some selected themes - more on this later.

Eight young participants, recruited by Caroline Oldland at Ujima Radio, have decided to join this new course because they are interested - in different ways - in local issues that affect them and their communities and are keen to learn how make their voices heard through the range of journalism tools we're going to guide them through over the next 8 weeks.

To introduce citizen journalism David Goldblatt showed the group some eye-opening films from You Tube made by people across the the world using, often surreptitiously, mobile phones - films that exposed vote rigging, corruption and the perfidious politics of Mitt Romney . 

Roger Griffith from Ujima radio outlined the themes the group will be working with during this project which include the local elections in May, the appointment of Bristol's first Muslim Lord Mayor and the Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone. In addition to generating content for the blog, the participants will be producing their own live radio programme on Ujima towards the end of the 8 weeks where they will interview local politicians live in the studio (as their predecessors did in the last project). The participants  will also collect material for podcasts during the course, this will include interviews with academics from University of Bristol who specialise in the areas we're covering in this project.

One major challenge for the project has been the news that Posterous - the excellent blogging platform we've been using for all our citizen journalism projects over the last 2 years - is closing down on April 30th after being taken over by Twitter a year ago. We've done a lot of research into blogs that will do the same thing, working with group contributors, with the ease and grace that Posterous offered, but unfortunately have found nothing free and off the shelf that effectively handles our requirements - mainly group contributions via mobile e-mail, good image displays and media embedding. So we've had to squeeze some money out of our budget to pay a pittance to a friendly Wordpress devotee to customise something for us, we'll post the link as soon as it's ready.

Meanwhile we'd hoped to carry on with the Posterous blog (backing it up) as ong as we could but it's stopped being fully functional, no e-mailed posts from mobiles are showing up and only some posts from desktops are appearing. Very disappointing Twitter.

Welcome to News from Elsewhere

Watershed in Bristol began running citizen journalism (CJ) workshops for young people in March 2010 in collaboration with writer, educator and broadcaster David Goldblatt. The workshops were part of the four-year long 'RELAYS at Watershed' programme that led up to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Over 18 months we ran eight CJ projects with 70 young people who used smartphones to report on topics ranging from Paralympian athletes training in Bath to a unique cultural quarter in Bristol - and all things Olympic in Weymouth.

'RELAYS at Watershed' has come to an end now but we're continuing with the citizen journalism strand of work under the name of News from Elsewhere and are about to start 2013 with a new action research project supported by the University of Bristol and working with Ujima Radio, David Goldblatt and staff from the University.

This follows on from a pilot scheme 'Bristol Mayor Watch' where a group of young people used smart phones to cover several aspects of the first election for a Mayor in Bristol and concluded the process with a live broadcast on Ujima interviewing several of the Mayoral candidates.

This new blog is a continuation of the 'RELAYS at Watershed' citizen journalism blog and is for documenting the progress of the new citizen journalism work we're planning.  This is where we'll report on our future projects - who was was involved, how we ran the workshops, successes, and what might change next time.

Additional blogs by the citizen journalist participants will be created for each of the projects we work on and links to those will be added to this blog.