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

Bristol's Enterprise Zone features on live Ujima radio show

Preparation for the live discussion

After an intense scripting and production session with Roger Griffith last Thursday 9th May, the team refined the shows they've been working on and decided to distill the content into three programmes. Next week (Thursday 23rd May) there will be two half hour shows on Ujima, back to back from 16:00 - 16.30 and 16.30 - 17.00; the theme of the first will be citizen journalism and democracy in Bristol, followed by Transport in Bristol and the Bristol Bus boycott of 1963. 

Presenters Miss Divine and Sib with two of the Ujima show guests Nick Sturge and Alun Owen

But the first live programme in this CJII series went out last night when key team members of the Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone came to the studio for a an hour-long live programme. Our two presenters were from both the first CJ workshop from last year - a welcome return by Miss Divine - and Sib from our current course. The Enterprise Zone guests were Catherine Frankpitt - Senior Communications Officer; Alun Owen - Service Director of the Enterprise Zone; Alison Retter - Bristol City Council Regeneration Officer for the Zone and Nick Sturge - Managing Director of Bristol's Set Squared, an enterprise collaboration between several universities including the University of Bristol.

The presenters had devised questions covering a wide range of topics to ask the guests that included 'what is the Enterprise Zone?' 'What will it do?' 'How will inner city and disadvantaged communities get to hear about opportunities and become involved?' The citizen journalists did an excellent job - a few confusions over guests' names were minor mistakes and easily compensated for with their confidence in asking some searching questions and their deft allocation of fair time to each guest. 

All this was overseen and supported by Paul Hassan and Roger Griffith in the studio - interesting to witness the scribbling and passing of notes and sign language that enable the smooth running of a live discussion show like this that listeners don't get to see! The show was recorded and a podcast will be available soon - the link will be posted here. 

Another of the CJ team, Nas, was tasked with filming the show and some additional interviews with the guests after the show. This is a continuation of her volunteer work with Firstborn Creatives and the films also will be uploaded to the Ujima website and links posted here as soon as they're available.

The crew and guests

First location outing for CJ team

Our trainee citizen journalists weren't alone in reporting on the hustings last night at the City Academy in Lawrence Hill, Bristol, it appears The Guardian were there too but this was the first opportunity for our team to apply the new range of techniques they'd been learning 'in the field' in covering this Question Time event for local election candidates.  The event was organised by the Easton and Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Management team where 8 of the 12 prospective councillors for the ward responded to questions from the public.

Tweeting from question time

The new blog was now up and running and several posts with photographs have been added to that by the participants. Twitter was also deployed by the team but the main focus of the evening was to record some audio interviews for inclusion in their forthcoming Ujima radio programme in May. The team had the chance to interview many of the candidates before the event began, as well as councillors from neighbouring wards, such as Jon Rogers who was interviewed by the previous team during their radio show.

Although we've not heard the recordings yet, the interviewing process seemed to go well with the candidates very happy to talk (it also gave them a chance for some practice before the event!) and some were really interested in the work we're doing. The CJs had prepared some questions before arriving and each candidate was asked the same questions, their confidence visibly grew during the evening.

The trainees also attended the event and one member, a Media Studies student, worked with First Born Creatives to video the event. There was a good sized and lively audience in the theatre with some very mixed responses to candidates statements - expressed through the use of red and green cards - red for disagree, green for support; failure of street cleaning contractors, drugs, relationships between community and councillors and train transport of nuclear waste through the ward were amongst the questions debated.

This type of event was new to some of the team, one of whom found the generic, often vague answers frustrating, but it was probably a fair representation of the British political system at work. The team will get a chance to follow up this theme at the election next week on May 2nd when they'll be based at City Hall, collecting some vox pops and probably finding more politicians to quiz.

Red cards of dissent in action

Before then, on Monday, we're also going to meet with Professor Alex Marsh and colleagues from Bristol University's School of Social Policy who will hopefully throw some more light on local political landscape for our citizen journalists, as they did so adeptly with our last group - a busy week to look forward to.

Here are the team at work...

Radio planning

Yesterday's session was held at the Ujima radio studios where most of the 3 hours was taken up with discussing content and planning the schedule for the radio show that the team will be delivering on May 9th.  However, as you can see from the previous post (and more photos below), the journalists did get a taster of live broadcasting for a 7 minute slot - little warning for them but they all responded really well, with Roger Griffith providing an outline of the project, David Goldblatt explaining the citizen journalism aspect and some of the participants talking about why they'd decided to join up.

Back round the table, Roger outlined the elements that make up most of Ujima's radio programmes, then through discussion with the team and David, each element was explained and expanded and topics for inclusion were vigorously debated - these include the appointment of Bristol's first Muslim mayor, the forthcoming local council elections and how the newly elected mayor and PCC are dealing with policing, transport and economic development and regeneration. How much of the show would be pre-recorded, what subjects would provide good vox pops material and who would be ideal to have as live guests on the show were also part of the conversation.

The result of all the talking was a good collection of potential material but further editing and refinement will be needed over the next few weeks, possible guest speakers must be contacted and decisions made about whether to do more than one programme. Parallel tasks will see each team member researching their selected topics and devising interview questions for a visit to University of Bristol academics with an interest in these fields.

During the course of the session each participant worked on a 'programme clock' (a pie-chart diagram of the radio show) with frequent amendments, additions and deletions along the way. But at the end of the session, with a growing sense of enthusiasm everyone had achieved a 'work in progress' clock chart and for many of the participants a much better understanding of how a radio programme is put together. One of the team said -

"This is my first time [planning a radio show] - it's a … challenge for me, a good challenge. I'm thinking it's something I can go forward to study, I really enjoyed it. I hope that by the end of it I will gain a lot of experience which will really help me as well to build up my own confidence…. I'm kind of shy but I think with this it's going to bring me out of my shell!" 

First time in the studio for the Citizen Journalism team at Ujima Radio.

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.