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.
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.
