At University of Bristol's School of Social Policy

Back at Bristol University's School of Social Policy again (see post about the first part of Bristol Mayor Watch project ) with Professor Alex Marsh and Dr David Sweeting to learn about how Bristol is run - the mayor, the council, the councillors. 

Pleased to see some homework has been done before the session by our citizen journalist team (they'd been sent links to profiles of Alex and Dave and to their blogs and areas of research - see links below) so there are some good questions about elections, housing and social policy in general - the responses noted and Tweeted to @BSmayorwatch.

Alex Marsh and Dave Sweeting

Now there's an elected Mayor the relationship between the Mayor and councillors will make a difference so the outcomes of the forthcoming election (next week) is a topic under scrutiny from both within and outside Bristol.

Transport is one issue that the academics have focused on for this session as it's such a hot topic in Bristol but perhaps the most revealing information was a graph known as The Jaws of Death, that clearly illustrates the huge cuts in the city's expenditure that the Mayor will have to make in the near future.

Some of the team aren't familiar with the British political system and found it a really interesting session and they'd all learned something new about Bristol's governance - the election process, what councils are and aren't responsible for, the structure of the council - one person felt the information would 'help me to develop myself more'

New insights into the hierarchies of the city were also discovered - one team member felt the amount of power the elected Mayor holds is underestimated by many, and no-one yet knows how much impact the council will have over the decisions he makes. Another of our trainees had come to understand during this session what an important role influence has within the process of implementing policy; who will have the most influence once the new councillors are elected? Well it may take some time for this to become evident but we'll be reporting on the elections from the City Hall later this week with further Tweets and blog posts by the team on the Bristol Mayor Watch blog.

These are links to information on or blogs by our excellent hosts at University of Bristol this evening, Professor Alex Marsh and Dr David Sweeting

http://www.alexsarchives.org/about/

http://alex-marsh.net/index.php/about-my-research

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/sps/people/alex-d-marsh/overview.html

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/sps/people/david-w-sweeting/index.html

http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/Elected-mayor-role-bring-stability/story-15968038-detail/story.html#axzz2SG4gJpRy

http://bristolcivicleadership.net/

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...

Session 4 - real interviews and social media

Some shuffling of the schedule has been necessary for this and next week since an opportunity came up for our trainee citizen journalists to attend next week's Local Councillor’s question time, an event at The City Academy on Thursday 25th April  for residents of Lawrence Hill and Ashley wards. Paul Hassan has been in touch with the organisers, Easton and Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Management, to arrange for our team to interview some of the candidates for these two wards (as we did last year at the Trinity hustings for the Mayoral election) and they agreed, a really good chance for the team to put into practice what they’ve been learning over the last few sessions - doing some solid research and devising some searching and focused questions for their interviewees.

However, the original plan for next week had been a visit to Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone - BTQEZ to meet some of the movers and shakers and get our crew to interview them to include in the radio show. This week’s session was to focus, with guidance from Gez Smith, on social media and its role in politics and democracy. Gez was also going to look at developing skills in writing posts for blogs and shorter pieces for Twitter.

When you're setting up a workshop project like this, it can be a challenge to achieve the balance in structure between a strong and well-thought through framework and an overly rigid format. Through this clash in the timetable we had the chance to test the flexibility of our planning - it would have been a shame to ignore a good opportunity and fortunately we’re also working with some flexible people. Earlier conversations and negotiations amongst ourselves paid off so it all worked out fine! Gez agreed to a truncated slot for the session and Paul managed to arrange for our BTQEZ  interviewees to come this week instead of next, and to come to Watershed to meet - and be scrutinised by - the CJ team. They’d done some research ‘homework’ and found out more about the Enterprise Zone  and the 3 people they would be interviewing, Paul Appleby responsible for Creative Skills in the Enterprise Zone, Councillor Guy Poultney - planning and regeneration in Enterprise Zone and Jonathan May - MD of Sponsorcraft and founder of the new Temple Quarter Enterprise Network. The team had some assistance on final preparations for the interview from Paul Hassan, Roger Griffith and David Goldblatt - and off they went...

Paul Applelby first interview

Paul's second interview

Jonathan May interviewed by the team

After the interviews the team told us what they thought of the process - what had they learnt, and what the challenges were; learning to speak more slowly and make a connection with the interviewee were the first points to work on for one of the team and a the biggest challenge for another was finding the right way to ask the questions to make sure you get the right answers, but she had enjoyed finding out how interviews are set up and conducted. Another participant realised that during an interview you are building a relationship with your subject so it's not necessary to put all your major questions at the start - you can build up the dialogue and get some final thoughts to round it off well.

Two of the participants felt they'd improved their interviewing skills and learnt more about composing questions but were also very interested in what they'd heard about the Enterprise Zone - neither knew about BTQEZ before they started on this project and they were particulalry enthusiastic about Jonathan May's Sponsorcraft - 'a crowdfunding platform that's for everyone in education'.

It's good to know that it wasn't just our trainees who were learning on the job - the whole BTQEZ project is new so our guests have only recently begun their work there and they too were pleased for the chance to respond to questions about the Zone to real interviewers. 

You’ll be able to hear extracts of these interviews on the radio show in May and we might try to include some longer versions on the participants’ new blog, which brings us neatly back to Gez Smith who has put this together for us at short notice and with very modest financial reward! But he assures us that since this is a subject close to his own heart this in itself provides satisfaction... the site is certainly a more than satisfactory solution for us to the problem that provoked the need for a replacement blogging platform.  

Gez's abbreviated slot at the end of the session as social media guide meant that he didn't get as much time to cover the topics as we’d hoped but the group were clearly interested to hear about his varied blogging exploits, and those of political bloggers like Guido Fawkes http://order-order.com/ and some good anecdotes about the workings, and failures, of social media provided some good insights; a Twitter confusion surrounding the recent demise of Margaret Thatcher is a salutory reminder of the caution required in the use of hashtags -  #nowthatcherisdead was apparently interpreted in the States as ‘Now That Cher is dead’, prompting a lively denial from the diva herself.

Gez Smith discussing social media

Nowthatwehaveaworkingblog is perhaps a Twitter hashtag we could start but hang on a few days before rushing over to view the blog and check our Twitter feed @BSmayorwatch as we have yet to add all the team as contributors, but hopefully they will be posting to it live from the Local Councillor’s question time next Thursday, so please check out the site then.

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.