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...