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.