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.