Ian Anderson visits Winchester University

Today we were given the amazing opportunity to have an editor of the bbc 10 'o'clock news give us feedback on our news packages. As frightening as that sounds, it was not all that scary because it is always really great to hear from a range of people in the Journalism industry, its the our only way to absorb as much information as we can about what it is really like, before we get thrown out into the big scary world.

Ian, who has been at the BBC for more than 20 years, started his Journalism career on his college newspaper. Admitedly he says that he started paying more attention to that than his course. He started out at the BBC in production, helping to produce the 6pm and 10pm bulletins and went on to take a role as editor of the 10 o'clock news where he led a team.

He spoke about the importance of the news agenda, checking the papers, the news diary and the offers of stories that would come in every morning.

Ian suggests that if we have an "intrinsic interest" and "want to tell other people stories" then journalism is the industry to be in.

To be effective we must act as a sponge, be open and available so that people want to tell us a story.

Talking about work experience, his opinion is that the best training that is available to us is in local news, whether that is newspapers, radio or television.

Ian placed particular emphasis on the word 'recognition'. Recognise what separates you from everyone else. Be an antena for news, pick up information wherever you are and make something of it!

veryone is just trying to work out what it all means in order to explain the world.

Final Cut Pro Training.

Yesterday we had training on the editing software 'Final Cut Pro'.
Chris Horrie made notes and posted them on the Winchester Journalism message board, they are really helpful, explaining how to 'capture', work on and edit your clips.
My notes are a bit of a disaster and barely legible so check out Chris's notes:

http://journalism.winchester.ac.uk/?page=102

A taste of the good stuff!

Today's Sun covers the story of the young Liverpool footy fan who threw his inflatable beach ball onto the pitch during Saturday's game.
We had been discussing the legal actions that could be taken if this boy could be identified, as he could be the target of abuse etc. but luckily his face is pixelated in the picture featured in the 'Goals' pull-out.
However, I noticed shortly after, that on page 15 of the news the Sun have used the same picture without pixelating the boys face. We thought this was interesting and our lecturer suggested that we persue this by contacting the Guardian.
A fellow student phoned up the news desk and was given an email address, to which he emailed the information about the Sun to and a few hours later he had received a reply and a £30 tip fee.
Real-life journalism in action and all it took was a flick through the Sun.

The Web. Monday's lecture.

Blogs! Blogs! Blogs! I think we've all finally seen the light and the importance of our blogs. It's taken a year to sink in and after mondays lecture with Chris there is now no excuse why our blogs can't be optimized to the max. We will defeat google.
What now?...
- Keep track of traffic to my blog.
- Link Bait - what can i add to my blog in order to pull in the punters? Youtube.com is excellent link bait.
- Form Follows Function.
- Alexa.com - excellent way of tracking websites and their popularity. Added the toolbar function.
- SEO - 'Search Engine Optimization'
- SERP - 'Search Engine Return Position'

We also learnt a bit about Google. We now know that it doesn't 'search' the entire web because it doesn't actually have 'all' the answers, as much as we'd like to believe in the power of Google and is in fact just a massive filling system. The Google index can only return information that is within the google search engine.
'Spiders' also featured largely in the lecture; the metaphorical term for the computer programme used to analyse web pages to see what it's all about before adding it to the Google Index.
Spider's also spot the URL, so if it's an 'ac.uk' its a winner because it proves it's a legitimate site. Google likes this. (e.g 'Journalism' in the title may help.)

- On-page SEO (tags, video, pictures...etc.)
- Off-page SEO (other sites, links...etc.)

Keyword density - our blogs should constantly be appealing to the 'Spiders' by using relavant keywords and using them repeatedly throughout. (But not too much!) Approximately 5% should be about the topic that you wish to be returned in a 'search'.

-Meta tags - do not make irrelevant to content.
-Pictures! Alt tags, attribute text.
- Domain names - 'MaxineErasmus.com'...hmm..
- SEOworkers.com
- HTML - coding.

We have to get high ranking sites to link to our page. (e.g wikipedia; if i write an article that relates to a topic on wiki. i can add my url to the page, can be risky as anyone can remove me but will give it a go.)
Also, other students can link to us, other universities (e.g City University), if we contact other bloggers who's blogs appeal to us we can 'Comment Spam' and add our URL, its one sided but it's still a link!
- Submit site to other directories; Yahoo, Bing.

- Add a Glossery? - a list of terms specific to a topic of interest or hobby; this is another way that will enable links and SEO.

Book - 'Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity' by Jakob Nielson.

Photojournalism!
Always be aware of lighting.Outside is best.

Two types of picture.
1. Point picture, i.e mugshot, helps with positive identification. (e.g 'David Smith has been charged with murder' - more than one David Smith, a picture can help clarification of identity.)
2. Action picture. (Does what it says on the tin.)
- Explicit consent - agrees but can later deny.
- Implicit - posed, happy about it.

Now I just have to put it all into practice.