Click on the tweet clouds to enlarge.

Tweet stats for @Conservatives

Following: 19,730

Followers: 19,952

Tweets: 2,107

Favourite hash tag: #pmqs

twitter.com/Conservatives

Tweet stats for @UKLabour

Following: 10,414

Followers: 9.988

Tweets: 1,305

Favourite hashtag: #changewesee

twitter.com/UKLabour

Tweet stats for @libdems

Following: 8,206

Followers: 8,471

Tweets: 998

Favourite hashtag: #votelibdem

twitter.com/libdems

Tweet stats for @TheGreenParty

Following: 2,804

Followers: 7,711

Tweets: 1,318

Favourite hashtag: #Brighton

twitter.com/TheGreenParty

Most backfiring Twitter campaign

#ivenevervotedtorybefore prompted responses such as “…because they’re the cream of society – and like cream they’re rich, thick and full of clots” from @martinmcgrath and “…before but could be convinced to, if it was only them and the BNP on the ballot” from @andyvglnt.

A response came in the #ivenevervotedlabourbefore which included tweets like “…because I don’t like watching the endless erosion of my civil liberties” from @notstevemcqueen. “…because I want the state to work for me, not the other way around” @stephenhallam.

By Anna Leach

Tweets were taken from a one month period from 20 January to 20 February 2010.

Whilst this sort of extortion is pretty rare, what’s not uncommon is the exploitation of those seeking to get a break in the media.

The NUJ’s recent survey of those currently doing work experience revealed that almost 25 per cent of people entering the industry were doing unpaid work experience for more than three months at a time. That’s not work experience, that’s work. And it’s unlawful.

I remember my work experience days well. I learned how to make a serviceable cup of tea but I also learned many valuable career skills that are with me to this day. I shadowed senior reporters in council, court and at sports events; sat with subs to learn their craft; was shown the ropes by photographers.

Work experience is an invaluable way to gain the practical hands-on experience required to secure that crucial first job. But this should never mean months of unpaid exploitation at the hands of wealthy employers enjoying cheap or free labour.

If it does it creates barriers to becoming a journalist. Only those wealthy or well-connected enough can break in. Just three per cent of new entrants to journalism come from homes headed by unskilled workers and only four per cent come from ethnic minority backgrounds. Unpaid internships or the sale of work experience opportunities reinforce these barriers and journalism itself is poorer if the workforce fails to reflect the diverse communities that make up our society.

The NUJ remains dedicated to making work experience a chance to realise the dream of becoming a journalist, not a nightmare.

by Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the NUJ

“I hesitate to even call them documentaries”, says award-winning director David Goldsmith. He is looking out of the window of his seventh floor flat at the top of Highgate Hill in north London. From where he stands there is a panoramic view of the city. His living room is decorated with photographs telling a history of his filmmaking. It is the perfect setting for a documentary maker of Goldsmith’s calibre.

He has been working in the industry for over 40 years for BBC, ITV and ITN. It was here that he won a BAFTA covering the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege. His book, The Documentary Makers: 20 Interviews with the Best in the Business, published in 2003, is a must read for anyone with a passion for the craft.

Short form documentaries – the new type of storytelling

But Goldsmith is concerned that online short-form documentaries are damaging the way we consume video media. Now, audiences will only sit through five minute snippets, and Goldsmith is worried this will permanently change the filmmaking process.

Short form documentaries are a new type of storytelling. They have emerged as newspapers have increased their multimedia output in a declining print market. Longer films, for Storyville or Dispatches for example, would use long shots, landscapes, music and montages to tell a narrative over an hour. But online films do not allow for this. They rarely exceed 10 minutes, have lower production costs, and rely heavily on voiceover. Short form caters for an audience’s increasingly short attention span, and it has been championed by online editors as an exciting innovation, and an essential tool.

But Goldsmith doesn’t accept this as an explanation for the demise of long form. He argues that short form is pandering to our penchant for bite-size media, a quick fix, which has a much lower production standard than was once required. “Documentary making,” he says, gesturing dramatically with his hands, “was once seen as the means of communicating aspects of life in all its guises, using a pretty wide range of techniques.”

The media is changing

He believes that these practices are suffering because of the way the media is changing. “We’ve now moved into what is “dramatic” because TV demands it. So the short form is one hell of a compromise. It’s an absurdity in a way.

“Somebody gets an idea or a commission for doing something and they stick a camera on their helmet or whatever, and this constitutes a documentary. This to my mind is a passive form of documentary making: it’s too easy.”

Over 3,000 miles away in New York, filmmaker Albert Maysles is telling a similar story. Once called “the best American cameraman” by Jean-Luc Goddard, Maysles’ filmography includes portraits of Marlon Brando (1965), Orson Welles (1966) and an indelible study of American aristocrats living in squalor, Grey Gardens (1976). He is still working at the age of 84.

He praises the modern toys associated with short form, such as featherweight cameras and cheaper recording equipment: “The cameras are lighter and cause less obtrusion, the tape runs for an hour instead of only 10 minutes and it costs $3 or $4 an hour instead of several thousand for the ten minutes of film.” But for Maysles, the problems come back to the narrative. He says filmmakers now want to spoon feed audiences with commentary, rather than letting the viewer use their imagination – something the longer form champions.

Losing your concentration

Maysles believes that when it’s difficult to show what is happening through visuals alone, new filmmakers are resorting to narration. “Documentary is at its best when stories are captured directly without narration or host,” he says. “There is a great opportunity to humanise by way of the video media, but not enough effort is directed that way.”

Heavy narration is an inevitable part of an online film in which everything has to be communicated quickly. Most film-makers agree that audiences don’t have the concentration for long-form content on the internet.

According to Jakob Nielsen, one of the world’s leading experts in online behavioural studies and website usability, this is a result of our declining attention span:

“After one second online, users get impatient and notice that they’re waiting for a slow computer to respond. The longer the wait, the more this impatience grows; and, after about 10 seconds, the average attention span is maxed out.”

Fast media

Long-form documentaries therefore struggle to work online compared to their younger, cooler brother. Nielsen calls the television experience “passive”: we lean back and consume the programme the way the director wants. Conversely, online is an “active” experience, in which we lean forward and can change direction at any time, with one click of the mouse. Nielsen says that when watching television programmes we make decisions between every thirty minutes and two hours, and sit back and absorb. However, with online content we make a decision on average between every 10 and 120 seconds, constantly jumping between pages and websites.

“The velocity of media consumption has increased dramatically,” Nielsen continues. “Readers no longer linger over lovingly described passages. They click here, they click there, they click everywhere. But they don’t stay. With online, the means of production are in everybody’s hands.”

So does this mean that there is no artistry in short forms?

In Colombia’s capital, Bogota, freelance journalist Matthew Bristow has just finished a two-year project on the Colombian drugs trade. It cost somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 to make, and was shot on a low-cost, compact camera. The three-part series of films, the first of which was shown on BBC’s Newsnight, was subsequently snapped up by the Guardian. They are all under 10 minutes long.

Using video to make a living

Bristow agrees that they took a different kind of skill to long form, but considering the miniscule costs and his lack of training, he feels that they are still of value: “I’ve never been to film school or anything like that, and I don’t know much about documentaries. I’m just a reporter who bought a Sony Z1 and learnt Final Cut Pro.

“It’s getting much harder to make a living from print journalism, which is one reason a lot of us have moved into video. All the advertising revenue has moved to things like Google, so they are cutting costs, and shutting their foreign bureaus. Now newspapers and magazines are increasingly asking for video to accompany print stories, which is what I’m trying to get to grips with.”

Someone who supports Bristow’s efforts is Michael Tait, the Guardian’s multimedia editor. He is frustrated that people slate short-form documentaries.

Short chapters work online

For Tait, short-form multimedia content is a vital part of an ongoing business model for newspapers: “A lot of the old guard, in their 50s and 60s, are showing examples of old conservatism. In many ways they are showing that they don’t have the imagination to come up with the ideas themselves. It’s about new technology coming up against closed minds.”

Tait argues that telling the story in short chapters is vital. Online, people often won’t get halfway through a film because they get what Tait calls “snacked off”.

He explains: “If it doesn’t absolutely demand my attention then I’m going to go somewhere else and look at something else. You’ll find with online films there’s voiceover, there’s very fast exposition straight into a story without placing the onus on the viewer.”

Is short form more democratic?

Despite claims over the last 15 years that the documentary is dying, Tait is optimistic about the shift towards short form: “People say there is always a funding crisis and there’s always a lack of will on the part of the broadcasters, but I think there are actually more documentaries, there’s certainly more factual TV.”

Tait is also a proponent of the democratic power of the short form and its ability to give access to technical skills so people can broadcast themselves. “This is an explosion in the ability of anybody to make a film,” he adds. “It doesn’t mean they are going to make a good film, but they can make it.”

Or just the aftermath of the recession?

At City University, Chris Brauer, head of online journalism for the MA programme, is reluctant to call short form the future. He explains that cost has had a huge impact on the way that media is presented to people now; and cheaper, shorter films are affecting visual journalism practices in the same way that investigative reporting has been rocked by the economic downturn.

Shorter formats are constantly being created, such as 12-second TV and Twitter, but Brauer sees this as a modern phenomenon. “It’s a ‘much of the times’ situation, where all of these technologies have emerged at the same time. It does speak to the culture of communication in 2010 but it doesn’t necessarily speak to a culture of communication that will endure.”

According to Brauer the increasing importance of documentaries at film festivals such as Sundance, shows that long form is still relevant when it comes to the big screen: “It could well be that long form documentary in the practice of journalism is on the wane, but then there has to be the opportunity for that format to adapt itself for public presentations.

“Stories can be told in multiple fashions. It lies with the viewer to interpret what’s being communicated in the format.”

Back in north London, Goldsmith concedes that some short-form work has an artistic quality and that it is encouraging budding filmmakers to engage with the craft. While it does not allay his fears, he is still convinced that there may be a future for the long form after all.

“It is the responsibility of the younger generation to get round this problem,” he says. “You’ve got to push the standard, got to find a way of beating the system.”

by JP Watson

Xcity magazine have some independent magazine stores so you can still stock up on your favourite glossy.

If you have a suggestion that’s not on the map, please email it to elliebroughton at gmail.com to see it added.

View The UK’s Best Magazine Shops in a larger map

Magma
117-119 Clerkenwell Road
London, EC1R 5BY
020 7242 9503

Magma
8 Earlham Street
London, WC2H 9RY
020 7240 8498

Rococo
12 Elgin Crescent
London, W11 2HX
020 7727 5209

Cornerhouse
70 Oxford Street
Manchester, M1 5NH
0161 200 1500

News Cafe
1 Ship Street
Oxford, OX1 3DA
01865 242 317

Rare and Racy
164-166 Devonshire Street
Sheffield, S3 7SG
0114 270 1916
rareandracy.co.uk

Magma
22 Oldham Street
Manchester, Lancashire, M1 1JN
0161 236 8777

Here
108 Stokes Croft
Bristol, BS1 3RU
0117 942 2222
thingsfromhere.co.uk

Here and Now Gallery
41A Killigrew St
Falmouth, TR11 3PW
01326 211 505
heregallery.co.uk

Baltic
South Shore Road
Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, NE8 3BA
0191 478 1810
balticmill.com

Guru-Murthy was 18 when he began working in broadcasting.

“The temptation when you start out is to be really aggressive,” he says. “You think it’s the way to get noticed. But the more you do it you realise that’s not very wise.

“With some interviews you have to be confrontational and authoritative, other times you have to tease. There is no point in being a one-trick pony. You see that with Paxman himself. It’s a misreading that he is always tough, he doesn’t always duff people up.”

“I spent the first 10 years of my career trying to prove to people running newsrooms that I was a grown-up”, he recalls. He went to Kashmir as a 19-year-old to do a BBC documentary and at 22, was sent to Croatia and Bosnia to cover the war. “I think it was quite hard because I was essentially a kid. I had to work hard to be taken seriously.”

Two years later he persuaded BBC bosses to let him work as a producer on Newsnight, for which he took a massive pay cut. He established himself as a political interviewer during the 1992 elections, and moved to Channel 4 in 1998.

Tough interviews

He admits that some of the toughest interviews are with ideologically strong people who have a very clear idea of what message to communicate.

“They’re a challenge but fantastic fun,” he says. “Animal rights activists are a classic example and Abu Hamza, the now jailed extremist Muslim preacher, also had a very strong idea of what message he wanted to get out.”

Another tough interview was Holocaust denier David Irving, who he interviewed around the time he had made racist comments about Trevor McDonald. “When you’re dealing with someone like Irving, who is no fool, you’ve got to be on your toes and not let the interview veer off.”

Who is media savvy?
According to Guru-Murthy, it is not just public figures and politicians who have become more media savvy. It’s also the public, who can spot tricks and ploys on both sides. “If you stick to one particular interview technique it can become terribly stagnant,” he says. “You constantly need to think of new ways of putting the questions.”

One interview that stands out was with Labour MP Jim Devine, who was barred from standing at the election after reports that he claimed expenses for work on his home by a non-existent firm. Guru-Murthy interviewed him on 5 February, the day he was told he faced two charges of false accounting for submitting fake receipts for the sum of £5,500. This was claimed for stationery but actually used for staff wages.

“I decided to take him through exactly what had happened. I wasn’t trying to be hard on him, just find out exactly what he had done, and quite remarkably, he told us. That is quite rare.”

Dreaming of Obama
His dream interview would be with President Obama: “He’s such a pivotal figure. I have never seen an interview where he has said something that surprised me, but you’d probably get more candour out of him after the end of his presidency. I’d like to do a Frost/Nixon – sit down with him for days and go through the life and times of his presidency in great detail.”

Guru-Murthy would like to do the same with Gordon Brown. “What we haven’t seen yet is him talking about his real position within the Labour movement and his popularity. That’s what everyone wants to get to but he doesn’t want to discuss that.”

He almost managed it when he quizzed Brown about the bullying allegations made by Observer journalist Andrew Rawnsley two days after our interview. “Do you get angry with your staff, do you swear at them?” he asked. Brown denied the allegations.

He continued: “Do you throw things? Have you ever hit anyone? Pushed? Shoved them?” His technique was enough to make Brown attempt that awkward smile.

by Lisa Kjellsson

Harper, a reporter for the Mail on Sunday, won £5,000 as part of the prize. The judges described him as “a story-setter in the true sense of old fashioned reporting”.

Decca Aitkenhead (newspaper, 1995) was named Interviewer of the Year, scooping the prize for a piece on Alistair Darling published in the Guardian in August 2008. It was described as “an agenda-setter” which “threw Downing Street into chaos, knocked millions off the stock market and set the tone for the rest of the year’s economic news”.

Stephen Foley (newspaper, 1999) won the Business and Finance Journalist of the Year award. He received special praise for his reporting and analysis, and ability to make finance more accessible to the general reader.

Three City alumni have been shortlisted for the British Press Awards 2010. Ian Birrell (newspaper, 1985) is up for the Columnist of the Year award for his column in The Independent. John Arlidge (newspaper, 1991) has been nominated for Feature Writer of the Year for his work for The Sunday Times and Jon Swaine (newspaper, 2007) has been put forward for his work as a reporter at The Daily Telegraph.

PTC Magazine Academy awards 2009
Last year’s magazine students were highly commended for their real-life magazine Tell! in the 2009 PTC Magazine Academy awards.

Editor Chris Hall said: “We were all very pleased with what we’d created but weren’t sure that the judges would fully get it, as it was a bit of an unusual idea. On the other hand, who wouldn’t want a magazine that had clowns, astronauts, house boats, bog snorkeling, naked clubbing and jelly sculpture all in the same issue?.”

Hall, who now works for the Mail on Sunday’s Live magazine, also won a highly commended award for a magazine concept that he and fellow students developed in the first term.

The PTC’s New Journalist Awards 2009 also brought success for City magazine MA grads. Gabrielle Jaffe (magazine, 2009) won Most Promising Student and Katie Jacobs (magazine, 2009) was highly commended in the same category.

Gary Younge – James Cameron Memorial Award
The Guardian feature writer and columnist Gary Younge (newspaper, 1993) won the James Cameron Memorial Award in October 2009.
He was awarded the prize for his reporting during the American presidential election.

Younge, who is based in New York, took a personal angle in his reporting of the election, recording the views of various communities and people at the prospect of a black president.

The prize, hosted annually by City University, is bestowed to journalists who have “combined moral vision and professional integrity”, and is given in memory of the renowned foreign correspondent and author, James Cameron, who died in 1985.

High praise for Heather Brooke in MPs’ expenses scandal
Honorary Visiting Fellow Heather Brooke was named Political Reformer of the Year 2009 by think tank Reform. She was awarded the title for her leading role in the MPs’ expenses saga.

Brooke waged a five year campaign for the full disclosure of MPs’ expenses. She first requested details of MPs’ expenses in October 2004 through a House of Commons freedom of information request. After this was denied she tried again until the High Court ruled that the details be made public in May 2008. This ruling was the driving force behind the resulting reform of the parliamentary expense system.

The details were subsequently revealed in a series of articles in The Daily Telegraph published from May 2009. Ms Brooke said of the scandal and her reasons for pursuing her FOI requests: “Anyone making a claim on the public purse must be prepared to put forward their receipts to justify their expenses and to make those receipts public.”

Brooke’s contribution was also acknowledged at the British Press Awards 2010, where she received a specially created award.

Merja Myllylahti – Best Paper
Merja Myllylahti (electronic publishing, 2008) won “best paper” at the International Symposium for Online Journalism in Austin, Texas, in April last year, for work completed as part of her MA project.

The paper, co-written with City academic Neil Thurman, analyses changes that have taken place at Finnish newspaper Taloussanomat since it stopped printing in 2007 to become Europe’s first online only newspaper.

Myllylahti’s work has been covered by publications such as The Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and The Independent.
This is the second consecutive year that the prize has gone to a City electronic publishing student.

Annabel Symington – John Ivinson Memorial Prize winner
Annabel Symington (international, 2009) was awarded the John Ivinson Memorial Prize for Freedom of Expression at the annual World Press Freedom Day Student Journalism Competition.

Symington was awarded the prize for her article on the press coverage of the fighting in Gaza last year, after she spent several weeks there at the beginning of the conflict.

She said: “I won the prize for a piece I wrote about a topic that I felt was being ignored by the mainstream media. It was a huge honour to have an article that I felt so strongly about recognised and applauded by UNESCO.”

Etan Smallman – TH!NK About It
Etan Smallman (newspaper, 2009) beat 80 bloggers from around Europe to win the TH!NK About It blogging competition last year.

Smallman’s blog featured political campaigning in the UK ahead of the European MEP elections, and he was awarded a Mac laptop for winning the competition.
He said: “It was particularly gratifying that the British bloggers as a group did so well, considering that the UK is usually thought to be apathetic and ignorant about European politics.”

Blogs written by Kat Bishop and David Christopher (newspaper, 2009) were also rated highly for quality and the pair won iPhones for their work.
All of the TH!INK About It bloggers had to submit one post a month to the site, commenting on European politics.

BSME awards 2009
City University alumni swept the board at last year’s British Society of Magazine Editors awards (BSMEs), with three Editor of the Year wins.
Empire editor Mark Dinning (BA journalism, 1999) won the category of Best Entertainment and Celebrity Magazine. Editor of Money Week, John Stepek (periodical, 2003), won the Fiona Macpherson New Editor of the Year award, and editor of The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, Ed Grenby (periodical, 1998), won the Lifestyle Magazines category.

Samira Ahmed – Broadcast of the Year
Channel 4 newsreader and reporter Samira Ahmed (newspaper, 1990) won Stonewall’s Broadcast of the Year award for her report “Corrective Rape in South Africa”.

The awards, from lesbian, gay and bisexual charity Stonewall, celebrate those who have made a positive impact on the lives of LGBT people each year. The report followed the rape and murder of South African female football star Eudy Simelane.

Tania Hershman – Orange Award for New Writers
Tania Hershman (periodical, 1994) was commended in the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. Her book The White Road and Other Stories is her first collection of short stories and includes original fiction as well as stories based on articles she wrote for the New Scientist.

Last year Hershman was also highly commended for both Biscuit Publishing’s 2009 Flash Fiction competition and Aesthetica Creative Works competition 2009. She was also nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize and won both the Binnacle Ultra Short competition and the Total Beast Six-Minute Play Competition.

by Becky Seales, Jasmine Phillips, Jessica Baron, and Alex Saggers

As the woman on the ground for UNICEF in Haiti, Roshan Khadivi (international, 2000) has come along way from City’s journalism department on St John Street.

In her role as media and external relations officer for UNICEF, she formed part of an emergency team. Putting her City training into practice, she gathered data and information from the field and fed it to visiting journalists and to news desks in London, New York and around the world.

The UNICEF office was damaged as a result of the earthquake. Khadivi said: “I had to sleep and work in tiny tents on the rocks next to the airport”.

She said: “As a communication officer all my journalistic skills were required: you have to know the issues, you have to know your audience and try to bring the stories to them.”

Khadivi helps journalists gather their own information: “I organised field visits to the UNICEF project sites, which many journalists might not be aware of or do not have access to, so that part of the story can be covered.” UNICEF projects include child protection, education, health, such as vaccination and distribution of medical supplies and nutrition as well as water sanitation and hygiene.

Khadavi isn’t the only alumna reporting from natural disasters this year.

Fiona Scott (international, 2010) wrote about the Chilean Earthquake in February, when she was visiting her family in Santiago. “I was supposed to come back to London on the Saturday, but got stuck in Chile” she said. “So I decided the least I could do was help push as much information out there as possible.”

She said that writing about a country’s tragedy while experiencing that tragedy first hand is “the best way to do it. The only way to really get a sense for what’s going on is to see and in this case feel it for yourself.”

By Jessica Baron

It’s 2005. YouTube, Twitter and Facebook haven’t been invented, blogs are only read by geeks, and WebCameron isn’t even a twinkle in the Conservative Party’s eye. It’s the General Election and social media doesn’t exist.

Five years on and the digital landscape is very different. Some 50 million tweets and 55 million Facebook posts are created every day. The major political blogs all have traffic in the thousands. Gordon Brown’s smiley YouTube video, and others in a similar vein, amass countless hits.

Messages of 140 characters or fewer are in vogue and Sky News considers new digital platforms important enough to employ a designated Social Media Correspondent. So what impact will these new platforms have on the way the 2010 General Election is reported? Will it be “The Tweet Wot Won It”?

Bloggers’ political conversation

Undeniably, new media platforms act as news sources, informing inquiry and providing stories. Political editor for the Guardian, Patrick Wintour, openly acknowledges this influence. “Social media will break stories that will be picked up by mainstream media,” he says. A prime example was Andrew Marr asking Gordon Brown about his use of anti-depressants – this was based on a rumour started in the blogosphere.

As Westminster officials fine-tune plans to allow certain bloggers into Parliament, their part in the political conversation cannot be denied. Once dismissed as web geeks, they are now considered experts. Guido Fawkes, author of the gossipy right-leaning blog, is regularly asked for comment. “Political punditry is no longer opinion formers from newspapers, but bloggers,” he says.

For his blog, Fawkes reads over 300 RSS feeds a day. Bloggers have the time to get stories that journalists can’t. Adam Bienkov, author of Tory Troll, regularly finds scoops by meticulously reading paperwork. For instance, over the Downing Street bullying allegations, Bienkov exposed the Conservative bias of the National Bullying Helpline, undermining the BBC story.

The power of Twitter

Can Twitter, with sound bites of a mere 140 characters, compete with the blogs? Alberto Nardelli, director of Tweetminster – a site that condenses tweet feeds to give stats and graphs – thinks it’s more powerful. He calls Twitter “open, messy, conversational and essential”.

“It has more reach and distribution, and so ultimately more influence,” he says. His site measures levels of public interest, and shows which topics are hot and who is saying what around issues of the day. Hashtags, which flag up different themes, opinions or jokes, such as “#CashGordon” or “#I’veNeverVotedToryBecause” highlight what people are tweeting about most globally. The anti-Tory hashtag was one of the top 10 most popular subjects worldwide; as the Conservatives launched their new ad campaign, tens of thousands of people around the world launched anti-Tory tirades with this hashtag.

A “live” campaign

This is the real difference afforded by new media platforms. 2010 will be a “live” campaign. As Matthew Macgregor, director of Blue State Digital, the company that ran Obama’s digital campaign, said, “politicians are always on”. The immediacy of social networks means that mistakes are both more visible and more audible. We have already seen numerous examples of politicians rashly pressing ‘send’ or ‘share’, leaving their spin department reeling.

Take Labour MP David Wright’s tweet that Conservatives are “scum-sucking” and the media furore that followed. That’s the “gotcha” moment which follows each faux-pas. As political journalism expert Professor Ivor Gaber puts it, “every time a politician makes a gaffe, someone will be on hand to record it and upload it somewhere.” There is enormous scope for opportunistic people to capture politicians. This means that rather than there just being a hundred or so voices from the Westminster village, there are thousands or millions.

Ruth Barnett, social media correspondent for Sky, thinks this will be decisive: “I hope web users and voters will change the face of election reporting – by using their phone to break news or capture a must-see moment on video.” There are countless ways to virally spread this information. One such example is Eye Spy MP, the Twitter feed that “crowd sources” political gossip.

Unreliable

But who is behind Eye Spy MP, and how much of it can be believed, is unknown. This is the danger with all new media. It is considerably less reliable than mainstream platforms. Twitter and Facebook are particularly risky. Last year newspapers were fooled into reporting that David Milliband tweeted about the death of Michael Jackson, and they splashed his words over the front pages. Twitter demands rigorous checking. Rather than coming from an attributed source, there is just a name on a screen. “It is not a wire service,” says Sky News political correspondent Niall Paterson, “even though a lot of people use it that way”.

“The reality is that in the UK social media in its complete infancy,” adds Paterson. Its unreliability means that people will continue to look to conventional outlets for their election news. And although there is a lot of talk about new media, and the number of daily tweets is staggering, it is not at all hard to find large numbers of people who have no interest in or knowledge of social networking. According to a study by YouGov, most of the 5.5 million people who use the micro-blogging service are likely to come from a lower social class, live in London and be “defensive of civil liberties”.

Not a huge impact

So other than a few more scoops and a better understanding of what interests the public, will this election be any different from the last? Even digital pioneer MacGregor admits:

“It will not have the impact people are expecting.”

It’s unlikely that we will have an all-American election won by social media. Brown and Cameron haven’t quite perfected the YouTube charisma of Barack Obama and the British public are yet to fully put their trust in Twitter. It might just be the beginning for new media but it certainly marks a momentous change in election reporting for the future.

By Sarah Baldwin

Under plans for the year starting September 2011 journalists on print courses will be taught broadcast skills, such as speaking to camera and editing. At the same time broadcast students will switch and be given a month-long course in how to write news and features. Some of the students from the international MA are also expected to complete the new multi-skilling course.

This model closely resembles the approach taken by American schools for post-graduate journalism such as Berkeley, where all incoming students learn to report through video, audio, and online mediums.

The move is one of several changes to the MA journalism programme at City designed to meet the media industry’s demand for multi-skilled journalists. Other changes include a new “entrepreneurial” module being considered for 2010, in which students will be taught business skills and how to make money from setting up their own media businesses, such as online magazines or smart phone apps. There will also be a new 24-hour online news and feature service – a hyperlocal news website.

George Brock, Head of Journalism, said of the developments: “We need to adapt to a world in which the balance between media may shift quite dramatically. Resilience and versatility must be our watchwords.

“It is increasingly likely that graduates emerging from City will be required to be multi-channel journalists. The job market isn’t what it was, and the chances that our graduates will work freelance or in smaller organisations are higher than they once were. We have to make sure we give students the skills to do this.”

Journalism MA programme director Barbara Rowlands said the different MA journalism pathways – such as magazines – would remain distinct for the moment because the industry still sees a distinction between the different skills each dicipline requires.

She said: “City is known for producing students with good traditional skills, but we’re moving forward – as staff we’re very excited about the changes.”
Media commentator and former Guardian editor Peter Preston said he believed students might struggle to become entirely multi-skilled, but praised Brock’s emphasis on a wide skill base.

He said: “Quite a lot of research shows that journalism students, and therefore the journalists of the future, can’t be equally at home doing print, broadcast and digital. There’s usually a weak link. But they can be exceptionally skilled at handling two areas of expertise – and how do you know which two until you’ve tried all three?”

The focus on multimedia work looks likely to culminate in the creation of a free-standing interactive journalism MA for September 2011. In the shorter term, course directors are being encouraged to embed online skills at every opportunity.

In another change, next year’s students will see their news stories about Camden or Islington posted straight onto a hyperlocal news website – a move inspired by the “teaching hospital” approach to journalism education pioneered at Columbia University.

Rowlands denied that existing modules on the larger print and broadcast courses would be scaled down in favour of entrepreneurial and online components. Instead, she suggested that teaching might have to go on further into the summer term, in which MA projects are usually written.

Brock said the plans for course reforms are not dependent on government funding. He believes that the journalism department is well placed to avoid significant financial cuts, despite concerns over possible reductions in Government funding to universities.

He said: “While the university at large will need to correct its running deficits, we are in pretty good financial shape, so we should come under relatively little pressure.”

By Becky Seales

A maximum limit has been placed on the number of students being allowed onto City journalism courses. This follows record applications and admissions this year.

The department currently serves 635 students – including publishing and undergraduate journalism – which is up by about 35 on the previous year.

The new group of students set things off to a rocky start in October, when the programmes began, pushing the department to its limit.

The fire brigade were called out to a public administration lecture in the first term after complaints that the room was over-filled. Students without seats were forced to sit on the floor in the aisles causing a potential fire risk.

Head of journalism, Professor George Brock said: “We have discovered that this is the maximum number of students we can cope with. In fact, the ideal number is just a little bit below this.”

He added: “If a group no longer fits into a classroom, it’s a crisis”

Despite applications running higher than ever before at this point, Brock stated that there will not be room for any more students.

He said: “We are not in a position to open up more places. It certainly won’t be above 635 next year.”

The course hardest hit was the international MA, as the majority of the extra students were accepted into this programme.

Lorena Fernandez, International MA student representative, said: “Initially, it felt like they didn’t have the structure for the programme. We had several teachers for the same class, and some classes seemed way too general – like they were just trying to fill a space.”

She said that the programme had found its feet again but added: “If they took fewer people they might make a better course.”

The increased size of the international course resulted in the students being split into more groups than usual.

International MA course director, Heather Purdey said: “There are now students from 25 different countries on the course. I had to completely re-vamp the timetable at very short notice, find larger rooms, and hire more tutors. It took a lot of work, but it’s turned out well.”

by Jasmine Phillips