BEN BRYANT

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Yesterday I handed in my MA project, bringing the City course to a close. I think more than half the class have jobs now, and the ones that don't are on the lookout. Adam Westbrook wrote a post last month bemoaning the lack of entrepreneurs amongst would-be journalists. This is why I think neither I, nor my friends, will be going down that route.

1. It's really tough to make money - and there are lots of good reasons why you won't make money. Hard work and a slim likelihood that you'll even earn enough to make a living means that there are few incentives.

2. It's hard to get noticed and there are few short-term rewards. The web has had a democratising effect on the media to the extent that every outlet, whether it’s a blog or an international media company, must communicate via the same medium: a website. When the internet started, people thought that this would mean the end of the hegemony of the big media brands. But that isn’t what’s happened. In reality, those brands have become more powerful, and court more readers than ever. The reason is that in the cacophony of voices vying for attention on the internet, users need reliable sources for news and comment. They will tend to gravitate towards trusted brands. Never mind that those brands no longer have a monopoly over content. The point is that when you are ‘selling’ facts and opinions to people, they need to know they can trust those facts and opinions. I can write a story on this blog and hardly anybody'll read it. But if I sell it to a national, I'll get a tidy sum, a load of people will read it, and I get respect because I've written for this humungous media organisation. It's a no-brainer.

3. Journalism is disposable. One big idea can be weeks of work and one story. If you're a tech start-up, you might make an app, and it might take your team a year, but people might buy it and use it again and again. A story might be accessed again and again, but you don't get paid according to how many people read it. Journalism as an industry is less suited to entrepreneurs because the returns just aren't there.

4. It's a poor use of a prestigious degree. If you're going to be a journalism entrepreneur, then there is no value in taking a degree in journalism. The value of a City or Cardiff degree is probably mostly in the prestige associated with the name - we're doing it because we think it'll land us that all-important interview. And besides, they don't teach entrepreneurship on the courses. It doesn't seem like an economically sound decision.

5. It's not just a question of having a good idea for a start-up. There are lots of great niche blogs around. It's just that ideas don't necessarily mean money in journalism, and building up a reputation takes years. Most journalists don't have money to burn, and they can't wait around for 12 months to see if their idea is going to work.

It's pretty obvious really: being an entrepreneur in an insecure, struggling industry is kind of anathema to entrepreneurialism, which is about identifying the best opportunities to make money.

I kind of lied in my opening paragraph, though. One of my friends is going down the entrepreneurial route - the editor-in-chief of impressively accomplished sports news and comment site. I mean to flatter him when I say that he didn't really need to do the course in the first place - it was already an enormously successful site, and he's managed to monetise it. So there is hope. But I think it's too late for the rest of us - when you've invested this much money, you kind of want something to show for it.

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A good post from Joseph Stashko today pointed out that journos need to be at the cutting edge to land jobs. One of his points was that the idea of blogging your way into a big media organisation is sooo 2007 - so what do hacks who want jobs need to do now (read: 6 months ago)? Two punts:

1. Live blogging - apparently a national posted an advert for a live blogger this morning, which would have been timely if I could actually find it. Anyway, it's true that live blogging is gaining traction at the moment, despite the fact that it's been around for ages. It's deceptively difficult and requires a lot of skill in curation and - perhaps most importantly - tone. I don't actually know many student journalists who have a lot of experience in live blogging either - less competition, then. Use of Twitter and Cover It Live or Scribble Live are a must, but hacks are also using curation tools like Storify intelligently. See also: Bundlr, Storyful, Scoop.it, curated.by, Pearltrees. If you can do this while streaming from your iPhone via Ustream.tv, you're pretty much ahead of everybody.

2. Community management - at least three jobs at the nationals have come up over the last couple of months for community management, and I don't think it's showing any sign of slowing. Wannabe Hacks summed this up better than I can - see here.

It's worth pointing out that these two trends mark a change in the way journalism is being conducted. Curation is on the rise - particularly when covering some types of breaking news. Why? Because it allows a media organisation to easily make use of citizen journalists and link to other sources. Community management works in different ways for different scenarios, but curation of content - by aggregating news feeds, as in the Guardian's Environment Network, or actually commissioning posts - can help to build a content-rich site where users can read and share ideas. This means it doesn't require as much investment (fewer journalists) and, carefully managed, it can build up a good network of contacts. Not profitable exactly (yet), but it's a small investment for a large audience share.

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View the full set on Flickr.

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I've spent the last week at Kipling Camp, Madhya Pradesh, India, to write about how money raised at last year's elephant parade is being used to help save the Asian elephant. I'd been hoping to post updates as I went, but terrible internet access put paid to that pretty quickly...

It was an eye-opening trip and a great opportunity to meet Mark Shand and Tara the elephant - the co-founders of the charity. First batch of photos are from market day at a nearby village on Wednesday 4 May. The piece will run in the Evening Standard at some point in the next few weeks.

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On the streets of Southall, hundreds of multicoloured turbans are bobbing up and down like boats on the Ganges. The heat is scorching; the aroma of chai and incense dizzying. I can't quite believe I'm 15 minutes out of central London - and I'm not the only one.

"We feel like we're in Amritsar, which is our spiritual home," says Hurmeet Kaur, a 26-year-old HR manager from Slough. "The heat, the food, the people, the atmosphere... It's just amazing."
I am in the thick of Vaisakhi, an ancient Punjabi harvest festival celebrated all over the world that culminates in a huge street procession. The festival is one of the most significant holidays in the Sikh calendar, and attracted about 100,000 people to Southall this year.

The procession begins outside the largest Sikh temple in the UK, the Sri Guru Singh Sabha. On the road outside the temple, stretching as far as the eye can see, dozens of Sikhs are linking arms. Prince Singh, a 19-year-old student, is one of them. He explains that they are creating a barrier to protect the Guru Granth Sahib - the Sikh holy book - which is carried on the vehicle at the head of the procession.

"Last year, we had a lot of injuries," he says. "People being punched, people being pushed... it was just too much."

There is no sign of violence today, however. It's now approaching noon, and the volume of the crowd, and the temperature, is rising. Sweat mingles with the sweet scent of incense and rose water. More people are joining all the time, and as the chant of the crowd reaches a climax, they swarm around the truck. Before long the procession is under way, having more than doubled in size.

As the crowd chants prayers, flag bearers march stony-faced, and Sikh swordsmen in full ceremonial dress - bar their Adidas trainers - clash swords in the street. It's a heady experience.

Dilmohan Singh Basia, a 72-year-old property investor, has been at almost every procession since 1966, when he came to England with his family. He remembers his first march.

"There were not many people," he says. "Maybe a few hundred getting together, with one or two trucks decorated - that's all."

The procession turns a corner and I dip into a side street, where a family hands me some chana masala. They don't want any payment.

"It's called seva," says Manmeet Shourie, a 47-year-old lawyer who has flown over from Singapore to attend the celebration. "The idea is that the more you give away, the better it is for you."

Manmeet's father owns a catering business and has helped to prepare the food. "Usually he'd be here," she says. "But he's in hospital. But he told me, 'You must be there today.'"

Nearby, I strike up conversation with Michael and Kira Cane, who met while they were studying at Brunel University. Michael converted to Sikhism four years ago.

"From the age of about seven or eight my best friend was Sikh. I went to Brunel and there were loads more Sikh people around, so I just got a bit more involved," he says.

The 29-year-old actuary married Kiran in 2007, and the two moved to Southall. "My family were quite supportive," he says. "None of them have moved in the same way I have but they all accept it."

As the march reaches the doors of the counterpart Sri Guru Singh Sabha temple on the other side of Southall, the crowds queue to pay their respects to the Guru Granth Sahib. A huge queue, in fact, that stretches across Southall. It is, I can't help but note, a very British end to a distinctly Indian festival.

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I think I'm a perfectionist. I might just be restless. But I am definitely an idiot, because this month I managed to delete my entire wordpress blog as I tried to do something clever with it that blew up in my face. Horrible geekery ensued that does not need to be divulged. The result is that what I recovered has now moved to this Posterous place, and although I like it right now, that'll probably change in 6 months and I'll do something stupid and everything'll disappear and once again I will be left wondering why I feel the need to constantly tweak and revise and change.

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I did ballet once, at the age of seven. I remember very little about it other than the cold floor, the teacher’s brisk instruction, and a creeping sense that I was extremely out of place. I was no butch kid – I had shoulder length hair, a satchel like a handbag, a preference for octopus over football. Looking back, I’m glad I knew to draw the line somewhere. I ran out the studio and sat in the car and left my sister behind to practice her arabesque.

That numb panic comes flooding back as an instructor with a 1940s bob and a black leotard barks me into First Position. As I lurch ineptly from one leg to the other, grunting loudly enough to earn a flushed glance from my partner, I can’t help but feel that this is not how the evening was supposed to turn out. I am with a date, and we are in a dance studio doing ballet. She’s done this before, of course. She is tall, lithe and elegant, her arms coiled gracefully above her head; I am stiff and ungainly, like Bambi on ice. I am also wearing a fedora, which I lose as I pirouette like a crane swinging a wrecking ball.

We’re in the Tobacco Dock, a disused warehouse in Wapping, and the dance studio is part of a big, fourth-wall busting theatrical-cinema event called Secret Cinema. The premise is that the organisers create a kind of piece of immersion theatre inspired by a classic film. Punters wander around this fantasy world – the location of which is kept secret until the last minute – watching set-pieces before settling down to see the flick.

It’s predicated on the idea that the whole event is a big mystery that nobody talks about, but realistically there must be 600 people here tonight, and with another 15 performances to go over the next fortnight, it’s about mainstream as underground gets. The sense of enigma is important, though; without it, it would be hard to imagine I was in Covent Garden in the mid-20th century, as we are now, bending awkwardly, chins lifted.

Sarah Tumelty, 24, has also been brave enough to give the ballet class a go (it’s by no means compulsory). “I’m not really the kind of person who’d normally do this. I’ve never done it before,” she says, a little out of breath. “But it sort of feels a bit magical here. And I suppose that’s what made me do it.”

She has a point. Everybody here – honestly everybody, without exception – has come dressed to the nines in 1940s garb. It’s quite a spectacle. Couples stroll arm in arm down the makeshift “streets.” There are shops selling real flowers, cupcakes and curiosities. There are dance studios and a mock tube station. The cider in the bars served by men in flat caps can be drunk, and it is delicious. It is an artistic vision of post-Blitz London, although it does remind me – very briefly – of a terrible theme park in the South West whose prime attraction was a kitsch, interminable trudge through London in the wartime. The difference being that Secret Cinema is more than just a sterile film set. It’s a mix of real and unreal where you really can lose yourself.

The centerpiece of the evening is supposed to be the screening of the film upon which the world you walk through is based, but the fun is undoubtedly in the meander around the set, as you try and guess what that film could be. Previous Secret Cinemas have included Blade Runner, Lawrence of Arabia and One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest – the latter taking place in a disused hospital in Kensington. I’m just trying to suss out tonight’s film, when we turn a corner and a dangling, bloodied corpse in a pair of red shoes springs into view. “It’s The Red Shoes!” I shout, panting effusively about films about ballet. I am exulted; she is, understandably, slightly taken aback. Conversation stutters, we hastily leave, turn back for cider, and leave again.

Outside, we’re warming ourselves by an oil drum, shelling hot chestnuts next to a huge, replica ship. It’s here that we meet Tom Stone, 34, who is wearing pinstripes and nursing a pint of ale.

“I’ve never been to Secret Cinema before,” says the advertising executive from Kentish Town. “I think I read about it in Time Out, and I’ve been twice now.”

“I’m a huge film buff, and since going to the cinema isn’t a particularly social event, this is actually a great way to meet lots of like-minded souls,” he adds. “I guessed it was The Red Shoes straight away. I haven’t seen it recently, so I’m excited about the film.”

The film is, curiously, something of a sideshow to all the excitement of the setting. As the credits roll we run out the Tobacco Factory and down to Wapping, whisked away by the tube, still stuck in the 1940s, and now the people around us are the actors and the set, and we’re Blitz-era passengers caught in a familiar future. If you are the sort of person who enjoys being led on a merry dance, there is little better way to lose yourself in London.

Secret Cinema hold monthly events at secret locations around London, priced at around £30. For tickets visit www.secretcinema.org.

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There’s an interesting dilemma faced by news sites looking to make money without chasing hits. The sites that nurture the most loyal communities tend to be the sites that have the strongest brands. They have a good relationship between the consumer and the brand. And newspapers can capitalise on that through targeted advertising and reader offers.

The rub is that consumers want other things too. I suspect that aggregators (Flipboard, Pulse) will overtake big brands as the consumer choice for mobile platforms simply because they allow a user to cram a lot of information – including news, features and comment – from a lot of different sources into one hyper-relevant application, tailored to the individual.

@themediaisdying wrote an interesting post arguing that news organisation survival depended upon two things: firstly that news organisations need to create a relationship with consumers (which they’re starting to do better) and secondly that they needed to become a “life resource” and not just a news one.

The dilemma is that becoming a better “life resource” probably necessitates dilution of the brand. A brand like the Telegraph or the Guardian is too powerful to be all things to all people – Flipboard and Pulse trade off the limitless possibilities offered by their applications.

Nevertheless, the biggest problem facing consumers is that consuming news is essentially a laborious and time consuming task. My contention is that there is a real gap in the market for a concise application produced by one of the big brands that can steer people towards the information they really need (or just want) to know. A kind of I for a mobile platform that’s easy to access, works underground, can be paid for simply and really is reliable. And perhaps there is room for an element of aggregation there that would set it apart from the static format of the free paper that currently dominates this market.

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Machynlleth’s Centre for Alternative Technology has just issued a release and podcast from a lecture given by George Monbiot  in which he says that we are faced with: “The complete collapse of the international process; the process is now dead…. It died in Copenhagen.” 

Monbiot goes on to say that says that, for the first time in his lifelong work as an author and activist, he has not got a clue as to what the solution is, the release reports. He says:  “My certainties of what needs to be done have crumbled in the face of the complete ineptitude and uselessness of the world’s governments.”

His comments echo those made in a column in September 2010.

Listen to part of the lecture here.

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My first DPS for The London Evening Standard

A couple of days ago I had my first taste at breaking a story that went national – and then international. It was a massive coup for me, and this post is about how I helped make it happen.

I’ve been working at The Evening Standard over the Christmas break and I’ve had some great cuttings out of it. I’ve been doing stuff for News, Features and Arts, and a couple of weeks in Features gave me the chance to cover a story on a new website called LittleGossip. It was for the lead double page spread in the paper. We published on 21 December, and a day later it was picked up on by The Daily Mail. Soon after it was covered by The Independent, the BBC and even The Times of India.

The editors had obviously placed a lot of trust in me. Why did this happen? Here’s a bunch of things that I think might have helped me land this piece:

1. I’d already written for the paper

Back in September, I covered for one of the features writers while she went on holiday. I was only there for a week, but it was enough time for me to build up a relationship with the features team, who I happened to get on with really well. This is partly luck, of course. But you still have to prove yourself as a writer. So when they offered me a full page piece, I had to deliver. The deadline was tight and I was writing late into the night. But I pulled it all together and they were pleased with the result. When I came back in the first week of December, they remembered me – and they already trusted me.

2. I was pitching (and writing) regularly

I didn’t get thrown a huge amount of leads. I was pitching whenever I could to News (although not Features, it has to be said). With pitching, the hardest part is getting the lead in the first place, so I used Google Reader to make it easier. Nobody at the Standard has time to go through the local papers, so I set up a load of RSS feeds for local papers and spent a little time in the morning going through all their best stories. I’d then summarise maybe 3-4 of them max and pitch them to the editor with links. It’s a lot quicker than just trawling through all the sites/papers.

3. I was putting in the hours

I did a lot of work outside of regular hours. I was typically putting in 10 and occasionally 12 hour days. I’d get in pretty early too, since all the reporters turned up at 7.30am. And I was doing a lot of stuff that didn’t necessarily land me a byline, but did show I knew what I was doing. This is often the toughest bit of work experience, ’cause you might not get anything at the end of it. Just be persistent, show initiative, and people will start to trust you and eventually it should pay off.

4. I kept myself busy on work experience

By the time I was offered the DPS, about two weeks into my time at the Standard, I was writing for News, Arts and Features. I was doing a lot of stuff that didn’t get credit, but that did get me on good terms with a lot of the reporters and writers. I’d also scored a page three lead for News by then, among other cuttings. All that probably helped to get me noticed. I was also careful not to bug everybody too much, which is a tough balance to strike. You really do need to just play that by ear.

I also tried hard not to leave! The best way to do that is to build up contacts on different desks and persuade them to take you on once your experience on the other desk is over. Eventually, people should start asking you to stick around.

5. I gave them as many reasons as I could for them to trust me

I pointed out from the start that I’m studying the Newspaper Journalism MA at City University which is probably the most prestigious journalism course in the country. I also edited my student newspaper, which they seemed to like. And I had some good cuttings. Mentioning all of that gives them a reason to trust you.

6. I was lucky

The fact is, you can do everything I did, and you can be a great journalist, and you can still not get any bylines out of work experience. I realise that everything I’ve written is a little obvious and I know how frustrating that is – but I suppose I believe that, most importantly of all, you need to have a good relationship with the people at the paper, and that’s something that you can only develop yourself. Striking that balance between being keen but not annoying is probably the toughest thing you can do.

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An interesting development in the climategate story. A memo obtained by Grist magazine shows that Fox New Vice President Bill Sammon ordered his reporters to question global warming in the wake of climategate:

From: Sammon, Bill
To: 169 -SPECIAL REPORT; 036 -FOX.WHU; 054 -FNSunday; 030 -Root (FoxNews.Com); 050 -Senior Producers; 051 -Producers; 069 -Politics; 005 -Washington
Cc: Clemente, Michael; Stack, John; Wallace, Jay; Smith, Sean
Sent: Tue Dec 08 12:49:51 2009
Subject: Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data …

… we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

Confirmation, as if it were needed, that in many media organisations the editor’s hand is resting a little too heavily on the shoulders of his journalists. His reporters went ahead and told a bunch of lies about a climategate conspiracy on Fox, as predicted. There’s a delicious piece of irony in there somewhere. But what’s more interesting about Sammon’s email is the justification. He suggests that journalists  should only deal with facts – that global warming, as an unproved theory, should be treated in an entirely objective manner.

It’s an argument that was rebutted in the simplest terms by the Guardian’s Nick Davies at an investigative journalism seminar I attended last year. He said something along the lines of: “It’s not the job of a journalist to report that there is controversy between two parties over the weather outside. It is the job of the journalist to open the window and see for themselves.”

Not everything is as clear cut as the weather, naturally. But in lieu of factual evidence, objectivity doesn’t mean two perspectives at all costs. Journalists are supposed to sift fact from fiction. And in the case of global warming – as for, say, evolution – the scientific evidence is overwhelming. In the wake of climategate, the deniers have gained momentum, but it would be a travesty if the minority of climatologists (3% at the last count) who don’t believe that human activity is significantly contributing to global warming were allowed the same prominence as the overwhelming majority of scientists who do.

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If anybody needed proof about the pervasiveness of citizen journalism, they need look no further than the coverage of student demonstrations this month. Countless blog posts and tweets have been written about this topic. And in the second protest, on Wed 24 November, citizen journalists actually beat the mainstream media at their own game.

How? Well, there were at least two important incidences of citizen journalism at the event. The first was the case of the ‘planted’ police van - the rumour that an old van was sacrificed by police to generate some negative publicity for demonstrators. While it would be near impossible to actually find out the truth, the noise protestors have made in the comments section of sites and on twitter ensured that this is one angle to the coverage that couldn’t be ignored.

Was this a scoop for citizen journalists? Not really. It was a suspicion that lacked the facts to back it up. And that’s one of the problems of citizen journalism. Tweets and blogs are often unreliable. Needless to say, none of the national media ran this story (Update: Sky posted this news blog reporting the accusation – thanks @unitonehiti).

Still, there’s more at stake here, because whether it was a plant or not, the point is that the press seemed to be so fixated upon the police van (and nailing that gorgeous front page “THIS IS SPARTA”  photo of a protestor trampling a van) that they completely missed a much more important news story.

Just south of Trafalgar Square that evening, mounted police charged a group of protestors. And it was all captured on video.

A full two days later, the Guardian picked up the story, crucially with a denial from police the day before, when a spokesman said: “Police horses were involved in the operation, but that did not involve charging the crowd.”

The story’s only just been picked up by the Mail too (less than an hour ago), and I’d be surprised if other papers didn’t follow suit.

After two days of coverage that focused on the police van and one particularly obnoxious protestor who rocked up in a Barbour jacket and button-down shirt then whined that his life had been ruined, the narrative’s been re-framed by whoever posted this video. After all, it’s hardly the first time the Met have come under fire for the heavy handed policing of protests – and their deception to the press makes this incident all the more alarming. And it’s the newspapers who are following the dozens of sources of footage and reports from amateur newsgatherers on the ground.

Sources that satisfy

The achilles heel of citizen journalism has always been the credibility of the source. That’s part of the reason why newspaper organisations are so fiercely protective of their brands – if they aren’t trustworthy, their resources aren’t worth much.

What’s interesting about citizen journalism is that it is flourishing in an age where video and photo are becoming easier and easier to capture, because while anecdotal reports on blogs are not necessarily responsible or journalistic or trustworthy, a video is hard to fake. When footage from people on the ground is combined with the resourcefulness of a career journalist working for a credible brand, the impact can make everybody sit up and take notice.

The net result for this story is that the Met look more untrustworthy and even less transparent than before. That’s a small victory for the unfortunate few who were subjected to the charge from mounted police – the people who, maybe without realising it, were citizen journalists in action.

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The Print Room, 18 November 2010

Fabrication is themed around a kind of inverted Oedipus complex, where a father’s obsession with his son evolves from youth envy into something altogether more disturbing. Interesting premise, but the only fabric that really matters in this overwrought story of infatuation is the kind that created the Emperor’s New Clothes. This play has the look, smell and feel of arthouse theatre, but steady your gaze on it for too long and it quickly unravels.

The play is based on the Italian tragedy Affabulazione by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and traces the breakdown of a father as he becomes steadily more obsessed with his youthful, potent son. It’s theatre in the round staged in a gravel-filled arena, with confrontation and violence to match.

You can’t fault director Lucy Bailey’s boldness, of course. While the rest of the arts world is fretting about cuts, she’s opened a new fringe theatre – in Notting Hill, no less. Fabrication is their first play, and as a statement of intent it’s pretty powerful, rejecting something straightfoward in favour of a full-blown poetic translation of an Italian tragedy. All those expressionistic monologues and gestures (the cast are very good) make it a beguiling watch, too.

Even so, none of that can hide the fact that it just doesn’t hang together. The plot, although utterly absurd, may have actually worked if the language was a little more accessible. It sounds lovely, but a lot of the time it… well, it doesn’t actually make sense. The characters are obsessed with their middle class status, but so much of their grief seems to stem from utterly trivial bourgeois concerns. That’s where a lot of the humour stems from.

Lucy Bailey’s work doesn’t make a habit of tiptoeing around the edges. And yes, Fabrication might be a director sticking two fingers up at the banality of safe, mainstream theatre in the age of cuts. The unfortunate irony is it also represents some of the things about theatre that really put people off. It’s inaccessible, pretentious, and sacrifices meaning for artistic statement. It just doesn’t make sense.

Until Dec 4. Tickets: 0844 4771000; www.the-print-room.org

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