The Future of Journalism...

Last year we were asked what we thought the future of journalism would be and I struggled to think about which way the industry was going but now, after all of the lectures so far this year I can see where journalism is going.

It is a fact that newspapers are dying. Sales have been decreasing over the last few years but the invention of new technology such as the iPad have meant that there are new ways for people to get their news.

Rupert Murdoch has announced plans to create a newspaper only accessible to iPad users. This announcement comes after claims that The Times is losing sales quicker than rival papers. Richard Branson is also planning on using new technology to make money.

Branson has set up a monthly magazine called Project. The magazine is currently only available on the iPad and will cost £1.79 in the UK and $2.99 in the US. It will be just like the magazines we are used to now but with one striking difference... it will update throughout the month!

A lecture asked us last week what we thought of consumers recieving a iPad from the news companies so that we can read what they are publishing. While I do not feel giving iPad is a good idea, maybe he had a point.

If we all had an iPad/kindle-like platform on which to view our news - newspaper companies would cut down on the costs of producing and transporting the paper in the long run. Obviously not every reader can afford an iPad or kindle but if newspapers developed their own version they could join together in a deal that could be more effective in the long run.

These are exciting times in the Journalism industry. Personally I do not worry about the dying art of newspapers, in fact I find it fascinating that I will be part of a huge media revolution. And as Nelson from The Simpons says - my medium is dying.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

It may be four days until the start of advent and people around the country can peel open their advent calendars to see what Christmas related chocolate is sitting inside but my countdown to Christmas started today with a trip to York’s Christmas market.

York is a beautiful city at the best of times but today the snow helped make the Christmas market seasonal. There may not have been as many stalls as I had hoped for but just being in the merry atmosphere made the early morning and 3 hour coach trip worth it.

As the snow fell over the market I warmed up with a cup of delicious piping hot spiced cider as I walked around the world famous shambles. Despite the lack of stalls, the majority being jewellery and food related the atmosphere has put me in a rather Christmassy mood.

4 weeks to go...

Video Skills Test

Video skills are a very useful skill in the digital newsroom. If you look at online versions of articles on sites like the BBC, the story is often accompanied by a video, adding an extra platform to the media. With this in mind, I was given the task of shooting an interview, uploading it to a video sharing site and embedding it into this blog post.

My video is with Ross Boyle, a 2nd year Law student at UCLan. I asked him what he thought about a rise in student fees and whether or not he thought it would harm Preston's economy.

The video can be seen below.


If you would like to contact me about anything, feel free to email me at FDent1@uclan.ac.uk

Data Skills Test

The final skills test for my Digital Newsroom assignment is all about data. For this skills test, we had to find some data from the Guardian's Data Store and manipulate it into something useful.

The data store had lots of interesting sets of data but the one that caught my eye was a list of every prisoner of war camp in the UK. The article attached to the data said “What would happen if the UK's prison population suddenly increased by 400,000 people? That's what occurred between 1939 and 1948, when thousands of Germans, Ukrainians and others became Britain's prisoners of war, according to a new book.”

This got me thinking, there has been a lot in the news in the past few years about overcrowding in Britain’s prisons and I started to think about if prisons became too full, would history repeat itself leading to Britain needing to re-open some of its prisoner of war camps to contain criminals?

Once we had found some data we had to create some sort of graph to display the data in a format a reader would understand with great ease.

Using Wordle, I created a graph to show the prisoner of war camps by their county. The bigger the word, the more camps the county had. As you can see Yorkshire had the most prisoner of war camps in Britain. The original graph can be found here.

I also decided to see how many prisoner of war camps there were in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The chart from these findings can be seen below. By clicking on the graph you can see a larger version.

This chart was created in Microsoft Excel and clearly shows that the majority of prisoner of war camps were in England. The section of the chart labelled UK represents Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. The data supplied by the Guardian lists the three places as part of the UK.

The following links are references to overcrowding in Britain's prisons from the last few years.

• World Socialist Website
• Socialist Worker Online
• BBC News
• Politics.co.uk
• Sky News

You can contact me on FDent1@uclan.ac.uk if you have any questions.

Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame

Photograph by SpreePiX - Berlin

Everyone from the young to the old have heard of the pop queen Lady Gaga but how many would do a degree dedicated to her life, work and rise to fame.

A report on the BBC website today claims that the University of South Carolina will be offering students the chance to take "Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame" .

There are people who think that degree's aren't worth it and that students should just get a job instead and normally I would disagree with them but a degree in Lady Gaga? Personally I feel that this takes celebrity obsession to a whole new and unnecessary level.

Leave me a comment telling me what you think of the idea and whether you think this is taking the celebrity obsession too far.

If you would like to contact me in relation of this or any other post I had written please email me at FDent1@uclan.ac.uk

Data collection

As part of my digital workshop today I had to use a set of data which we were given and create a chart.

The data we were given was regarding litter fines around the country. Firstly I had to find the fourteen boroughs of Lancashire and put them onto a separate spreadsheet. I then had to make a chart to show the amount that each council has collected from litter fines.
This is the chart I created.

The chart shows that 6 Lancashire borough councils failed to provide the information. It also show that Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council collected the largest amount of money.

If you would like to contact me regarding this or any other of my posts please feel free to email me at FDent1@uclan.ac.uk

Bloggers "inadequate, pimpled, single"

Photograph by funkypancake

I have just come from a lecture in which my lecturer contradicted himself big time.

He started by commending a person in the lecture for his work on BlogPreston, he said that he was very impressed by the site.

In the lecture we were talking about specialist journalists, those in the industry who write about one particular thing such as sport, health education or fashion and he mentioned blogs.

He said he wouldn’t trust a blogger over an established journalist as he doesn't want to read the opinions of someone who is not a trusted journalist. He practically agreed with what Andrew Marr said last month when he described bloggers as "inadequate, pimpled and single."

This contradicts almost everything I have been taught over the last year and a half!

Firstly in another module we were told to set up a blog and that blogging is an important tool in the changing world of journalism. Also I have always been told by an editor of a local newspaper that if you can't get work published somewhere publish it yourself so that is what I do in my blog.

After saying that he wouldn’t trust a blogger the lecturer gave us some tips on how to become a good specialist journalist and guess what one of his suggestions was.....

That we write a blog!!!

He either thinks blogging is a good idea or doesn't - he can’t have it both ways!

As for Andrew Marr's opinions on Blogging and citizen journalism, if it wasn't for the latter, news companies like the BBC wouldn’t have had many of the news stories such as the 7/7 bombings that they have had as quickly if it wasn’t for citizen journalists.

Also I am a blogger, I am not pimpled, I have been told that I have good skin on a few occasions, also I am not single. Finally and most importantly, I should hope that I am not inadequate as I am paying a lot of money for my journalism degree and I wouldn’t be doing so if I thought my degree would be wasted!