Winol Semester 2 Week 7

Week Starting 12/03/201

Saturday (10/03/2012)
Today I got aranged a press pass for a Science and Engineering Day at the University of Southampton.
We've been told that if we go to event, the focus should not be on the event itself, instead we should find a story within the event.

Before heading their, I already knew that my main focus would be on a model vehicle called the Bloodhound SSC, which hopes to reach 1000mph. I made sure to get a number of shots, as well as shots of a special 'bloodhound experience' that they had on the day for people(mainly children) to use. I asked permission of some parents to record some of the footage, but the media officer assured me that generally it was ok to film the public as their were signs informing them that filming would be taking place.

One of the most interesting parts of the day was that I was walking around with the press officer alongside two ITV journalists who were filming the whole event itself.It was interesting to see how they decided to interact with the public, and decide on their shots. They moved to multiple areas before deciding on a place to shoot one of their interviewees.
When at the bloodhound, I managed to find a good spot to film some of the 'bloodhound experience', and one of the itv crew asked me when I was done so they could stand in my spot. I felt quite good that I had found a spot that ITV wanted.

I also filmed some Vegetable Orchestra, but it wasn't quite what I had hoped. I was hoping for a touring orchestra that uses vegetables as their instruments, but it was more simply a small workshop for families to construct their own vegetable instruments

Monday
Today kind of replaced Tuesday, in that I was editing the majority of my package together, including the majority of the voiceover. We also had the usual news meetings and debreif where we analysed the previous weeks bulletin.

Tuesday
This morning I helped Louis with his 2 interviews in Southampton, including one with the head of the Southampton City Council. Unfortunately the two stories Lou had fell apart, but when we returned to the news room in the afteroon, I was able to record the final piece of my voiceover, to finish my package completely.

Wednesday
As usual. today was very busy.
I was first asked to edit together an oov on a planned biomass plant in Southampton. A similar oov was developed the week before by Graham using stock footage, but the oov wasn't used in the end. I made it a bit fresher from the week before, so it was still usable.

This weeks bulletin

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A Guide to Journalism - The Basics

Flickr: NS Newsflash

News Reporting

• You always need balance for your story.
• Facts in your voice
• Comments in your inteviewee's voice
• You're best visual should be at the very start of your package, as well as in your headline.
• Pictures and quotes are very important for a good package.
• Time is quality, not quantity.
• If you use a still (picture) in a package you should give it movement(such as a zoom or pan from left to right)
• If you use a categorical fact, you must:-
  a) Check it
  b) Have a source for it.
  You should either check these facts or simply leave them out. A categorical fact without a source is just an opinion.
• You should avoid doing too much expo(exposition).
  

Tips

• Informal pre-scripting - Interview a guest beforehand to try and find out what she might say. 'Pre-interviewing' them will help make them more comfortable and rpepared, as well as you.
• 'Fair Dealing' - can be used for purposes of review, criticism and comment. Should use fair dealing for the film piece, instead of loads of clips from the film press conference.
• A good way to start a package can be with natural sound.
• To make your piece to camera easier you should just focus on 3 key points, it it then easier to remember and say.
• Using a prop for a piece to camera can be a good idea(and can help you feel more relaxed with something to do with your hands) but you should be holding something thats relevant to what your talking about. 
• Source ProtectionNever use a blind source unless you really have to.
  Even so, if you offer them protection, you need to remember that thier is nothing to defer them from lying. Source protection should only really be used if in extreme cases such as protecting the source from violence, it shouldnt usually be used to preotect someone from being fired. If you agree to protect the person, you must protect them to the grave, and should be prepared to go to jail.
• 'Off the record' interview = waste of time. It should only be used as a journalistic technique so they brief you regarding the story, and sometimes to try and convince them to go on the record with a certain comment.
• You should have 'Fact Fear' - check, double check and triple check. Make sure its correct before using it, if your not sure, just get rid of it.
  You can also use phrases like 'they claim' to be safe if necessary. 

Website Write Ups

• Write headline that fits layout.
• Try to make a person the 'who' in your top line.
• Always remember(the method) who, what, where and when. - A 'simple summary intro'.

News Story Layout (Basics)
Paragraph 1 - Who, What, Where, When
Paragraph 2 - Why
Paragraph 3 - Quote
Paragraph 4 -Detail (Not always though)
Paragraph 5 - But (Balance)

Writing Headlines
A headline must :-

• Fit the story to tell the reader clearly what it’s about.
• Make the reader interested in the story and want to read on.
• Be on a front page, and should be visually striking enough to grab the eye of the readers at stations, news agents, and news stands.
• Reflect the newspaper attitude to the new story.
• Fit into a very limited space but still be bold and capitalized.

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Modern Economics

This week, in our HCJ lecture we focused on economics. Money.
In the past we have looked at money in some ways, such as Adam Smith, and his look at free trade. We also looked at Smith's satirical solution to the financial problems in Ireland in 1729.

We have a desire to consume which outweighs our desire to produce. We have a number of 'wants' in our life, and finance usually means we have to decide which 'wants' to satisfy. People often say that they 'need this' and 'need that'. Humans don't 'need' anything. They simply 'want' it.
Economics ignores 'needs'. Need has no reference point.

Utility- To economics it is fundamental
- A phenomenon
- The reference of human wants
Humans maximise their utility.
'Utilitarianism'

Marx = Ricardo (Value theory) + Neo Malthusian

Value Theory
Embedded labour power

Eg- Piano = 5000 bins
Takes more work to make the biron - 5000 times more labour.

Malthus - the iron law of population
You should have 2 children, so that they can replace you.
- More than 2 children means a population increase.
- Less than 2 children means a population decrease.

Neo-Malthusian - the iron law of wages
- Internal contradiction of capitalism
- Inability of system to scoialize surplus vaue = crisis of revolution
= Crisis and revolution
- Neo- Malthusian means over productions and under consumption ecause of profit.

The answer to unemployment is growth.

Simple Economy (an example)
All that's made is 1 apple.
Value of the apple = £3
Producer of the apple is paid = £2
Profit would be = £1

However, if the producer of the apple went to the shop and wanted to buy the apple, he wouldn't have enough money.

They would then try to solve the problem -
Cut wages to = £1
Cut price of Apple to = £2
But this doesn't solve the problem.

Source - Flickr: Images_of_Money

Old economists thought of money as transparent.
Modern economists eel that money exerts popwer on the real world - irrational.
Karl Marx - Communist Manifesto
People didn't have enough money

1850's - The gold rush in America.
Until recently - gold had no real value/purpose.
Anthropology - Superstitions about gold.
Gold supply has varied through the decades.
But gold mines caused economic recession.

Paper (money) circulation is a small percent of that used today. It is now mainly electronic.
In some ways this means that the 'Economy is based on confidence'.

- 1880's onwards - Germany, America, Britain - The welfare state.
State education came at around the 1870's.
- Government bonds (gilts)

Why pay taxes?
Taxes help to pay interest on the bonds, because governments get charged interest on the bonds/gilts that they recieve.

Problem - Inflation
German hyper-inflation - resulting from 'printing money' (not backed by gold standard)
Too much money chasing too few items.

Two types of economists
1- Keynesian
- Don't care about inflation.
- Plan economic growth

2- Monatarism
- Followers of Adam Smith
- Classical in the sense of Smith
- Pre-modern and Pre-Freudian
- Think people accurately work out what the want.

'Know the price of everything, and the value of nothing'

People should accept cuts in their wages to help the economoy, but they won't.

National Health Service - helpful in avoiding inflation, as the government needs too keep spending money to keep people employed.
However, they need to keep public spending within the public sector.
Eg - War
- No private sector
- Means investing in public sector of war doesn't put anybody out of business (thier is priate sectar for war, so it doesn't damage any private companies).
Eg - Space programmes
Eg - Digging holes

Y = C + I + G

C = Household spending
I  = Private investment (eg - savings)
G = Government spending
If Y decrease, then thier wont be enough money to keep people employed unless they take pay cuts.

If banks won't take bonds, we end up with the situation currently in Greece. They are no longer trusted to eventually pay back the money.
Answer - print more money. Germany have taken out a lot of money and handed it to Greece to help them financially.
Germany has more ability to raise money, so they can continue to take out bonds.
Once banks default on bonds = Mass unemployment

In the long term, we can try to keep doing this and 'kicking the can' further and further forever. Alternatevly, we could try and wipe all debt, or could face a global economic crisis.
In the long term we're dead, and the problem moves onto the next generation, and so on.

When I was young I used to think that money was the most important thing in life. Now that I am old, I know it is.

Oscar Wilde

Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.

Plato 

A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.
Jonathan Swift

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
Woody Allen

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Journalists on Twitter

A number of Journalists now use twitter, it has become a great way of releasing stories as well as discovering stories.
Through things like hashtags(#) and 'trending topics' it can be easy to locate opinions on certain topics and news stories.
Thier are a number of top journalists and bloggers from a number of newspapers, news broadcasters and more on Twitter.

I have spent some time locating some of the top journalistic tweeters and have composed a list that will show all of thier tweets as soon as they are posted.
This is accessible to anyone at this link - http://twitter.com/#!/danielmackrell/journalists

Here you can read all the very up-to-date postings of some of the professions top reporters and get updates on thier latest posts, comments and links to the newest news stories.
It doesn't require you to sign up to Twitter to access and read the tweets, although if you are a member of twitter, you can follow the list, and all journalist tweets would be added directly to your twitter feed.
I will continue to add more and more top journalists when I find them, and if you know of any, then let me know and I will include them.

What the list includes
It has a variety of journalists. Ranging from sports, technology, politics, and economic experts, as well as editors, presenters, sports presenters and bloggers. Thier are also links to the latest online news reports and alerts from the likes of Sky News, The Mirror, The Telegraph. And thier is also a useful Tweeter that reports the latest journalism jobs available.

It currently features just over 100 tweeters, but only has currently 3 'followers' but one of those is Chris Choi who is a consumer editor for ITV news and has worked on Radio 4, Watchdog and Five Live.

I hope this will be useful to some of you.

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Karl Marx

At the start of our HCJ lecture, we were provided with a quote from Karl Marx -

'Capitalism comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt'.

Marx was born in 1818 in Germany, and more specifically he was born into a Jewish family. This could have some significance as some of his relatives were Rabbi's. Marx could have seen himself as a 'modern day' profit. However, his Jewish parents lated converted to Lutheranism, which follows the theology ofan old testemant prophet - Martin Luther.

On his tomstone it reads "Workers of the world unite" and a quote that can be considered to differentiate him from other philosophers - "The philosophers have only interpreted the world - the point however is to change it".

Karl studied law, then philosophy, but then had a revelaition which lead him into the field of journalism. Marx became both a journalist and an editor for radical newspapers in Europe. What he preached was considered 'dangerous talk' and inflamatory. Governments didn't like it and he was pushed out of many countries, eventually, he fled to London where he lived until he died in 1887.

He met Fredrich Engles in 1844 in Paris who he worked with to write 'The Communist Manifesto' in 1848.

During 1848, rebellion spread across Europe, while some cases had short term success, generally they failed. Although, Marx gave philosophical backing to all these changes. He saw philosophy as a way to change the world.

Karl Marx believed that you could explain everything about a society by analysing the way economic forces in shape - social, religious, legal and political processes.

For Aristotle, man is the rational animal, for Kant the moral animal, for Hegel the historic animal. For Marx man is the productive animal.

He saw that mankind creates the environment it inhabits - 'not a figure in the landscape, but the shaper of the lanscape'. He felt that man dominated the world because of its ability to build tools and cooperate.

Marx believed that everything you do is for economics.

Marx achieved(according to Engels):-

1 - Hegelian philosophy (especially the philosophy of history and dialects)

2 - British Empiricism (especially he economics of Adam Smith)

3 - French revolutionary politics, especially social politics (man is born free but everywhere is in chains)

His method was scientific, he believed he was using the same methods as Darwin - researching every aspect of society n der to understand it.

He worked for years in the reading room of the Britih Museum. He managed to work his way through a vast amount of material. This included census(1801), tax records, commodity prices(growing empire).

Marx attacks Hegel's dialectic idealism/mysticism - Geist battle between good and evil - the real dialectic was rotted in the real world, in money and class struggle.

Marx sought the explanation of the historical process between man and the material conditions of his existence. His theory of history is therfore called 'dialectic materialism'.

Hegel

The subject of this historical process is Spirit and through history it is seeking self-understanding.

History end when Spirit will achieve full self-knowledge and become the 'absolute spirit'. The process works through the dialectic.
-Thesis (proposition)
-Antithesis (counter - proposition - contradicting - negation)
-Synthesis (combination of refuting on propositin)
-Dialectic is a dialogue between two opposing points.

Marx see's the class struggle through history. Eg - master and slave, lord and serg etc...
The property - less working class - proletarial - have nothing to lose and everything to gain. "Nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win".
Other groups stand to lose private property and social status, and so cannot be relied on to act a selfless way.
Marx is interested in the proletarial as he feels these are the people that can make a change.

Alienation
Marx's theory of alienation rests first on his theory of human nature. He proposes the triparlite self theory, which is shared with Plato. It is the belief of 3 parts to a person.
It is a set of needs. They are the following -

- The natural self with the subsistence needs - it is with us always not just the distant past.
- Alienated self - these natural needs are perverted - need for clothes, shelter are not met.
- Species self understands we are all part of one another - this will only eerge in the communist state.

Capitalism alienates men from themselves and from each other. People then begin to value 'things' over each other and encourages competition and inequality - the cash nexus becomes the criterium of all value.

Work is the loss of the self - it belongs to another - it does not develop the body or the mind. We are all alienated from our need for satisfying work.
We are also alienated from our higher species needs, as yet to be fully known or realised.

Communist society is characterized by equality and true justice and the evolution of a truly fe individual,.
Revolution = society will be equal and evolve(another link to Darwin?).
Marx likes the idea of evolving, a historical progression.

Communism(Marx's view)
Thesis - Free market capitalism, liberal state, individual rights. (very similar to Locke when exploring the idea of property and liberty)
Antithesis- The proletariat - Every time you have a proposition, a contradiction will come. Often people are worried they're going to be exploited.
Synthesis - Socialism
Capitalism has been described as 'Seeds of its own destruction'.

Capitalism
Factory production.
Market(links to Adam Smith and his 'hidden hand of the market').
Workers cannot afford the product of thier labours. Leads to unemployment and market crash.
The goods sold on the market would have had intense competition.

Capitalism will try to survive by investing in better technology, and exporting products(competition and imperialism). Then state expenditure focuses on education and military. However, Marx did see that these were onl temporary, and not the best of solutions. He was a historicaly determinant - he believes that the fall of capitalism and the rise of the prolatarials are equally inevitable.
The proletarians would rise up and dispossess the bourgeoisie - dictatorship of the proltarial would lead to socialism. Workers would sieze the means of production and produce goods to meet the needs of society instead of the market. They can then distribute the wealth equally across the state. People would work together for the common good and the state would wither away.
Communism would be a garden of 'eden'.

He see's there being difference between mental and physical labour. A person would be a fisherman in the morning, a factory worker in the afternoon and a musician and philosopher in the evning, and all these activities would have equal worth.

"From each according to ability. To each accordin to need"

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Code of Conduct

Thier are 4 different Codes of Conduct for Journalism:-

NUJ(National Union of Journalist). This Code of Conduct is a very good one to follow as it is constructed by the journalists themselves, and therefore you can be sure they are fair and reasonable to follow.

PCC(Press Complaints Comission) - This Code of Conduct is more stacked against you, and is seen as an 'Editors Code Of Conduct'.

BBC - The BBC have thier own Code of Conduct for people that are employed by them and are named 'guidelines. They are available to view online here.

Ofcom- This Code of Conduct is generally more specific to commercial television(also covering factual programming and news) with guidlines aimed towards advertising, watershed and glamorising crime.

Another rule that needs to be followed throughout Journalism is balance. This is required particularly for the BBC, but involving all tv stations when politics is involved. You are required to remain un-bias, but can restore yourt channels balance overtime if preferred and done effectively.
Newspapers and online are different, and can be as bias as they wish. You can see this with many newspapers such as The Sun with over the top headlines which make it very clear what partytey upport aswell as views on similar topics.

NUJ Code of Conduct

• You must obey the code.
• Eliminate distortion, news suppression and censorship
• Let a certain authority edit it(eg - editor, police officer etc0 label as advatorial.
• Seperate comment from fact
• Don't cast comment as fact.
• Rectify any harmful innacuracies promptly
• Obtain information, photographs and illustrations only by straightforward means.
• 'Death knock' - taking photographs at funerals - don't do it without permission
• Protect confidential sources of information
• Shall not accept bribes, or allow inducements to influence the performance of professional duties.
• Shall not mention age, race, colour, illegimacy, marital status, gender or sexual orientation unless this information is strictly relevant.
• Avoid Juxtaposition(libel) - horrid story with juxtaposed picture beside it(innocent person)

Public Interest
Reporting a threat to safety of committe
Health Issues
Exposing crime, corruption and justice.

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Jonathon Swift and Adam Smith

A Modest Proposal

In 1729, when Ireland was in very big financial trouble, satirist, Jonathon Swift decided to publish 'A Modest Proposal'. This was a satirical piece of writing which suggested eating your children, or selling them to the rich as a food.

He pointed out that up to 1 year of age, a child can survive on nothing but the mothers milk, and therefore not needing to cost the family any money during that time. He suggests they turn 1 year old, they are then killed and used for feeding and cloathing. The Cloathing items that Swift suggests includes boots for geneltemen and bags for ladies.

• He stated that this process prevented(ironically) voluntary abortions and prevents murder of bastard children.
• It also halts the over-pupulated problem that Ireland has.
• Swift argues that it would be more humane to kill the child while they still have minimal awareness and thoughts than to let them suffer a slow death of starvation because of thier poor family being unable to supply food.

This idea is very humourous, and i can just imagine people at the time reading this piece and believing it to be true. The word 'modest' in the title is satircal itself as it couldn't be further from the truth.

The Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith was a philosopher and very enthusiastic about political economics. He wrote The Wealth of Nations which explained why certain countries are richer than others.

In this publication Smith used the term 'the invisible hand'

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