The Bristol Mayor Watch citizen journalism project came to a triumphant end on 27 November with the participants presenting a live radio programme at Ujima Radio and interviewing some of the mayoral candidates, their supporters and political commentators. The programme can be heard on Ujima’s Citizen Journalism page and more detail about the event is on the Watershed Citizen Journalism blog.
This quote from the show about the citizen journalism workshop by Ricardo, one of our participants is just the sort of thing we like to hear! He represents SH&NK (Street Harmony & No Knives – a Bristol based anti-knife project for young people:
“Its given me skills in terms of … media coverage for the youth of Bristol… getting involved is one of the greatest things I’ve been ever been into, it’s been fantastic so far. The campaign’s been excellent and I’m glad to be a part of it.”
There’s another post on the Watershed Citizen Journalism Blog reflecting on this project and now that the RELAYS project is coming to an end, some thoughts about where we’ll go next with ‘News from Elsewhere’ – the citizen journalism strand at Watershed.
We’ve now completed five of the seven planned sessions with our current citizen journalism project ‘News from Elsewhere’ which aims to cover Bristol’s Mayoral Election from a number of perspective. The project is running in conjunction with Ujima Radio and with support from the University of Bristol – both organisations that we’ve visited with the team to learn about making a radio programme and discover some background to the new role of the elected Mayor in the City.
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve been awarded some funding by Bristol University to run ‘News from Elsewhere’ – a citizen journalism project to cover the forthcoming Mayoral election. We’re working with long-term RELAYS /Watershed associate, David Goldblatt, but also teaming up with Ujima Radio which will add another dimension to the reporting process. So in addition to using smartphones for posting content to a blog as we’ve done in previous projects, the participants will also be contributing to Ujima’s live outside broadcast on the election process on 8th November. The participants, 18 – 25 year olds who are being recruited through Ujima, will be introduced to the idea of citizen journalism, receive training in the use of the smartphones (that we provide), blogging, and radio production and learn about the effective use of social media in this context. (more…)
RELAYS at Watershed has teamed up with our friends at Encounters to run a Film Journalism Workshop over the Festival with a group of nine young people at various stages of their training or careers in the film industry. They’ve called their blog Inside Encounters and aim to cover as many aspects of the Festival as they can through video diaries, interviews, reviews, reports and photographs.
The photo above shows the Film Journalist team plus guest speakers at our first session, Zoltan and Zsuzsanna from Daazo (a webiste and magazine for ‘sharing and celebrating short films in high quality’), and Rachel Segal Hamilton from Ideas Tap who helped with promoting and recruiting for the workshop. Head over to our Citizen Journalism blog for more details about the project.
It’s over two weeks since the Bristol citizen journalism crew left Weymouth but their blog is still being added to (see below) and right now it’s been viewed 5555 times! Eleven young people have provided some great perspectives on Weymouth’s temporary Olympic life (being continued until the end of the Paralympics) with observations and reviews on cultural events and interviews with visitors, residents and businesses, and even a rival Olympic Sailing team from Denmark! (more…)
Between 28th and 30th July 2012 a group of students from colleges and universities across the south west will be reporting live on the London 2012 Olympic Sailing and Cultural activities from Weymouth Beach through RELAYS at Watershed’s Citizen Journalism Project.
We have now chosen six very enthusiastic young people from the Bristol area to join six Weymouth natives at a four day long media camp in the only location in England outside London to host London 2012 Olympic Games events. From 27th July to 30th July we believe they will be pleasantly overwhelmed by the choice of topics to report on! The media camp is part of the Maritime Mix programme.
We’ve timed the camp to coincide with the opening of the London 2012 Olympic Games in Weymouth, and in addition to the competition sailing there’s a rich mix of cultural activity going on too. See our post over on the RELAYS citizen journalism blog for more details.
Media camps for young people, aged 16-24 are taking place in Weymouth & Portland – host borough for the London 2012 Sailing Events – between July and September this summer as part of Maritime Mix – London 2012 Cultural Olympiad by the Sea
#media2012 is a UK-wide collaboration aiming to foster relations between citizen and professional journalists, and encourage unaccredited reporters to explore the stories behind and around the Olympic and Paralympic Games. It also strives to make links with subsequent Olympic host cities (most immediately Sochi, Winter Games 2014, and Rio de Janeiro, Summer Games 2016) to ensure the regular participation of citizen journalists at the Olympic & Paralympic Games.
Continuing from work begun at the W2 Media Centre during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games (dubbed the first “twitter Olympics”), #media2012 will see a variety of citizen journalist projects rolled out across the UK in the summer of 2012, supported by the London 2012 Creative Programmers in Scotland and the North West and South West of England.
As part of this activity, the #media2012 South West of England hub (a partnership between Watershed, Bristol; Weymouth College; the University of Bath; b-side and the London 2012 Creative programmer for the SW) is running a series of four “#media2012 summer camps” for young people/students, aged 16-24, in Weymouth and Portland in collaboration with Weymouth College.
For more information please contact liz.milner@watershed.co.uk
Our RELAYS colleagues at Bristol University have once again arranged a fantastic opportunty for 1300 or so Bristol Secondary school pupils to sample a whole range of sports at their Combe Dingle Sports Complex. The first day, yesterday Monday 26th, had 300 children from central Brisatol schools trying out Lacrosse, Golf, Basketball, BMX, Street Dance, Ultimate Frisbee, Fencing and Handball amongst many others. You can read more about it, and watch some films of the activities and listen to interviews with participants, teachers and volunteers here.
You can also see photographs from the Festival in the gallery
In anticipation of our increasing involvement with #media2012, we’ve started a flickr account where we’ll post photos of our young citizen journalists going about their business! You can see a slide show of the images we’ve added so far and these all feed into the #media2012 site where other media hubs across the country who are part of the project send their photos too – the intention is to reveal as many aspects of the London 2012 Games as possible via citizen journalism. We’ve followed the progress of our projects form the very beginning and it’s been great to watch the confidence of the participants grow as they learn new skills and become more familiar with the technology.
There’ll be some more citizen journalism training sessions starting soon with students from various locations, building up to our visits to some of the media camps we’re helping to organise in Weymouth during the Games – more details soon!
