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…)
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
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!
You can see the last post about our third citizen journalism project here but we’re already discussing a new and imminent project with Dr Emma Rich from Bath University and RELAYS colleagues around sport and disability, more news as details are firmed up.
Negotiations are already underway with a range of people in Weymouth around finding accommodation for our citizen journalism students and acquiring access to a technical base for next summer’s planned visit to report on the Olympic sailing and windsurfing and also hopefully to the opening events.
Meanwhile come back soon to find out details of an Olympic-related event at Watershed in late November – our friend David Goldblatt has written a book with colleague Jonny Acton called How to Watch the Olympics and we’re having a book-launch evening to celebrate.
We’ve been working with media students and tutors from City of Bristol College on our latest excursion into citizen journalism. The event we covered this time was Oktoberfest – not the beery one in Germany but a two-wheeled challenge in Ashton Court! Oktoberfest is a day-long mountain bike competition that attracts hundreds of participants from far and wide who ride the new trail in Ashton Court several times over – fastest time wins a prize! Cycling has been a bit of a theme these last few months and there’s an interview with Cyclescreen’s Tommy Curtis from Oktoberfest on one of the student blogs!
Before we took on the bikers on Saturday we began training sessions with the students at the beginning of October at the College, Watershed and the Pervasive Media Studio and then sent them out into the city (with support and smart phones!) to try out their reporting skills for half a day in Stokes Croft. You can learn more about the project here and links to the student blogs are as follows: Group A, Group B, Group C and Group D. (more…)
