The ‘Journalism Talk’ with 10 year olds!

So there I was, mooching around the local supermarket near my parents house, when I hear a little voice say ‘Hi Nina, how’s your career going?’. It was Harry, a young boy from Yeo Moor school in Clevedon, where my mum works. I was touched that he’d remembered me from a few weeks ago when I’d gone into the year 6 class to do a ‘talk on journalism’.

I’m not going to lie, in the first instance, I was a little annoyed that my dear mother had so eagerly ‘volunteered’ me to do this. After all, I’m still trying to find my own way around this crazy world of journalism, let alone explain it to a roomfull of influential children. Annoyance soon turned to nervousness when I had forty pairs of 10 year old eyes looking at me expectantly, waiting for me to tell them all about my ‘exciting’ job in television! And when the teacher said I was there to talk to them about how to write a good newspaper article – I nearly fled the classroom! Print Journalist, I am not. And Print Journalist in a position to tell others how to write for print, I am most certainly not!

What actually happened though, surprised and refreshed me! We went through the 5 W’s of journalism, talked about how reports should always be accurate, reliable and unopinionated  (had to bite my tongue a little there) and talked about story structure. By the time we got to making up headlines, the kids were flying! The classroom was beginning to sound more like a Fleet street news room.

Luckily no-one asked me about phone hacking.

By the end of the morning we’d set up a small news production operation, complete with researchers, sub-editors, typists and interviewers. Our teacher (or news editor) gave us a one hour deadline to write a whole newspaper article about the destruction of Amazonian rain forests… it was a tight deadline but we pulled through and went to print on time! Phew.

What was refreshing was how engaged the children were. They had so much fun with the exercises we made up, got really creative with words and asked some great questions about the industry. It was a real buzz to see them getting excited about journalism and made me realise why I’d got into all of this in the first place.

Talking to Yeo Moor Year 6 took me out of my comfort zone that day, but I enjoyed every minute. It was a real pleasure to work with such young enthusiasts and I’m pretty sure I spotted some budding reporters in that classroom. I hope to see some familiar bylines in newspapers to come! (parents… apologies in advance!)

A Year of Journalism & Conflict: finally taking it in

Everything about this post is retrospective but I just  had to acknowledge a great exhibition that I recently went to at Somerset House, London.  Frontline: A Year of Journalism and Conflict, put together by Sky News,  looked back at the crazy year that was 2011 by showcasing the major stories that had us gripped. It started with Cairo and the Arab uprising and then, using photos, video and some extremely clever interactive multimedia, took you on a journey  through Syria (which was particularly poignant given the current situation there), Libya and finished up on the London riots of summer 2011.

It was spine-tinglingly good. I realised that, although I had seen all of the pictures and footage that were on display, I had not actually ‘seen’ them.  I’d worked on our Foreign Assignment desk through every one of those conflicts, had friends and colleagues out in the field on every single one and probably looked at hundreds of hours worth of footage / pages of editorial BUT until now I’d not taken a step back and really processed it all.

For me it bought back memories of living/working through some of the incredible events of last year. I saw again the unbelievable images of Egyptian security forces charging at crowds on camel-back. The jubilation in Tahrir Square on the night that Mubarak stepped down.  I remembered the night that Tripoli fell and the moment our team called to say they’d just reached Green Square, their comms were terrible and all I could hear was celebratory gunshots being fired in the air – how we made air that night is still a mystery to me! I was transported back to my night shift when the jaw-dropping image of a burning red double-decker bus appeared on my screen, who could have imagined the chaotic days that followed as London erupted into riots?

If, at the start of 2011, someone had told me that half of these things would happen over the next 12 months, I think i would have (politely) laughed in their face. But they did happen – some are still happening –  and I’m glad I got to stand back and take them all in on a personal level.

Unfortunately the exhibition is over now. But if you’re interested I’d strongly recommend just ‘youtubing’ a few reports as a reminder.

Here are a few I’ll always remember…

Stumbled across this short film put together by cameramen Daniel Demoustier & Sean Swann (ITN)… shows those dramatic scenes when  camels stormed protestors in Tahrir square.

NBC’s Richard Engel reports from Tahrir Square on the night Mubarak stepped down. 

Sky’s Alex Crawford enters Tripoli with the Rebels

NBC’s Richard Engel on the day Rebels took Gaddafi’s compound

Sky’s Mark Stone in Clapham, South London on the night of violence and looting