Capturing Cardiff – Students Who Strip

Like many students Poppy needed a part-time job to pay her way through university. Unlike many students, her job involved dancing naked in front of strangers for money.

“The most difficult part is flirting with people who make your skin crawl. But if someone comes into a shop and you don’t like them, you still have to serve them and be nice to them. It’s just like any other job in that way,” says Poppy, 21.

This idea of normality comes up time and time again.  When asked why, unlike other dancers, she didn’t switch between clubs she says: “I had my own locker and my own spot in the dressing room. I felt comfortable there.

“Everyone thinks of stripping and thinks of drugs and prostitution and while it does go on it’s not something the majority of dancers have anything to do with.”

Poppy (not her real name) never thought she would work as a lap dancer. She describes herself as “a nice middle-class public school girl” and moved to Cardiff from Ireland during her gap year to find work. She went for a bar job at strip club For Your Eyes Only but crossed wires meant they thought she was applying to be a dancer.

Talking with the managers, and especially with the other girls working there, she came round to the idea that this was something she could do. The clincher was the money on offer. Working three to four nights a week, dancing topless on the pole and doing nude private dances, Poppy would take home between £400 and £600. If there was a big rugby international at the Millennium Stadium, she could take home double that in a single night (although even strip clubs are not immune to the credit crunch)

Poppy is not atypical in combining studies with stripping. Jamie Willison, general manager of the Fantasy Lounge on St Mary Street, has eight full-time students among the 40 dancers on his books. If you include further education of any sort, that figure rises to 20.

Of course there are downsides. Poppy wants her real name withheld as she hasn’t told her family about it.

“Three or four of my friends cut contact with me when I started doing it. They thought it was disgusting and told me as much. One girl I’d been friends with for seven years hasn’t spoken to me since, she’s appalled by it.”

Several people have accused her of letting down her gender, a charge she articulately rebuts.

“I identify myself as post-feminist. I am all for empowered women but I am for using your sexuality to empower you.

“Besides,” she laughs, “There are many feminists out there who would find it hard not to be swayed by that much money.”

Hear Poppy’s story...

Then there’s the preparation. “It’s an ordeal to get ready. If you’re paying £30 you don’t want a girl with stubbly legs.”

Club owners are quick to point out if a girl has put on weight, or needs to wear more make-up. “The girls understand it’s a glamour industry,” says Mr Willison.

It’s clear that the hair, the make-up and, paradoxically, even the skimpy dresses place a barrier between dancers and clients. It’s not Poppy dancing, it’s a stylised, doll-like part she played for the evening. “It’s pure fantasy,” she says.

Mr Willison agrees. “The girls are very far removed from it. It might be about sex for the punters but it’s not about sex for the girls. It’s about money.”

The extent to which lap dancing clubs are about sex was discussed last month in Whitehall at a surreal hearing of the  Culture, Media and Sport Committee. A current overhaul of the licensing laws proposes to upgrade lap dancing clubs to “Sex Encounter Establishments.”

Councillor Ed Bridges, Chair of Cardiff Council’s Licensing Committee, says he would welcome the change if it meant people had more of a say about what went on in their communities.

“We wouldn’t necessarily agree with the moral arguments put forward by those passionate proponents of the change,” he says.

When councillors leave morality aside in this way, then arguably formerly unacceptable activities are losing their stigma. These two articles reflect the tensions caused by this process of social evolution.

Kate Nicholls, secretary of the Lap Dancing Association, hopes attitudes are changing. The LDA was set up two years ago expressly to offer lap dancers an alternative to joining the International Union of Sex Workers.

She says: “It’s important to differentiate our members from sex workers. Our girls see themselves as entertainers. And the idea of sex encounters is anathema to most club owners. It’s not what they see going on in their clubs.”

Poppy agrees. Since breaking her foot a few months ago she has stopped working as a stripper but she is adamant she never had a great moral dilemma about it. If anyone overstepped the mark security were always swift to kick them out.

“I think a stripper provides a good service, the same as a taxi driver, a doctor or a fireman. They fill your needs, you pay them and everyone’s happy.”

She wouldn’t consider what she did as sex encounters. “I wouldn’t want anyone touching me, no amount of money is worth that. It’s the difference between selling your body and selling your soul. That’s quite poetic!”

Strip clubs in South Wales

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Why Rory Cellan-Jones Didn’t Turn Out To Be Morpheus

 

I was dreading BBC Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones’s visit to Cardiff University last week. I know we have heard over this series of lectures that the online revolution is not going to render everything which has gone before it obsolete, sweeping away old journalistic values and practices in a tidal wave of new technology. Hell I have even written blogs saying as much.

But Rory Cellan-Jones, I feared, might think differently. He is one of the high priests of online journalism, mightn’t he demand an end to all the old ways and demand in fire and brimstone terms we convert or be damned?

In my head I was actually imagining a situation like this.

Red/blue pill time, the starkest of choices, wake in my bed believing whatever I want to believe or stay in Wonderland and see how deep the rabbit hole goes?

Thankfully there was no such decision to be made. Quite aside from the fact that Mr Cellan-Jones was not an insufferable poser, wearing sun glasses indoors and waffling on in empty pseudo-intellectual platitudes, he made it clear that much of what is currently important to journalists will continue to be so.

He talked about, “the old endurance skills..many of which are still relevant to this day.”

He insisted that those in editorial positions should not be swayed by “Most Read” sections on websites and should retain a sense of pride in their own editorial judgments.

The biggest thing I took away from his talk was the vital need not to throw the journalistic baby out with the old-technology bathwater.

It seems he is not the only one keen to get this message across. On the same day he was addressing us in Cardiff, the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) was beginning a two day conference in Manchester, the centrepiece of which was to reveal the findings of a major survey into how journalism training should evolve to meet the needs of the multimedia newsroom.

The survey found overwhelmingly that the skills most concerning employers were traditional. They included the ability to find one’s own stories, use of language, writing, media law and newsgathering.

Perhaps most startling of all was the employers’s insistence that shorthand should remain a key part of journalistic training. This article on holdthe frontpage.co.uk highlights this particular issue but more generally the tone of the piece reflects the continuing obsession with traditional skills, summed up by Manchester Evening News editor Paul Horrocks:

Things that can be given away may be less time on modern processes such as video journalism. We can teach that.

Similar sentiments are expressed by Colin McKinnon, learning and development manager for editorial at The Age newspaper in Australia, quoted in this Press Gazette piece:

McKinnon warned against getting too “hung up” on technology and forgetting the basics of journalism, such as fact-checking, fairness and balance.

Of course it could be argued these news editors and training managers are hopelessly out of touch, clinging onto the past with the same misguided zeal with which people tried to pack suitcases as the Titanic went down.

Look at the title of the Press Gazette piece, “Decade of hell”, or this Economist piece “Who killed the newspaper?”

With its tales of young Brits turning away from newspapers and investment banks attacking even the most revered papers for their tumbling share prices it makes pretty gloomy reading.

But back we turn to Mr Cellan-Jones and in fact the recurring lesson I have learnt from this series of online journalism lectures over the last few weeks.

Yes things are changing. But if we forget who we are, what we do best and why we do what we do, then we might as well start waving the white flag right now.

Oh God that sounded like something Morpheus would say..

My New Job as CEO of Me Inc! (Urgh)

The Brand Alphabet

In this week’s lecture Rick Waghorn, founder of MyFootballWriter mapped out the future of journalism as he sees it – for journalists to flourish in the digital age they must develop individual brands.

There is nothing new in this idea. AA Gill, Charlie Brooker, Henry Winter and (mind-bogglingly) Jeremy Clarkson have all built up large, loyal followings and as a result they have developed powerful media brands. Previously this was the preserve of a rarefied group of star names, now even journalist students like myself are being urged to think about our brands.

Why? Because the internet has changed all the rules, making individual’s brands easier to establish, maintain and measure.

This fantastic article from the New York Observer points out that once it took decades for a brilliant journalist like Tom Wolfe to become a brand.

“That was before anyone with a blog and a Flickr account could burrow into a writerly niche and, if all went according to plan, come out burnished by the soft glow of Internet fame. The days when a writer actually had to have a body of significant work in print to be famous are over. Now, a sort of equivalency gets established between Tom Wolfe and … Perez Hilton?”

And this is where I start to get a bit nervous. As much I as I can admire perezhilton.com as an exercise in gossip-mongering, I baulk at the suggestion that he stands toe to toe with an epoch-defining journalist like Wolfe.

This is the problem I have with journalists as brands – it threatens to make self-publicity more important than journalistic ability.

Think I’m being paranoid? This 1997 article, one of the first to spell out the philosophy of self-branding, is explicit: “Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle.”

The whole piece is toe-curlingly excruciating, using the kind of motivational psycho-bullshit that even David Brent might draw the line at.

For example:

“We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”

Now don’t get me wrong, I am under no illusions as to the seismic scale of the changes our industry is currently going through and in the current climate I am more than willing to do whatever I can to sell myself to employers.

But let’s not lose sight of the values that underpin journalism and avoid the irreversible drift to becoming just another business.

The worst case scenario as I see it was mapped out in this post by online journalism guru Jeff Jarvis ( a post which interestingly starts with a discussion about Rick Waghorn).

So what if the newsroom of the future isn’t a room at all but an open network of journalists who succeed or fail by the value of what they do and their reputations and credibility?

What a grim future that would be. In an industry where fierce competition and egoistical point-scoring render ridiculous the idea of teamwork in a newsroom, do we really need to go even further and reduce newspapers to a disparate collection of individual journalists, working by themselves and for themselves?

Besides, I feel this whole idea of journalists as brands has been overstretched. Mr Waghorn cited Robert Peston as being a bigger brand than the BBC during periods of the credit crunch, but one of my colleagues pointed out that without the BBC branding behind him would Peston have been able to gather anywhere near the same number of leads?

A savvy New York Times journalist is quoted in the New York Observer article cited above as saying:

“When people are kissing me on both cheeks, one of those cheeks says New York Times.” 

So let’s not get too wrapped up in this idea of us as brands. At its most innocent it may be distracting, at its worst it could be poisonous.

The challenge for the media organisations is to make sure their recruitment processes are able to recognise and reward talent above all. The challenge for us as trainee journalists is to ensure that we develop that talent.

Knowing Me, Knowing You, Online Communities and the Alan Partridge Problem

Every episode of Alan Partridge is brilliant but this may just be the best scene in the whole series. Desperate to impress the visiting Irish TV executives, our hero launches the most incompetent, patronising charm offensive ever seen, culminating in the wonderful section where he lists things people associate with Ireland (horses running through council estates, toothless simpletons etc).

During today’s excellent lecture by Shane Richmond, Communities Editor of Telegraph.co.uk, it struck me that when we the media establish, manage and discuss online communities there is a danger we, like Partridge, struggle to think outside our prejudices and preconceptions.

What do people really want from us?

Shane Richmond told us that the values treasured by journalists and the values users expect in online media sites are very different. He hammered home the reality that in a media landscape where the very concept of brand loyalty has been fractured and users can pick their news à la carte on an article by article basis, reassessing readers and reflecting their wants is paramount.

Part of the new role of media organisations is to facilitate the workings of online communities, which the My Telegraph site is very good at, currently hosting 30,000 bloggers. The Telegraph cottoned on quickly that most of their bloggers did not want to “be bloggers” as such when they signed up, they really just wanted to talk to other Telegraph readers.

Once again when we strip away grandiose theories about people embracing the power to publish, we are left with something much more simple.

If you were to go into any pub in the country and wander around listening to people’s conversations, you’d probably be barred. But as you were manhandled out the door, you would marvel at the range of topics that get people talking. It’s the same on the Internet.

A random look at MyTelegraph today brought up links to posts with the following titles; “Towards a typology of delinquent public service employees”, “What is your favourite recipe?” and “Will Muslims go to Heaven?”.

None of these topics would have been covered in today’s papers and yet at one point this afternoon they were three of the most read postings. The point, as Mr Richmond explained, is things that might seem unimportant, un-newsworthy or uninteresting to a hard-nosed hack have engaged thousands of people.

This 2007 article written by American digital technology professor Rich Gordon urges newspapers to think of their websites as networks rather than destinations.

Add all these network-building ideas together and I think a news site can increase its site traffic significantly — attracting new audiences, making current users come back more frequently, and increasing the time spent and pages viewed per visit.

The same ideas underpin big organisations like the Telegraph managing online communities. It struck me as telling that although Telegraph readers inundate Shane and his team with complaints about the website, they still come back again and again.

Readers’ expectations are clearly changing. Next time we reel off what we think people want from newspaper websites, we would be wise to stop and think. To paraphrase Partridge, “Der’s more to the website, dan dis.”

How Mel Gibson’s Finest Film Explains Journalism in the Age of Networks (And No, It’s Not “What Women Want”)

I love the film Braveheart. It may be sentimental. It may be historically inaccurate. And with its misty lochs and forlorn bagpipes it may fetishize Scottish nationalism to the point of the absurd. But it is a rip-roarer of a film complete with plucky Celts, a sexy French princess, and in Longshanks a cartoon English baddie who steals every scene he is in.

(As a side note, Longshanks, Edward I, is famous for persecuting English Jews and eventually expelling them from England in 1290. He and Mel Gibson would no doubt have got along swimmingly.)

But back to the film. This is Longshanks’s best line by a mile…

In the debate on the digital revolution, it sums up an attitude that I have come across time and time again, and it maybe articulated like this: The problem with the internet, is that it’s full of people. (If it helps picture me saying this with long white hair and wearing chain mail).

We can look at network maps and debate relevancy alogorithms but strip it all away and you’re left with people.

In today’s lecture, Antony Mayfield, Head of Content and Media at iCrossing UK, put people firmly back in the picture. He pointed out that Google’s seemingly unassailable hegemony can be explained largely by their insistence on putting the user first. Relevancy of results is king in Googleland and therefore we all remain loyal subjects.

Like Jessica Elgot and Jemima Kiss, I too have become a convert to the iconoclastic teachings of Michael Rosenblum and was lucky to see his lecture, nay sermon, at the Society of Editors Conference this week.

Leaving the stage to stalk the conference floor, Rosenblum extolled the virtues of video journalism, but the implications of his tour de force went much further. It is no longer possible to cling onto ideas of how we as journalists think things should be done. Our users will from now on tell us how they want things done and it is up to us to fall in line.

Mr Rosenblum tore into the idea that necessity is the mother of invention, asking whether anyone in the mid 1990s sat around in newsrooms saying, “Shit, we really need an Internet. I wish someone would invent that. Cos when the internet came along let’s be honest, you all went, ‘Fuck get that thing out of here.’ “

But Rosenblum and Antony Mayfield both believe in creative disruption, and see the seemingly cataclysmic upheavals bought about by the internet as a great thing for journalism, not least because it refocuses our industry on people, their wants, their needs and their ideas.

It struck me during today’s talk that though we tend to toss around technical terms when discussing journalism and the internet, the key values we come back to are intrinsically human. Today Antony Mayfield talked about etiquette, reputation and attention-seeking. In previous weeks we have talked about trust, storytelling and connecting with people.

Let us not lose sight of this. As Antony Mayfield concluded:

“Don’t be distracted by technology. Find and follow people.”

Without people, the internet is nothing. And like William Wallace and his army, kilts raised, genitals a-wagging, the people have laid down the challenge.

We can ridicule their blogs. But we can never take their freedom.

Open Letter to Adam Smith, aka The Drunk Journalist

Dear Adam,

I love Birmingham and spend an inordinate amount of my time defending its reputation. It is friendlier than London, less self-consciously cool than Manchester and more diverse than Cardiff. It is the city that gave the world the Balti and Black Sabbath, Cat Deeley and custard powder, Jasper Carrot and Jamelia.

And I will put it on record I ruddy love the Brummie accent, even though one survey claims a person with a Brummie accent seems less intelligent than someone who just stays quiet.

Therefore I was disappointed with the predictable unleashing of Brummie-ism over your now infamous drunken YouTube rant. The fact you are a Brummie seemed to add an extra layer of sneering to the fallout and so I tried to defend you as much as possible this week.

 ”I am a bit of an idiot,” you slur at one point. True enough, but you’re our idiot Smithy.

But of all the ways in which you let himself down, one line sticks out above all others. When the mysterious Dutch interviewer asks if what you’re writing is going online, you snarl back, “It’s going in print. I’m a proper news journalist.”

Oh Smithy.

We have heard about these dinosaurs who still cling onto the idea the world is flat and that the prominence of print journalism over online remains unquestionable. But like UFOs or James Blunt fans, I am not sure that I ever thought they existed.

Adam Tinworth, Head of Blogging at RBI, gave a lecture this week on the role of blogs in the brave new media world. He is at the vanguard of the changes, and outlined how blogs are key for media organisations hoping to connect with this overwhelming, ever-evolving “distributed space” of which you are so disdainful.

He told us that choosing the most appropriate medium to present our stories is crucial to maintaining the bond with our audiences which we are so desperate to cling onto. If Samuel Pepys were alive today, surely even he would embrace the blogosphere. It would look something like this.

Blogs are the future Smithy. Earlier this year the Observer published a list of the top 50 most powerful blogs and it makes fascinating reading. As a “proper news journalist” you will undoubtedly be struck by the presence of five celebrity gossip blogs in the list.

But eight of the sites are political, like Talking Points Memo which specialises in investigative reporting that the big papers, lacking funds, inclination, or both, no longer undertake. Last year a report published on the site about the White House firing several attorneys unsympathetic to the Bush agenda led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The blog’s creator, Joshua Micah Marshall, received the prestigious George Polk journalism award for the piece, the first time ever the prize had gone to a blogger.

How’s that for proper news?

Or what about Beppe Grillo, the Italian comedian and commentator railing against corruption in a state where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi controls much of the mass media?

Is he less of a journalistic force than you Smithy, slumped on the pavement, cutting and pasting BBC reports?

Adam Tinworth said for the first time this year online revenue overtook print revenue at RBI. It is a watershed and one that may well be replicated across the industry over the coming years. Blogging is an essential way for the 21st Century journalist to connect with his readers, which is what journalism has always been about.

Although the methods of reaching out to readers are changing, the need to do so does not. The fundamental rules of journalism remain the same. Like the one about how hacks should be able to hold their drink…

Yours as ever,

Rob Alderson

How One Man’s Love For A Goat Teaches Us About Social Media

In 2007 I had a disconcerting number of conversations about bestiality.  Like many others I was fascinated by the story of the Sudanese man forced to “marry” a goat after being caught in flagrante by the goat’s owner.

For weeks the story stayed resolutely in the BBC’s most read section, it was emailed to me by friends and acquaintances across the globe (get me) and hours of pub time were devoted to Charles Tombe and whether forced marriage to the animal in question was a punishment likely to put off other would-be animal lovers.

Matthew Yeomans talked in last week’s lecture about social media and the power of the internet to propel a story way beyond its usual audience. He mentioned Greenpeace as a prime example of an organisation that used all the technological tools at its disposal (YouTube, blogs) to spread their message to as wide a readership as possible, to “punch above their weight”.

The Tombe story is another illustration of the magnifying power of the web. Could Charles Tombe ever have conceived that millions of people round the world would hear about his humiliation? That office workers would read it over lunch, school boys would send it round on Facebook and that long after the event blogs like this one would flag it up once more to the uninitiated?

Perhaps if he’d known, old Charles would have gritted his teeth and hurried home for a cold shower.

This Telegraph piece, one of a number of follow-ups in the national press, gives a good account of how the story snowballed. But the most interesting revelation it contains is that this story was never actually put on the Juba Post website.

The BBC were as shocked by the story’s staying-power as anybody according to this blog. Matthew Yeomans talked about the half life of the internet and this story broke into the public consciousness over a year after it was first on the BBC.

So how did this go from a small piece in the print edition of a Sudanese paper to my friends and I guffawing in a pub in the suburban West Midlands? The BBC got the ball rolling but from then on it was all about networks, people passing this story onto people. The big media organisations could only jump on the bandwagon as and when there was a space.

These are the new rules.

We talk about media and trust but it is a world away from the kind of real trust we have for our friends and family. If one of my friends links to a story on Facebook, or Twitter, I am almost certain to read it.

It’s easy to ridicule Sarah Palin (no really, have a go!) but the scorn poured on her over her failure to name a paper she reads is misplaced. So she doesn’t sit down with a copy of the New York Times every morning? Fewer and fewer people do.

That paper wrote an excellent piece last week that Matthew Yeomans quoted from. The article cites Google CEO Eric Schmidt warning that the Web would become a “cesspool of useless information” unless the big, trusted brands survived.

But this survival is not inevitable. Internet commentator Dan Farber wrote gloomily this week that,

“People are willing to settle for content of generally less value that is free of charge.”

This challenge for us as journalists is to reverse this trend, to make sure our work is better than that of the untrained, unchecked and unbalanced (sometimes in both senses of the word) blogger. Let others worry about advertising revenue, all we can do is ensure that we are writing is something that others will want, and need, to read.

So lets’s step up and take the bull by the horns. (No Charles, it’s a metaphor).

How Digital Storytelling Will Improve Journalism No End, By Way Of a Stand Up Comedian And A Very Pretentious Metaphor

Two years ago at the Edinburgh Festival I went to see a show by comedian Daniel Kitson. At half one in the morning around 200 of us squeezed onto the impossibly uncomfortable bare wooden benches in the venue and on shuffled a shoe-less Kitson and his musical sidekick Gavin Osborn. With almost nothing by way of an introduction, Kitson took out a fairly battered notebook, cleared his throat and began to read, his dulcet Yorkshire tones occasionally sabotaged momentarily by his stammer.

He read for maybe an hour and a half, with a handful of Osborn’s songs breaking up the chapters of the story, a brilliant, moving and utterly original tale of love, loss and a shark attack. Nobody fidgeted. Nobody checked their watch. 200 people sat in that room and were completely absorbed. It almost felt wrong to clap at the end, perhaps if nobody interrupted he might just keep going and going.

Storytelling as an artform has fascinated me since that evening but I had never thought about its possible relationship with journalism until Dr Daniel Meadows’s incredible lecture last week. The evangelical way in which Dr Meadows spoke about digital storytelling really struck a chord, what was new though was the idea that the future of our profession may be bound up with projects like Capture Wales, the BBC’s flagship digital storytelling project that Dr Meadows oversaw.

Perhaps the most interesting, and reassuring, part of the lecture was the insistence that there is no hierarchy of forms in the media, one technological development rarely renders an existing medium obsolete, although it may alter the way in which that existing medium has to work.

I’m a great fan of pretentious metaphors and one that has stuck with me from my undergraduate days was that historians should try to be both the parachutist and the truffle-hunter. So too I believe should the journalist, and digital storytelling strikes me as a fantastic tool through which to live up to the truffle-hunter challenge.

Take a story like the Bridgend suicides. This first article is a good example of the parachutist approach, covering the chronology, the issues raised and the responses in a very traditional way. The parachute opens, we hit the ground and we have this well-written article that includes a great deal of personal, anecdotal opinion from young people living in the town. But still we are not truffle-hunting.

This video from the Capture Wales scheme shows a mother talking about her son’s suicide. Incredibly poignant and almost unnervingly intimate, this lady talks about the last time she danced with her son and the first time she visited his grave on Mother’s Day. The family photos that accompany it, the fact that we appear to be in this lady’s living room all add to feeling that we are inside this story, we are exposed to the raw, overwhelming emotion of it in a way that is rarely possible in a newspaper article, however well-written.

But this isn’t the end for the traditional journalist. Could this video stand alone? No, we need the context provided in the first two articles. Woe betide the truffle-hunter who doesn’t appreciate the lie of the land.

But in terms of adding personality to stories that are often complex and confusing, digital storytelling is incredible. This video is similar, kaleidoscoping the huge, sprawling issue of immigration into three minutes of colour.

Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in six words. His response: “For Sale; baby shoes, never worn”. The six word story phenomenon has exploded in recent years, with books, websites and even a Flickr group devoted to this most concentrated of storytelling skills. Like Dr Meadows said, everybody has a story inside them, however brief. As journalists it would be a grave dereliction of duty if we didn’t help bring them out.

How Old Ladies in Swimming Costumes Helped Me Think About Networked Journalism

  

 

About six months ago I turned up for the Kick-Start the Week swimming session at my local pool, ready for what the poster promised was, “an invigorating workout to blow away the weekend cobwebs.” What confronted me as I left the changing room was about 30 old ladies doing water aerobics to a Sister Sledge song, A Last of the Summer Wine swimsuit special.

I have tried to suppress that memory but it came flooding back after Glyn Mottershead’s lecture on Networked Journalism this week – the hot, itchy sensation that this wasn’t what I had signed up for.

It is terrifying to find out three weeks into a journalism course that journalism is changing, rapidly and permanently. The relationship between journalist and audience is being redefined and we the media have no choice but to adapt.

Associated Press CEO Tom Curley in this 2004 speech nailed the new reality we must all get our heads round:

“The Internet has become our new business environment, not just another medium for distribution.”

But for Curly this means exploring new possibilities not wallowing in self-pity. His central point is this:

“The franchise is not the newspaper; it’s not the broadcast; it’s not even the Web site. The franchise is the content itself.”

In this way, journalists have nothing to fear – our job has always been to engage with people and while the ways we do this may change, the fundamental need to do so will not. After all New York City media professor Jay Rosen is correct, the Web is just “people connected by computers”.

And these “people connected by computers” want news in different ways. This manifesto from the People Formerly Known as the Audience spells it out:

“We graduate from wanting media when we want it, to wanting it without the filler, to wanting media to be way better than it is, to publishing and broadcasting ourselves…(We) are simply the public made less fictional, more able, less predictable.”

So the onus is now on us to cater for these new demands. A brilliant example of one organisation’s attempt to rise to this challenge is the Huffington Post’s Off the Bus presidential election campaign site. Here some 7800 users across the company uploads reports, photos and videos which show their experiences of the campaign. It is a pro-am collaboration with professional journalists mentoring the contributors.

The quality of the reporting is superb and reading the thoughts of the very people making up their minds ahead of next month’s vote compliments the nightly bulletins I watch which cover the big, over-archhing themes of the election (filed by journalists travelling with the candidates, on their campaign buses).

This is a crucial thing to understand, Off the Bus doesn’t mean I don’t still devour the mainstream media’s election coverage, but it does add new dimensions to my understanding of it.

This is one example of successful collaboration between journalists and their networks. Trial and error is unavoidable and there will doubtless be some collaborations which fail. But doing nothing is not an option.

We are not the only ones whose industry is changing. This trailer is for a film made by a Swarm of Angels, a collaborative donation-based website hoping to revolutionise the way in which movies are made. It’s called Worlds Will Shatter, and that may not be such a bad thing. 

So lets take a deep breath, straighten our swimming caps and jump in the pool with the old ladies. Altogether now, “We are Family, I got all my sisters with me…”