NUJ Students’ Conference 2010 – Investigative Journalism
You need to be an “obsessive geek” and realise that “almost everyone hates you”. That is the life of an investigative journalist, according to the panel at the NUJ Students’ Conference held yesterday. Shiv Malik, investigative reporter and co-author of Jilted Generation – How Britain has bankrupted its youth, talked about the dislike towards investigative journalists as you are trying to find out things people want to keep quiet. He said your notes are “absolutely vital and essential” and that the “Police are like vampires… If you have something (i.e. notes) don’t let...
Read MoreJournalism and Press Freedom – problems for international journalists – NUJ Students’ Conference 2010
“You will end up being arrested, stripped naked and beaten but your job is to tell the truth,” were the words told to student journalists by Charles Atangana at yesterday’s NUJ Students’ Conference. Atangana, an exiled journalist from Cameroon is currently fighting for his right to remain in the UK after receiving death threats. In a place where the state feed the media, he faced censorship from his own paper and was arrested by President Biya’s security forces, where he was detained for 40 days, during which he was locked in a flooded cell, tortured, suffered from malnutrition,...
Read MoreNUJ Students’ Conference, 2010, Getting Started in the Industry: advice for student journalists
“If you want a nine to five job go to a library” was the advice offered by the Associate Editor of The Mirror, Kevin Maguire, today at the NUJ Students’ Conference. He said, “Journalism is a great life” although it is now harder to get in to. “You need to be nosy, to get on with people, and you need to be able to write and be accurate.” He noted the value of getting experience whilst at university and said it was a mistake on his part for doing very little whilst there. He then failed to get a job when leaving university and was forced into taking a postgraduate journalism...
Read MorePeter Simmonds’, Assistant-Editor BBC TV News, tips for journalism students
Peter Simmonds, Assistant-Editor of BBC TV News, visited the Centre for Journalism today. During his journalistic career he has worked across commercial radio, Sky News, 5 Live, BBC World News and more. Simmonds has spent the last 16 years at the BBC, during which he says ‘things have changed a lot’. “When I started there wasn’t any online journalistic presence.” He also added that the ‘BBC used multimedia quite slowly at first’. When asked the question of tips for getting a job he said when he was starting out he ‘managed to get a job in the downturn’. He offered the...
Read MoreThe journalism student’s life
My journalistic life recently has involved renting myself to pay the bills, talking to drug dealers in a pitch black park, and uncovering which shops are selling fireworks to under age youths in Chatham, Medway. Alongside this I’ve been working on an investigative piece for my final year project. I don’t want to tell much about it at the moment, except that I’ve found out that the BBC are working on a very similar documentary, so the competition is on. It’s myself vs a much larger, more experienced, and better-resourced BBC. I’m looking forward to it. As usual we’ve been kept busy...
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