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Journalism 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, chronic diarrhoea and food poisoning. He escaped through bribery and fled to the UK...
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 course at Cardiff. Whilst some journalists belittle journalism courses, Maguire said...
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 following tips for journalism students: - Get experience and get yourself seen. -...
Read MoreCatherine Quinn’s tips for freelancing
‘Never say you’re a student journalist, ever’ was the advice given to us at the Centre for Journalism today by the freelancer Catherine Quinn. Why? Because it often ends up potential interviewees suddenly becoming too busy to help and leaving the soundtrack to my life being ‘Don’t hang up’ by The Orlons. I thought I’d share some other tips she gave us after talking to some journalism students at the NCTJ student council, who said they’d like some information on freelancing: - Quinn said that being a freelancer is the ‘ultimate sales job’. It’s 70% selling and 30% writing. - Different editors like different styles of pitching....
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