“You’re fired”

Yesterday, the second of two school visits I’ve now done for the Trading Places scheme organised by Oxford University took place. It involved going to talk to and do a bit of a workshop on media careers with a class of teenagers (13 - 14 yrs), alongside Syed Ahmed from The Apprentice in Birmingham (yesterday), and with Nabil Elouahabi (Tariq from Eastenders), in Manchester last month.

Trading Places is one of those schemes which probably risks coming across as patronising, but in lieu of any better ideas or wider changes in society is a well-meant and necessary attempt to bridge gaps created and maintained by tradition.
The specific aim of Trading Places is to attract the brightest ethnic minority students to apply to Oxford University, and the broader goal (one with which it’s hard to quibble) is to simply encourage bright students from backgrounds which have little tradition of applying to top universities in general to consider where a degree might take them.
I found out about the scheme in an email from the Oxford Careers Service which said that they were looking for alumni who ideally fulfilled the following three criteria:

1) That they had been state-school educated
2) That they had gone on from Oxford to an “interesting” career to which 14 year olds might relate
3) That they be from an ethnicity currently under-represented at Oxford University (from what I recall of my time there, this would include anyone who wasn’t white)

I got in touch to say I’d be happy to help, but warning them that I didn’t fulfill all the criteria. Since they did pick me, a white journalist, I’m presuming they weren’t flooded with offers of help from ethnic minority state-school educated rockstars and astronauts. I wonder whether this is because the state-school educated ethnic minorities of Oxford, an already smallish group, a) never heard about the scheme, b) don’t actually fancy being the poster child for state-schooled ethnic minority success (fair enough), or c) are too busy flying to the moon and interviewing superstars for MTV.
The day was a success, I think. I tried to convey that you don’t have to have it all worked out at 14, 18 or even 21; I hadn’t realised I wanted to work as a writer or editor until the summer I graduated. I’m pretty sure they understood what I was trying to say: university buys you time in this respect, rather than wastes it. And I tried to dispel the idea that if you do go to a well-respected university, it means you’ll be slaving away nine to five, 24/7 studying non-stop for three years. Erm, unless you take a science degree. I also talked to them about 4Talent Central and good ol’ Hotdog magazine.
Syed presented what I guess might be called the flip-side, stressing his years of hard graft in places like McDonalds (trivia of the day: he earned five stars at Maccy Ds) and suggesting they begin planning their lives now in order not to be left behind. Horses for courses, I suppose.

I didn’t have the balls to tell him I’ve never seen any of The Apprentice.

Old Media, New Media: The Case Of The Collins Podcast

Caution: not-exactly-revolutionary insights ahead…

You know what I love about working in new media more than anything? It’s not the aesthetic. Gadgetry and computers, even those hailed for their clean design, aren’t beautiful. Or not to me. I can respect the way a nice bit of kit has been designed, but it could never make my heart sing, in the true sixth-form poetry sense of the phrase. Even at a more mundane level, give me a dustily comfortable study heaving with leather-bound books and battered oak-paneling over a tooled-up media suite humming with the glare of progress any day of the week. And I’m certainly not in love with the burning eyeballs, cramping fingers and Steptoe spine that are a heavy day’s work’s legacy, though that’s hardly new media-specific.

No, what I love most about online journalism is the sheer speed and accessibility, the chance to just get on with it, have an idea and make it happen. Yesterday afternoon I was proofing for publication on 4Talent Central an interview that journalist Karen Krizanovich had done with the annoyingly multi-talented Andrew Collins, presenter of Radio 4’s Banter, writer of Where Did It All Go Right?, ex-editor of Q magazine and, recently, co-host of a series of podcasts with the excellent Richard Herring, wackily entitled The Collings & Herrin Podcasts.

These are nice podcasts. People should hear them. Andrew describes them as “our own sideways look at the news. Our fervent wish is to recreate our now legendary news reviews from my now-defunct BBC 6 Music show, except without the indie records interrupting us, and without the need to temper the content for fear of offending a Sunday afternoon BBC radio audience. We don’t get paid, and they are free to listen to, it’s all done for the love of laughter.” It would seem to make sense to link to these podcasts from the article, no? Better still, why don’t we host one direct as a sample for the readers?

Granted, I have about as little experience of working in the Old Media as eternal trainee Jimmy Olsen - and he’s fictional - having spent but two years on an old-school film magazine without a website (the much-missed - er, by me, anyway - Hotdog magazine). But even in my ignorance, I do know that it wasn’t really the monthly magazine cultural ethos to go from this initial thought at about five in the afternoon, to heading over to Andrew’s blog, contacting the man direct, asking if we could host his podcast, to him checking whether that’s ok with other folks, to me uploading the podcast and sticking it on our frontpage next morning.

This is a slightly different type of example of course, but I remember that trying to organize a competition to win DVDs, t-shirts and assorted branded tat in Hotdog used to seem to take a minimum of a fortnight, from initial email to press officer, to permission forms, promo images, faxing legal agreements, passing assets to a designer, tweaking copy, proofing PDFs, obtaining approval… god, it brings me out in a giant yawn just thinking about it.

Of course, in this example you’re dealing with huge companies who “need” to make sure they’re “on brand” and other such tedium, in the grand cause of increasing the audience numbers for films of variable quality, while the other is simply downloadable audio files featuring established media pundit types in a not-for-profit scenario.

So perhaps it’s about the money flying around, or lack of it, not the medium. And that’s fine. If big corporations want to hinder themselves by slowing everything down, that’s their absolutely their right. But if people like Andrew and Richard want to make their own lives easier by letting grubby web monkeys like myself promote their for-the-love-of-it work for free, that’s, to me, actually rather wonderful.

As stated in this episode, if anyone would like to buy out Andrew and Richard’s podcast series, they’ll happily look at all offers, starting at c. £5 mil or near offer.