#dan howarth

Better late than never, right? The endless cheese fog has lifted and I’m gearing up to returning to work tomorrow – the same day my eldest leaves us to return to university. Normal life will resume, which is depressing enough, and I’m doing dry-ish January. What the hell is ‘dry-ish’ January? Well, I have set myself the goal of being a little fitter and losing some weight this year and the…

I love Fantasycon. It’s an amazing experience, full of friendly faces and like minded people where I go to recharge my writer battery. I haven’t written much in the last year. Firstly, work has been kicking my arse and secondly, I’ve been editing The Original’s Rage (out 15th November! Preorders available here). After a weekend of discussing writing and drinking far too much alcohol, I’m ready…

In the last post, I explained five of the lessons we've learned since launching JesmondLocal two years ago. Here's another five:

Journalists have a part to play in halting the slide in civic engagement, reconnecting journalism with its democratic roots. We live-blog council ward meetings, so that the important decisions taken about our community are heard beyond the half dozen elderly people who bother to attend in person. We hold political hustings events during local elections so that the people of Jesmond get to meet and quiz the people who will represent them. If journalists don’t do it, who will?

Multimedia journalism, I’m discovering, can be practised by anyone. During a partnership with the BBC and local Jesmond schools to produce slideshows and short films for Radio 3’s Free Thinking festival at the Sage Gateshead, some of the best interviews were conducted by teenagers from a Jesmond school for children with severe hearing impairments. Journalists have a role to play in helping people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities to tell their stories.

Passion and professionalism are mandatory. JesmondLocal wouldn’t happen without a handful of passionate professionals (that’s me, former Newcastle University journalism students Dan Howarth and Sophie Bauckham and chief evangelist David Baines) plus the patience of our partners, children and family pets. Sustainable journalism isn’t going to develop and evolve unless more professional journalists are willing to give up time and money to pass on their skills.

The next generation of journalists must see themselves also as educators. Those of us who have been in the business for longer struggle with the concept of sharing our skills. But in a post-Leveson world, journalists will have to work hard to recast the relationship with the public, and become more social in their working practices. It won’t be enough to be just a content creator – journalists also need to be organisers, collaborators, supporters and educators.

We are a unique laboratory of inquiry. I’m not sure that a larger media organisation could take the risks and leaps of faith that JesmondLocal ploughs into – community radio shows, pop-up magazines, journalism bootcamps -  or  be able to adapt and switch the focus of its inquiry as quickly when something doesn’t work, or a new innovation appears.

Two years on from launching JesmondLocal (see previous post for background), here’s what we’ve learned so far:

Student journalists need real world, grassroots work experience. For obvious reasons, opportunities for gaining experience in established news organisations are increasingly scarce. There is no shortage of classroom-based teaching, but would-be journalists, professional or otherwise, need first-hand, on-the-ground experience so they can learn the basics of newsgathering and reporting. We give each student a patch (crime, sport, health, environment etc) just as any local newspaper would do and show them how to build up their contacts book, work up story ideas, pitch them to a news desk etc. Hyperlocal/local journalism may not offer the sexy, celeb-filled material many of our students prefer to read, but we impress upon them that Jesmond, like any community, can be a microcosm of the wider world. When you learn the basics of covering a local politics story in Jesmond, you’re learning the basics of covering a political story at Westminster.

News organisations want to recruit talent with this real world, grassroots news experience. Our students often tell us that when invited to interview with the BBC, Sky and other news organisations, the JesmondLocal experience on their CVs is what often gets discussed the most.

What student journalists need to learn is changing all the time. The best university journalism courses are refreshed maybe once each academic year, if you’re lucky. But the tools, techniques and skills journalists need in 2012 are being refreshed almost daily. We offer our students three “semesters of learning” where, at our weekly team meetings, we run through a constantly changing curriculum of the latest multimedia tools, techniques and skills – Skyping experts from around the world to bring our volunteers the freshest insights.

Print is not dead. Convincing an advertiser to spend even £5 on a local online ad is almost impossible. But as soon as you mention the word “magazine”, local advertisers begin to take notice, writing cheques for up to £600 per page. Before Christmas, we created a magazine around the Turner Prize in just 48 hours at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. In the previous two years we’d barely sold enough online advertising to cover our domain fees. Yet in just a week, we sold enough print advertising not just to cover the costs of the magazine, but turn us a £1,000 profit (which we then foolishly donated to charity).

Projects accelerate learning and build community. The online news website remains the hub for what JesmondLocal does. But one-off projects, such as community radio shows and short films fast forward progress. For the same magazine project, we pulled in favours from a variety of creative professionals: illustrators, writers, photographers and film-makers. The chance to work alongside each other, including our students, gave everyone involved – professionals and volunteers - an opportunity to learn and explore new working partnerships.