Out and About Interviewing in London

A couple of hours after receiving the email inviting trainee journalists to apply to work as a journalist interview at the International Service’s Human Rights Awards I had rang the lady in charge and submitted my application. The opportunity to interview the award winners and the host, Jon Snow, at the House of Commons excited me so much because of my background. I wanted my application to reflect honestly my experience as an interviewer, passion for human rights and natural inquisitive nature. Fortunately they chose me and after a huge amount of reading up on the charity, the award winners and Jon Snow, I headed across to London. International Service wanted to have material to be able to make a film reflecting the work they do supporting charities in West Africa, Latin America and the Middle East and the importance of International Service’s Human Rights Awards.

On Tuesday, the day before the awards ceremony at the Commons, I interviewed Nabilaye, a Malian development worker. I stood on the banks of the River Thames interviewing Nabilaye, whose charity (ADAC) won the award for the Defence of the Human Rights of People Living with HIV/Aids. He only spoke French and with the help of a translator (who also happened to be the CEO of International Service) and a professional cameraman, he gave a moving interview about the charity he runs in Mali which supports sufferers of aids and HIV there. At the awards ceremony the next day, I interviewed all the other award winners including a reporter and producer from the Channel 4 series ‘Unreported World’ as they had won the award for Global Human Rights Defender. This was quite a daunting task because, as with Jon Snow, they know a thing or two about how to interview!

On Tuesday evening I attended the pre-awards drinks party with the winners and the main sponsor of the awards, none other than the Chairperson of Northern Rock, Bryan Sanderson. Once he realised I was a trainee journalist he became a little cold saying he’s got tens of journalists on his back the whole time to find out the latest. I should just say that he was brought in six weeks ago to sort out the crisis. The next day it was the awards ceremony and the big interview with Jon Snow.

Anthony Mayfield

Head of Media, Spannerworks.

What is the current state of play with the World Wide Web?

Having heard a number of lecturers touching on the subject (including today's with search engine marketing specialist Anthony Mayfield) I feel fairly confident I can give an answer.

The speed of communication has accelerated. Newspapers for example are no longer competing on a daily basis, but minute by minute online. The scale of available content is vast because the individual living in countries rich and poor has been empowered to create. According to Anthony, by 2010, 70% of online content will be created by individuals rather than companies and organisations. Individuals are communicating and interacting more and more through social networks - of the 1.25 billion people online, 400 million (and rising) use social networks.

In relation to journalism, rather than being passive readers, internet users are expecting to interact with journalists by emailing them and writing comments on their articles. And content lasts - yesterday's news is no longer today's chip shop paper. For example, yesterday on Guardian Unlimited, a story written in 2000 was the second most read on the website, incidentally it concerned sex in space (Astronauts test sex in space - but did the earth move?)!

That's some of the main characteristics of today's internet. It's clear to me that every aspiring journalist needs to embrace them to be successful.

Kim Hollamby

Digital Development Director, IPC Media

Search engine optimisation (SEO) was not a term I was familiar with until recently, but thanks to an excellent article in the Media Guardian I now feel well informed. Kim Hollamby, believes we trainee journalists need to be well aware of SEO.

Search engine optimisation is when news organisations aim to get their stories as high as possible in search engine results. Where newspapers replicate their stories online, this has proved problematic as their headlines often rely on puns. Some newspapers are re-writing headlines and sub-headings for online. Where newspapers simply replicate their stories online, for example with the South Wales Echo, internet users will miss some of their stories. I suspect this will soon change and all newspapers will have to make different headlines when they put their stories online.

SEO is yet another example of how successful journalists will fall behind if they do not work with digital media.