Last night, my journalism class and I went to a meeting of the Cardiff NUJ and we heard the current chairman of the union in Cardiff, Martin Shipman, Chief Reporter of the Western Mail speak, himself an ex-Cardiff journo student.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only to expect a NUJ meeting to be the doom and gloom brigade, nay-saying about poor pay, job cuts and being replaced by citizen-journalism-robots, and that, children, is why we all need the NUJ.
And Martin Shipman and his colleagues did say that, to certain extent, but they also stressed with lovely grins on their faces that the reason we do this, and the reason we’ve worked for a pittance and even for free is because we love it, and it’s “bloody good fun”.
Apparently, that’s absolutely true. It is bloody good fun. These professional journalists, who are witnessing the print apocalypse first hand, told us. And that was the best thing they could possibly have said.
It made me think again about my Online Journalism training. As complicated as things like Twitter and Dipity and Sprout and all these endless widgets may seem, they’re fun, and they’re there to be played with. I just spent two hours making this blog look pretty when it probably would have taken someone vaguely competent around five minutes. But what the hell? It was fun!
If we play around with these tools and learn how to integrate them into the way we think about news, we might just hit on a brilliant way to tell a story.
