With election night fast approaching where better to watch the results come in than in the comfort of our clubroom. With screens generously provided by Sky News, we will be showing the coverage on a selection of channels. Snacks will be served throughout the evening to keep you going, and drinks will kindly be supplied by Chivas Brothers.
The evening is supported by:
Photo: pcruciatti / Shutterstock.com
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As Americans go to the polls we invite you to join us to follow the live coverage of the 57th US Presidential election night. In what is set to be a tight race we will have coverage from Sky News and other networks as results unfold state by state.
Complimentary wine and American beer will be served courtesy of onefinestay and hotdogs and nachos will be available.
The evening will begin at 8pm but make sure you are set for a long night and book a table in the restaurant, where we will be serving a special US election themed set menu from 6 – 9pm. Book a table via the restaurant page, or call 020 7479 8950.
Sponsored by:
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To find out more email Homa Rastegar on homa.rastegar@onefinestay.com, call 07767686701, or take a two minute questionnaire to find out how much your home could earn you.
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19.00 Keynote speaker: Gavin Sheppard, marketing director, Media Trust.
19.30 Panel discussion: The future of newsgathering and the changing media landscape
Change in the media landscape is constant. Technology and new media has enabled both journalists and citizens on the street to actually break news themselves. With a smart phone or iPad, one can discover, capture footage and report news instantly.
Journalism has entered the digital revolution – the age of mobile and crowd sourced street reporting. With the emergence of citizen journalists becoming a trusted source, how will media organisations adapt their newsgathering methods and maintain readership?
Consider media reports from countries like Sierra Leone or Syria. The authorities have not shown any responsibility to protect journalists or those independently newsgathering and reporting from the scene. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, ten journalists have been killed in Syria since November 2011 – two of which were British nationals working as independent newsgatherers. What can be done to ensure the safety of citizen, independent and career journalists?
Moderated by:
Nikki Bedi, a television and radio presenter of Indo-Anglian descent, began her career in Mumbai as both a stage and television actress. Spotted by Channel 4 she moved into broadcasting and has worked in India, the U.S.A and now the UK; hosting her own chat show on Star TV, film shows for Universal’s channel The Studio and NOW TV and she now works for the BBC. She is a regular interviewer alongside Clive Anderson on Radio 4’s Loose Ends, works on Radio 2, can be seen on To Buy Or Not To Buy on BBC1 and currently presents her own nightly radio phone-in show Nikki Bedi on BBC London 94.9. She can also be seen reviewing the papers on Sky News.
With:
Paul Lewis, special projects editor for the Guardian. He joined the Guardian as a trainee is 2005 after studying at Cambridge University and Harvard University. He currently runs teams of journalists at the newspaper working on a range of investigations. He recently led Reading the Riots, a major research project into the causes and consequences of the England riots, in collaboration with the London School of Economics. London-based he lectures across Europe about the use of social media in journalism and teaches a masterclass in investigative reporting. This year he was nominated for both Reporter of the Year and the Orwell Prize for Journalism, named Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards 2010 and won the 2009 Bevins Prize for outstanding investigative journalism.
Matthew Eltringham, editor of BBC College of Journalism. He was previously Assistant Editor of Interactivity and Social Media Development at the BBC. He developed programmes to bring social media skills to all journalists within BBC News and extended the BBC’s involvement in social media. In 2005 he set up the user-generated content (UGC) Hub – an innovative award-winning team that has developed expertise in digital editorial engagement with social media and user-generated content.
Mark Evans, head of home news at Sky News. He has been a journalist for 20 years, working in local, regional and national newspapers before joining the TV world with Sky News in 2001. Since then Sky News has further developed into a multi-platform organisation, leading the way in the provision of news for the web, radio, hand-held technology and in HD on TV. His position as head of home news puts him on the news front line, pushing those innovations while maintaining Sky News’ second-to-none record in editorial content.
Gavin Sheppard, marketing director at Media Trust and Community Channel, he leads the organisation’s marketing and communications services, including training and resources, media volunteers and Press Association partnership Community Newswire. In 2009 he launched Media Trust’s pioneering digital media work with communities across England, Community Voices, which is currently working throughout the UK. He has more recently also led on the development of a UK-wide community reporters network newsnet, which will support the production and distribution of quality local news over the next three years.
Ravin Sampat, editor at Blottr. He previously worked within the editorial team at DMGT on their local community hubs LocalPeople and ThisIs. Prior to this, he spent two years in India working as the editor of a lifestyle magazine, freelance copywriting and consulting. He is currently leads the editorial team at Blottr, and is responsible for curation of editorial content and recruiting new contributors.
In partnership with Media Trust.
Photo credit: Emma Suleiman
]]>Download this episode
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Three time winner of the Royal Television Society Journalist of the year award, Sky special correspondent Alex Crawford spoke on trauma, risk, the tools of her trade and why she would rather eat her own liver than be a presenter.
The reports for which most recently she is best known are from Libya; her pieces from Zawiya under attack from Gaddafi’s forces and the final push towards Tripoli.
Disarmingly modest throughout – almost reticent to talk about her achievements, Crawford told Vin Ray, former director of the BBC College of Journalism, about being trapped in Zawiya as Gaddafi’s troops closed in.
“Zawiya in March was an incredibly traumatic time for all of us. I’ve never been through anything like it and I hope I never go through anything like it again. It was very, very traumatic”
The people of Zawiya were desperate for the pictures to get out and prove that, contrary to government propaganda, the city was being crushed by Gaddafi’s forces.
“We felt we had a moral duty to get the pictures out. And whether you agree with it or not… it gave a lot of meat to David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy’s argument that there needed to be a no-fly zone.”
Dealing with the stress of being a foreign correspondent isn’t easy – her children keep her grounded after spending time away.
“I’d say ‘you have to eat that… there are people in Baghdad who would love to have that. And I remember my little daughter saying… ‘well take it to the people in Baghdad, I don’t want it!…”
But what then of the risks that go hand in hand with her job?
“…You have to be able to feel that all those risks and dangers were actually worth it. I want to go back and face my children and them to feel that I’ve done something worthwhile. And that’s what makes it worth it.”
Mindful of the hoard of journalism students in the room – and I’m one of them – Crawford gave a number of hints for effective TV journalism.
Her only rule when it comes to scripting or ‘writing to picture’ is “it has to be simple”. The information, she says, must be ‘boiled down’ because of the short length of TV pieces.
Impartiality is a fallacy Crawford says –
“We should stop apologising for feeling… If you can’t feel it then how can you report with passion?”
Rather than learning lines by heart, Crawford makes sure she’s aware of the anything the presenter might ask her. But –
“Quite often, before I became a foreign correspondent I’d be stuck outside the High Court and (Sky presenter) Kay Burley would ask me a question and I’d think ‘Oh my God I don’t know the answer to that, so [I’d say] – “Sorry I can’t quite hear what you’re saying Kate, but what I can tell you is that…”
She is at pains to make clear that she has fought for every opportunity; from early rejections before landing a post at the Wokingham Times, to repeated rejections for the position of Sky foreign correspondent.
So for budding journalists trying to break into a tough industry she has this advice:
“Keep on striving, and absolutely do not take ‘no’ for an answer”.
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She will be joining us at the Frontline Club in conversation with former BBC executive Vin Ray to take a look back over her career as a foreign correspondent.
]]>Alex Crawford‘s coverage in Libya won her widespread acclaim after she travelled into the conflict with rebel forces. The first journalist to make it into the city of Tripoli after it fell to rebel forces, she coloured her career further with the occasional arrest, detainment, bullet, IED, tear-gassing and mortar shell.
One of the most decorated journalists in the field, Alex Crawford, is the only person to be awarded three Royal Television Society journalist of the Year awards and has recently been presented the James Cameron Memorial Award 2011 for her coverage of the fighting in Libya and the Middle East.
Brought up in Nigeria and Zambia she began her journalistic career working on the Wokingham Times and later joined Sky News in 1989 where she has worked ever since, and is now their Special Correspondent.
She will be joining us at the Frontline Club in conversation with former BBC executive Vin Ray to take a look back over her career as a foreign correspondent.
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We will be discussing Kashmir’s future, the changing role of the foreign correspondent with The Guardian‘s Jonathan Steele, torture and the Arab Spring, and the coming presidential elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A series of Film Africa documentaries look at the people of the Western Sahara and a community of women living in exile after being accused of witchcraft.
There’s a film about the street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi who, by setting himself on fire, sparked an uprising in Tunisia, and another tells the story of the brother of Private McKinley Nolan and his quest to find out the truth about what happened to the missing G.I.s in Vietnam.
Following on from this month’s #fcbbca discussion on Israel, we will be discussing women and the Arab Spring at Westminster College’s Paddington Green Campus.
The focus of our November First Wednesday discussion will be announced on Wednesday 26 October.
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View in iTunes
Watch the event here.
By Helena Williams
In a year where 100 journalists have been killed so far while trying to tell the story, and as the media’s coverage of events rocking the Middle East have been brought into sharp relief, it seems high time to examine the delicate relationship between ensuring the safety of journalists and being able to break the story first.
“Libya has been a very traumatic year for journalists, especially for freelance journalists. We lost three good friends,” said Inigo Gilmore, an award-winning freelance journalist who has worked in conflict zones across the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
“No one even imagined Libya would turn to this. How could we [journalists] predict what would happen on the frontline?”
Last night’s talk at The Frontline Club, ‘Reporting Conflict: Competition, pressure and risks’ highlighted the risks that journalists out in the field and news editors back in London face while attempting to break news to an increasingly demanding audience.
Chaired by former BBC executive Vin Ray, and with international editor for ITV news Bill Neely, head of international news at Sky News Sarah Whitehead, and BBC’s world news editor Jon Williams sitting on the panel alongside Gilmore, the debate focused on the difficulties of conflict reporting from opposing sides of the industry – both those commissioning journalists to go to the frontline, and the journalists themselves.
Neely, who has worked in numerous conflict zones, was adamant that the first and constant pressure of covering war did not come from newsrooms in London, but rather from the competitive nature of journalists who want to go and get the story.
The old pressures from the newsroom no longer exist, said Neely, who argued that journalists now travel to hotspots on a voluntary basis.
Journalists have to be savvy while out in the field – the rule is “don’t stay anywhere for longer than 20 minutes in a warzone,” he said – but it is also up to the editors to monitor the situation.
“Over the past 10 years editors in London understand that it’s people on the ground who have to make the decision not to go those 100 metres up the road.”
Whitehead, whose Sky News teams were hailed for their remarkable coverage from Tripoli’s Green Square during the fighting in Libya in August this year, agreed:
“You’re not there and you have to make sure they [the journalists] can make the decision. This year has been one of the most extreme and dangerous that I’ve known.
“This year I have taken people off air who have been in the middle [of reporting]. One afternoon, when a team was watching a fire fight in Tripoli, snipers opened up behind them and I pulled them off air and asked what their exit route was.
“You have to be there to be the stops if they are taken over by the story.”
While the BBC and other news organisations were criticised for failing to get equally dramatic coverage of events unfolding in Libya, Whitehead insisted that a lot of her team’s reporting was down to luck.
“[Sky News] was at the right place at the right time, and in the right frame of mind. They didn’t know where they were going to end up. A lot of people made other decisions and it was the right decisions for them.”
Williams, who has also had his fair share of managing journalists in hostile environments, said: “Risk must outweigh return, but it is a very fine balance. It’s a difficult call to go forward, and it’s just as difficult to go back. If you have the balls to go back because you don’t think it’s safe I take my hat off to you.”
Neely added: “It’s risk and reward. You have to ask yourself, ‘is it really worth that extra shot?'”
“War reporting is a mixture of judgement and luck – but you can be unlucky. For those 100 journalists this year, for one reason or another, their luck ran out.”
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We will be discussing Kashmir’s future, the changing role of the foreign correspondent with The Guardian‘s Jonathan Steele, torture and the Arab Spring, and the coming presidential elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A series of Film Africa documentaries look at the people of the Western Sahara and a community of women living in exile after being accused of witchcraft. There’s a film about the street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi who, by setting himself on fire, sparked an uprising in Tunisia, and another tells the story of the brother of Private McKinley Nolan and his quest to find out the truth about what happened to the missing G.I.s in Vietnam.
Following on from this month’s #fcbbca discussion on Israel, we will be discussing women and the Arab Spring at Westminster College’s Paddington Green Campus. The focus of our November First Wednesday discussion will be announced on Wednesday 26 October.
Follow us on Twitter and catch up on any events you missed on the Forum blogor download our podcasts on iTunes.
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But here are a few incomplete notes on the panel discussion…
1. BBC vs Sky News reporting of Tripoli
I think this has largely been put to bed. The general consensus seems to be that while Correspondent Alex Crawford and her Sky team did a great job of covering the fall of Tripoli, criticism of the BBC’s reporters on the ground was not justified.
ITV’s Bill Neely described flak levelled at the BBC team who decided not to proceed with the rebel convoy as "grossly distasteful". But…
2. BBC: Live vs Bulletins
….we did learn from Kevin Bakhurst, Deputy Head of the BBC Newsroom, that one of the reasons Correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes and his team did not follow the story into Tripoli was because they stopped to file a piece for the Six O’Clock News.
While they were doing this, Bakhurst said they became detached from the rebel convoy and the team adjudged that it would have been highly dangerous to try to rejoin it – "the right decision for the situation they were in".
Of course, the team may still have made a decision that it was not safe to travel with the convoy even if they had not become detached. It is worth pointing out that Rupert Wingfield-Hayes was caught in an ambush the following morning while travelling with the rebels.
Although secondary to safety concerns, therefore, this does nevertheless raise the question of whether the BBC should prioritise rolling news or bulletins.
On the ‘bulletins’ side of the argument is the fact that bulletins have much larger audience figures than rolling news (Ten O’Clock News, 5 million; BBC News Channel 9.6 million per week).
For the ‘rolling news’ case, Sky’s Alex Crawford was deemed to have "owned the story" and there is a feeling that increasingly audiences are consuming news live, a point raised by the BBC’s Jon Leyne. Further research anyone?
3. Blown budgets
It appears that money for international news in 2011 has already run out.
Both Kevin Bakhurst and Sky’s Head of International News, Sarah Whitehead, said they had blown their budgets and had asked bosses for additional funds.
Ben De Pear from Channel 4 News said he had spent his "tiny" budget by July and had been forced to raid the coffers of other departments.
When Bakhurst was asked what he would do if another major international news story broke later in the year he said: "I don’t know".
4. Social Media
(Unless I missed something at the beginning)…there wasn’t much discussion of social media.
Professor Tim Luckhurst argued that the ‘Arab Spring’ had stressed the importance of traditional media journalists. Initially, he was talking about ‘citizen journalists’ not replacing professional reporters which I’d agree with.
But I’m not convinced about the statement that followed from that premise:
"Yes, social media makes a contribution but it makes the least contribution when you need it most. And it cannot always be relied upon. And it can only be relied upon when it is curated by professional journalists".
The first problem here is the identification of ‘social media’ with ‘citizen journalists’ when all and sundry are now using social media – especially professional journalists.
Leaving that aside, the crux of the issue is the idea that people who are not professional journalists make least contribution to the news through social media when ‘we’ need it most. I’m just not sure I agree.
I would argue that generally people who are not professional journalists have much less desire to spend the time, energy, trouble and money to report the news on social media platforms when there is no great pressing need.
The Arab Spring has shown that in the context of state censorship of traditional media and political repression, social media provides a (nevertheless contested) space where people who have a frustrated need to share news, ideas and information can do so.
You might call this a very different form of ‘journalism’.
You might reject that understanding of ‘journalism’, but surely the contribution of these individuals to the news and even ‘traditional journalism’ when ‘we’ needed it, has been rather important (even if their contribution was subsequently often curated and brought to a broader audience by professional journalists)?
It’s both, not one or the other.
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I’d be interested in your thoughts…feel free to comment at Mediating Conflict.
The book launched at the event, Mirage in the Desert? ‘Reporting the Arab Spring’, is available on Amazon and includes a chapter by me on the Gay Girl in Damascus blog.
]]>Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith has been given a prestigious Bayeux-Calvados award for Blood and Dust, a film shot during 10 days spent with a US Medevac helicopter team in Afghanistan.
The awards, which were launched in 1994, recognise the work of journalists covering conflicts around the world.
Smith’s film, which was shown on Al Jazeera in February this year, won the grand format television category with his coverage of the work of the paramedics of the US Army’s 214th Aviation Regiment.
This year the awards were dominated by Libya, with Sky News’ Alex Crawford’s team announced winners of two awards at an event in north-west France for their reports from Libya’s besieged town of Zawiyah, between 4 to 6 March.
Smith, who has filmed in Afghanistan several times in the past, said he decided to go back because he was concerned that his previous work had shown the machinery of war but not the suffering:
"This being a grevous omission I went back last winter to film US army air ambulances, ‘Dustoff’ helicopters, flying over Marjah in Southern Afghanistan, " he said: "The pictures are strong and show both US marines and Afghan civilians being lifted off the battlefield in equal numbers."
Of his decision to work with Al Jazeera, he said: "I couldn’t find another news broadcaster in Britain that would show the film without cutting out the stronger images. I have huge respect for the way Al Jazeera as a broadcaster engages the world while so many others appear to retreat from it."
Read more about Vaughan Smith in Afghanistan.
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