The charity Co-operation Ireland http://www.cooperationireland.org/organises an annual student journalism conference. This year it was held in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast and I decided to attend because as my PhD thesis deals with the subject of journalism, I thought I could learn something. The title of this year's conference was 'Reporting Civil Action - What is the Media's Role?'. Liam Clarke, Political Editor at The Belfast Telegraph and Kevin Connolly, the BBC Foreign Correspondent, were the main speakers at the conference.
Liam Clarke
Liam Clarke spoke first. He said that he had no formal training in journalism and that he started off his journalistic career by writing in local left wing papers. 'It's not a journalists job to be responsible', he said. He also said that it's not a journalists' job to bring harmony. Up until now I would have thought that it was and that they had a responsibility to be careful and not to cause situations to boil over and create any sort of instability, but the more I think about it, a journalist should only be concerned with telling the truth. They should not be hiding any unpalatable things that they find or should not be covering up for others, whether they be politicians or others. Although when you consider that Clarke was mainly reporting from Northern Ireland during his career, does that also remain the case. The fact that in the past Northern Ireland must have seemed like a tinder box, journalists must have felt pressure from themselves and others to try and bring harmony to the situation and to be responsible in their reporting. That raises the question of the journalist's objectivity.
Kevin Connolly
Kevin Connolly is a BBC Foreign Correspondent. He is currently reporting from Libya where a popular uprising against the dictator who has been in power for the last 42 years threatens to boil over into a civil war. He has also reported from Northern Ireland and other interesting locations in the past.
Connolly said that revolutions come in bunches - sort of like bananas. That analogy goes some way to explain the domino of revolutions that is sweeping across the Arab world at the moment. He said that in the 1960s there were lots of revolutions and similar outpourings of emotion. We only have to think of Northern Ireland and the civil rights marches, the USA and the civil rights movement and of course the events of Mai '68 in France when students and factory workers took to the streets to demand fundamental changes in how the country was run. Connolly says that the revolutions sweeping across the Arab world now are different, however. What differentiates them is that we are living in the information age. We now have mobile phones, Facebook and Twitter to help us organise people and bring about change.
Connolly mentioned how the death of one man in Tunis who was standing up for his rights against the system helped to change the face of the world. He said that the young man who was trying to provide for himself by selling vegetables without a permit changed his country, his region and the world for ever. Connolly ended by questioning the rise of the so called 'citizen journalism' that we are witnessing in the media at the moment. We have to ask ourselves if these citizen journalists are actually who they say they are and are reporting from where they say they are. Is their reporting accurate? Who are they accountable to? I suppose that this just highlights the point that we must critically evaluate everything we read. We cannot take a journalist's word at face value.
Local journalists
After lunch, two local journalists spoke about their journalistic careers. Firstly, Adrienne McGill from the Newsletter spoke about her work as a business editor. The newspaper was established in 1737 and is loyalist leaning. She said that it's a very varied job because you could be reporting from literally every kind of business that employs people. Secondly, William Scholes, the features editor at the Irish News spoke about his work. Scholes said that he had reported for the newspaper from the Holycross School in Ardoyne, Belfast where they was a standoff in 2001 / 2002 between parents of the children attending the school and some of the locals. I can remember seeing disturbing scenes on the television where young girls were forced to run the gauntlet of abuse, both verbal and physical on their way to school. I still can't understand how something like that could happen in this day and age.
The question and answer session after their presentations was very interesting. I asked them how the formal training they received for their jobs had prepared them for their current jobs. They both gave some funny examples of how their journalistic training helped to prepare them for their jobs. Adrienne mentioned that she interviewed Prince Charles during her training, but that she got caught up in the situation and didn't manage to get any real information from him. She started off by introducing herself to him and of course she wasted valuable time by doing this.
Her advice to the future journalists present at the conference was to just ask your questions and forget about the formal introductions as they can distract you and will take up too much of your valuable time.
I really enjoyed the conference and would like to thank Co-operation Ireland for organising it.
The Irish Times of Saturday 12 March 2011 has an article by their Northern Editor Gerry Moriarty about the conference. Here is a link to the article. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0312/1224291982266.html
The picture at the top of the post is of Belfast City Hall.
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