An idea forming...

I have an idea and it came to me; like all my ideas do, whilst I was alone and talking to myself. Reading through my random thoughts, collecting the nuggets, dusting them off and presenting them to the room full of eager eyes that is my conscious brain.
I want the truth… It is that simple and anyone who tells you different then they’re simply lying! It’s not a monumentous idea, but one that has been lost within the maelstrom of the modern information age.
The internet is at the heart of this idea; an infinite resource that has already seemingly been lost to corporations eager for our attention when we stray away from a book, the television or even our own minds. We are the masters of this wondrous concoction that we have made for ourselves, it is not the rod for our backs, but the stick with which we learn to walk again and maybe one day prance through fields of endless green and gold.
I look around me and see a lot of questioning eyes; it is the brains behind those many pairs of eyes that needs to be engaged with this, that needs to run head-long into concrete walls if that is what it takes to unlock the truth in this fragile world.
The truth is that this world is not simple, but what has been proven if nothing else in this new information age is that truth brings hope, hope brings determination and determination brings outcomes. These outcomes that are sometimes negative have potential greatness, potential to bring great positivity through understanding of your fellow people; the ability to converse with them, understand them and above all come to love them as the siblings that we all are. We are here for too short a time and this world is too fragile a place to fill it with violence, pain and hate. Those agents are the ones of our own downfall through endless misery and we in this room are the seed that could grow into the largest network the world, maybe even the universe has ever seen.
I know it seems fantastic. There will be doubt among many of you: “Who is this guy? Is he out of his mind? Isn’t it time this was over?” My one question to you is this: do you not know it somewhere inside you? Isn’t there somewhere in your mind and soul that tells you that this is what you are here to do? All I can tell everyone is that I feel that calling. I feel it urging me on, encouraging me to know as much as I can about everyone and anyone, everything and anything even if it only brings a smile to sorrow-filled face, then I will be happy, I will know that all this talk about destiny and truth is in some way contributing to your desire for a better future.
Truth is the key and with that lance of truth we will slay the harbingers of war, famine and pestilence because truth can only bring light to dark places, it can only free those who are falsely in chains and it may even save those who are weak.
Using Christian allegory may seem slightly misleading coming from someone that isn’t religious, but I concede that one of the biggest things that the bible is not free from and that is monumentally simple metaphors. Jesus said: “seek and ye shall find”. I say, find the truth and the rest is as simple as it gets.

What a difference a year makes!

So here i am! At the END OF A YEAR OF UNI! With only one question... Why was this so hard before? Well I think all know the answer as soon as I say that Loughborough was the first institution I went to! Oh well, I'm here now and I couldn't be happier!
The Den Festival was yesterday and made up an Ad Hoc launch of the magazine before It goes on tour with Rosie... The attendance was a bit poor but I think a good time was had by all! It turned out to be a bit of a brainstorming session. Having done a story on the foibles of the FXU and it's lack of involvement in the day to day running of the Stannary as a business has given me an insight into certain feelings about the venue itself and the way it's run. There are limitations with both when it comes to putting on a show as unusual in this county as the Den Fest was. I believe that there needs to be a rethink in the way major shows are put on in South Cornwall. Within the jurisdiction of the magazine over the next year comes the assurance that next year's Den Fest will be a bigger success than this one. With this in mind I think that it might be a good idea to campaign for a bigger, better-suited facility for larger gigs for South Cornwall and maybe a large cinema facility to sustain the venue 'off peak'. We could get the support of local businesses and local music industry to create a regional standard venue. We could use new media: vidblogs, website etc. to keep people up to date with our progress. STAY TUNED FOR DEVELOPMENTS.
It feels great to be at this stage now. The cost of printing came in cheaper than expected and the final product is amazingly polished! I'm so very proud of it!
On Wednesday we had the honour of winning the Journalism Department's award for best Zine. The trophy has taken pride of place on my shelf and in turn, will take pride of place on the front cover of all this coming year's issues.
Exciting times makes me feel like I don't want to leave for the Summer, but oh well. Looking forward to the next couple of quiet weeks, bit of surfing, bit of sailing and a couple of friends down for extra measure then off home for a bit of work and earn...

Crikey! Two Posts in One Week!

It's been a very productive day today and thought that I shouldn't lose my flow before I go home... Yes! That's right! I'M STILL IN THE NEWSROOM! Amazing!
Well this morning started with an over-active organisational gland! Got out of bed a bit late and the day didn't look too promising, but upon finding that my Audiences & Genres group weren't meeting until 12 I took the extra hour to get well and truly ready for the day. I spoke to my future landlord and organised the next step in the process and answered some emails.
Upon arriving at college I realised that because of the early hour and the prospect of getting carried away with work I decided to goto admissions first to get my notice of enrollment for my UN internship application. It was then straight off to the office to see Jason about my feature that still hadn't materialised out of the million or so foggy thoughts in my brain.
Jason and I decided that a three-pronged approach was called for with decending levels of challenge. The first option was a Cornish skew on the impact of Gordon Brown's premiership which was discarded because of the difficulty of getting reasonable quotes from London. The second option was a response to a recent documentary about the rural decline seen in Britain and specifically the closure of a Cornish school. The third option was a re-working of an article in the current issue of the music magazine; an expose of the lack of local support for Cornish music talent.
I decided that the second option was the most likely and got to work deciding who to call and what to ask. At One o'clock Adrian's design lectures started and I forced myself into magazine mode and finished my feature on 'Green College Falmouth?' and then set to trying to finish my news story about the Climate Change Conference. At Four, prompted by a swift reply from Royal Mail Group, I realised that I should really start getting quotes for this Rural Decline article and rang Cornwall County Council.
And so, here I am at one of the faceless, Bowie-esq computers in the Newsroom looking forward to hugging Katy and eating some good grub!
A good evening to you dear void, speak to you soon!

thejournowithin

FINALLY GOT THE PROOFS!!!

WOW!!
Walking back from the radio station this morning and just popped in to check my post... and there it was!!! The Brown Package I have been waiting for!
Grrr,Grrr! Magazine took a HUGE leap forward with the proofs contained in that buff envelope!
The reason why it's taken so long to get to this stage is that I really wasn't happy with the quality of the first version. I'd learned so much about design and the like between finishing the first version and getting it to print that I felt I could do so much more with the material and needed to bring a lot of it up to date!
So NOT LONG NOW!! I've given the go ahead to print and should have it on shelves in a week or so!!!!

SO EXCITING!!!

thejournowithin

Last Radio Show For A While!

Well, here we are almost three-quarters of an hour through my last radio show for a while! I think it's gone quite well, certainly as experiences go, it's been a lot of fun... I'm able to play pretty much what I like apart from swearing of course (it limits me more than you might think!) and talk rubbish for two hours on a Monday morning. Next to no one listens, but hey, that's not why I'm doing this!
The Magazine is finally at the printers! I can't believe it, but it's true! I have already started on the next issue just simply because of the large gaping hole in this month left by the Easter holidays... In a way I would like to stay and get on with things, but in other ways I just want to try and relax for a month to get ready for a big push for the finish of this first year.
I've started looking seriously at internships for next year which is really exciting. I think if I can't get a decent placement in something hard-hitting and maybe newspaper-related then I might head towards an international organisation like WHO or INTERPOL.
Watch this space!!!

So... almost an Hour in....

So we started at about 2010 and things have been good... Slightly slow start on the door, but I think we're doing good. A Day At The Movies are up at the moment... Their set moves from euphoric rock balad to slightly durge driven indie... A Respectable set from a new band. I think we're going to pick up the pace after nine o'clock with The Sycamores... We wait and see!

Just Over an Hour to go!

Right, just over an Hour to go and we have a Lineup! So A Day At The Movies are first up with a 45 minute set! Then It's straight onto the band that aren't on the bill: simply called (at this point) Sean's Band. Then a 45 minute trip through the Absent songbook and then onto the headline act: The Astrofirs! Should be a good night, but we don't know for sure!

Right, Here, At the Venue!

RIGHT! Well, I'm here at Woodlane Bar with PA system in hand! Well, I say in hand... Tom was A legend, he brought down the PA system at the last moment in the back of his new 306 estate. So here I sit, waiting for everything else to happen! First to show will probably be the sound guys, then Paula, then the bands I HOPE! In that order! It's all a bit exciting, We've got front covers to hand out to people on the door, hand stamp on the door too and a very excited assistant editor with not a lot to lose!!

Flyer! At Last! 8th February Tigers! Be there!

First day after the deadline!

I know this doesn't really make any sense but I've found a new love for blogging while just sitting my computer like never before! Oh well!
So the deadline's been and gone and what a lovely time it has been! I took my girlfriend Katy into college yesterday when I went to hand my work in, she found the department confusing (as I think we all have at some point or other!). I took her so that I could take her out to lunch afterwards, so that's what we did, at The Clipper Cafe at one-thirty. If any of you have never been to The Clipper, then you really ought to straight away! It's just up Well Lane from Toast, you know where I mean! When you get there you'll be surprised to find a tiny front room with three rather pretty oak tables and a fantastic smiley welcome! For a pound you get probably the largest cup of tea commercially available in Falmouth in essential Cornish Blue mug! It really does feel like you've gone to some long-lost Great-Aunt's house for tea! I had the Clipper Burger for the Princely sum of three pounds. It comes in a large, round ciabatta, lightly toasted with a light garnish of lettuce, tomato and cornichons. You may choose (as I did) to have 'everything on it'. This makes it specially unique with, cheese, bacon and onion marmalade, I can't tell you how delicious it is!
I enquired about Kate's Chorizo baguette and she said it was very good: I can vouch for this as I've had it there before!
Kate takes her time about her food, something that I really must learn one of these days, so I asked permission to order a slice of the proudly displayed cake of the day: A delicious, home-made Victoria Sponge, oh yes, and another mug of tea! I can still taste it now! It was so delicious: light and sweet, with beautifully set clotted cream and fresh strawberry jam. Being washed down with tea as it was made it all the better. Gosh, I wish I could live off that kind of thing! Oh well!
Anyway, dwelling on a delicious lunch won't do for the rest of this entry... The rest of the day was a mix of charity shop shopping (I bought three books from the Oxfam), a trip back up to Woodlane to meet up with Benjamin and preparation to go to Ed's brother's joint birthday party at the Shipwrights at the Chain Locker. I think everyone had a vaguely good night apart from dear Lucy!
Her boyfriend Simon broke up with her and we all took it in turns to comfort her... I have to say that I got quite angry, but managed to settle down before bedtime.
Today was lazy to say the least! I got up just before 12! And set about getting ready for a lazy day! I kept thinking about my beautiful girlfriend at the other end of the hall as a hive of activity working and busying herself with all kinds of wonderful things... I washed my face and got ready to face that rather sheepishly. I padded along the hallway and knocked once lightly on the door and i heard a small rustle and suddenly realised the truth! Katy had been fast asleep and i hadn't even brought her a cup of tea let alone a cup of Lemsip that would have been of more use!
I apologised and offered her that cup of Lemsip and left her to get a bit ready. We had cereal together and decided that we should go to the library and return our current movies (Wizard Of Oz among them!) and get The Sound Of Music to break my virginity!
So there we are, I sit here a Sound Of Music convert and feel all the better for it! God knows what I was so worried about!
I realise now that the next two weeks are going to be a great opportunity to read as much as I can so I'm off to Kate's room to read whilst she does some more work for her printing project. So here I am, sort of relieved that the deadline's past, but then again, sort of not!

J101-News Analysis-10/10: The Guardian; 26th January 2007.

The article “Cameron vows to bring in gradual changes to Blair's 'hysterical' reform” is an article reporting on a speech made to “a Guardian public services summit”.
From what is written (it seems to be a verbatim representation) the speech was in all convoluted and delivered with suitable verve to attract the eyes of the media. I think that this kind of journalism represents the limitations of The Guardian’s neutral stance.
In something as politically charged as a major address to a significant group within British society it is very difficult for a newspaper like The Guardian to do anything but represent the facts. I can imagine that this article really is very important to almost all people in this country but for very different reasons.
It could be cynically argued that regular readers of The Guardian may not be interested to a large extent because they would never vote for David Cameron. To me, someone who assesses my voting by my belief in policy and not strict party lines, this speech and the subsequent article is of great interest to me because of the solid policy that might come out of it. Instead it represents the manner in which David Cameron and his shadow cabinet tickle the different elements of the public that can get him elected as Prime Minister. This article gives the best chance of seeing behind the smoke and mirrors simply because of the lack of polish The Guardian puts on such a story.

J101-News Analysis-9/10: The Independent; 26th January 2007.

The article “Litvinenko killer 'will die of poisoning within three years'” brings yet another twist to this bizarre case that had us scratching our heads at the end of last year. It appears that whoever it was that poisoned Alexander Litvinenko more than likely would have received a fatal dose of the Polonium-210 himself.
This article is an update; it puts the case so far into context and explains how far Scotland Yard have got with building the case against the two businessmen accused of being involved. They too are supposedly in danger from the several meetings that they had with Litvinenko after he had been poisoned. The two businessmen have both been treated as suspects by the media in the whole debacle, although, “last night, it was reported that there is sufficient evidence against Mr Lugovoi for the CPS to decide whether he should face prosecution.”
This bombshell is saved until the end of the article for reasons unknown. I believe that this is the crux of the story. Its relegation to the end signifies to me that The Independent is itself caught in the current wave of sensationalised journalism. The claims of imminent death made by Mr. Litvinenko’s friend Oleg Gordievsky are almost impossible to prove due to no one knowing the identity of the killer let alone what precautions they may have taken! The only piece of solid information in this story is the information about the CPS and personally this is the most interesting fact.

J103-Reading Analysis-10/10: Subculture; 21st Nov 2006

In Dick Hebdige’s essay on subculture he doesn’t put any new ideas forward. What he does do is bring together a lot of material on the subject from many different social commentators and shows effectively how it all fits together and how useful it is to us when we try and understand subculture.
By bringing everything together Hebdige has produced an essay that simply (in about fifteen pages) summarises the signs left behind by and the effects that subculture has on modern day society.
Firstly, he refers to his own writing from 1979 (Subculture: The Meaning of Style). He makes clear from referring to this and other writings at this time that his main expertise is on the first major fracturing of youth culture seen during the 1960’s and 70’s. In the first passage he defines what a subculture really is and what it means the mass culture it leaves behind.
Using the example of the punk movement of the 1970’s Hebdige has free-roam among these many effects upon society at large. With the punk movement comes the breaking of common society’s rules and regulations, the disregard for society’s common conventions about dress, behaviour etc. The problem with this explanation is that it gives no idea of size. From what Hebdige is saying I could be a subculture in and of myself as long as keep myself as far from the normal as possible. Maybe that was true in 1979, but today the idea of subculture itself has been accommodated by society and made mundane.
This focus on one period goes a long way to describing the limitations of this essay and one might argue, the general study of subculture as a whole. The 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s were a boom time for subculture. With plenty of subcultures going around almost every young person was accommodated in some way and made to feel like they belonged. What hasn’t been realised by this essay is that this period of about thirty years was, on a far larger scale, a naturalisation of subculture. The many factions present in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s are still (mostly) alive and well today in some form or another.
So, using Hebdige’s own words the incorporation of these subcultures is the process that has won in the end. A subculture using the capitalist definition is successful if it is profitable to move it into mainstream society. If it is possible to commodify the subculture then you then have something to sell to the rest of the community, you can make money with it and turn it into just another part of the mainstream.
This is where we are now. With communication technology as it is now it is impossible to keep something in the minority for long if it is desirable. I would suggest that Hebdige’s arguments, whilst relevant to a study of modern history, are now out of date. In today’s technology saturated world it just simply isn’t possible for a major subculture to develop. Communication is too quick, corporations are too able to assess an idea on its merits and make a decision about selling to this or that market.
I would argue that this piece is well written and puts across its ideas in an easy to read manner, it just doesn’t makes sense in today’s world of high-speed internet access. It isn’t necessarily useful to know how the newspapers of the time described the Mods or the Rockers. The only way that this is useful to a modern audience is if that audience was concerned with the study of subculture and the impact that it had on late 20th Century society.

J101-News Analysis-8/10: Al Jazeera English; 25th January 2007.

In the article “Myanmar: US wants puppet regime” it is reported, “Myanmar’s Military Government has accused the United States of plotting to install a puppet regime in the country.” This comes as a reaction to George W. Bush’s eighth State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday (23rd January) in which he said “that the US "will continue to speak out for the cause of freedom" in the South-East Asian country.”
This article gives a good idea of the worry that a sudden interest in UN resolutions on behalf of the USA brings to such a small country. The problem is that the major source for this worry is from the state owned newspaper in Myanmar. The article raises the issue of who would be best suited to intervene. The only quote from outside of this issue is from the Malaysian foreign minister who said, “I believe Myanmar will be hardened”. This is referring to the fact that a government accused of being tyrannical by the US is unlikely to engage with the greater global community.
I think the article is written with an overly negative bias against the United States. It takes for granted the validity of the quotes from the New Light of Myanmar newspaper and doesn’t try to examine the truth about life within that country. What it does do is question the usefulness of a possible involvement by the United Nations and shows the Malaysian foreign minister to be quite wise in suggesting that: “The Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean), rather than the UN Security Council was in a better position to handle the Myanmar issue”.

J103-Reading Analysis-9/10: The Aesthetics and Politics of Melodrama; 14th Nov 2006

In this essay Jostein Gripsrud discusses a different way of looking at the popular press. He sets out his argument in a framework that sets him in a position that is both unbiased and rational. He suggests that there is “futile moralism frequently present in critiques of it [the popular press].” He says that this serves no useful purpose because whatever is said, the popularity of this kind of journalism keeps growing year on year and there must be a reason for this “in their form-and-content”.
The first section of the essay is nothing new. It states the tactics used by the tabloid press: the ‘emotionalisation’, “sensationalism and personalisation.” He reiterates the “focusing on any traces of shocking or personal aspects of the material in question.” He uses an example (eluding to Mrs. Thatcher’s resignation speech) that “the popular press will typically focus more on the speaker’s emotional state than on what is actually said” and that this “may provide the starting-point for a commercially successful series of stories during the following days or weeks.” He touches upon the stylistic aspects of popular journalism before launching into his major point.
Gripsrud starts by explaining “the valuable work done by the literary critic Peter Brooks (1984).” He was interested in the reasons for the rise of melodramatic theatre during the nineteenth century. Gripsrud explains Brooks’ conclusions by saying that “Melodrama was a textual machine designed to cope with the threatening black hole God left after Him when He returned to His Heaven”. In other words it was there to replace the teachings of God by making Good and Evil absolutely unquestionable. Gripsrud links this back to the melodrama of the tabloid press by saying that popular newspapers teach “what the world (the news) is really about, is emotions, fundamental and strong: love, hate, grief, joy, lust and disgust.” This is where Gripsrud loses me, this statement is true, but to me is no longer a good enough excuse.
Gripsrud announces that “Peter Brooks calls melodrama ‘democratic art’” and explains that this was because it was a replacement for religion and that because it represented “‘the struggle of a morally and emotionally emancipated bourgeois consciousness against the remnants of feudalism’ (Elsaesser, 1986: 281). Melodrama had an ideological side to it. It proclaimed a ‘moral law’ that was the same for everyone”. This is very noble and true in theory, but in practice serves as little use. For, in reality, the popular press’ main concern is not that of equality amongst the people, but the bottom line. In the capitalist world that we find ourselves in, such theory can only be just that: a theory. If the public didn’t buy their newspaper then they would have no further use in the world.
In the remaining six pages of this essay Gripsrud goes about explaining why limited views and consequent criticisms of the popular press are inaccurate. His conclusions reflect this by preaching nothing more than a more holistic view of the usefulness of the popular press.
In all, his arguments are sound and show a frustration within him towards the ‘left-wingers’ and ‘intellectuals’. His criticism should be felt on both sides and shows to me that which I already knew: that dialogue between these two, seemingly disparate factions of society is the key to understanding how their differences can be put aside and used to move forward, not under banners of social status or class but under a united cause of progress.

Before I Start...

Up until this point in this blog the tone has been one of marked favouritism towards the quality press. This has been intentional and has served a purpose in that it allows me to look in the future at what I believed now. I fully accept that this bias against the popular press is not entirely justified. I know that the popular press serves a purpose at this present time in history, but I would argue that in the future it will be seen as merely a detailed account of the more trivial aspects of society.
I write this now before writing what may be a turning point in my understanding of the usefulness of tabloid journalism represented within the photocopied pages of this essay before me. Jostein Gripsrud accuses “intellectuals, political left-wingers and the traditional bourgeoisie” of “simplistic condemnation” of the popular press. At this point I refute that comment in the knowledge that I, personally am always open to being proved wrong about the popular press. In fact, I hope that this next essay changes my mind.

J101-News Analysis-7/10: The Daily Mail; 23rd Jan 2007

The story “Packed Trains Safer In Crashes, Claim Rail Chiefs” is about the discovery of a reply from a spokesman at the Office of the Rail Regulator (ORR) to a letter written by a Conservative MP about the overcrowding on commuter trains from West Berkshire to London.
The story is yet another example of The Daily Mail’s use of ‘bandwagon journalism’ and its useless pointing out of the ‘facts’ about something that they have missed the point of and brushed aside without giving it it’s due attention. Not only that, but it shows that the comments made on the website in response to the story are as half-baked as the story itself.
The spokesman is quite right to have said what he said no matter how flustered it makes readers of The Daily Mail. After a short bit of investigative journalism I found two documents that the writer of this story may want to peruse before issuing a retraction.
The first is a very helpful document about crowd dynamics. You can find this document at http://www.crowddynamics.com/Egress/Overcrowding.htm If you look at section two of this document you will see that “Others are better placed to take measures to tackle the causes and consequences of overcrowding as they relate to passenger comfort, well being and customer care.” The proof comes when you actually look at the report “Implications of Overcrowding on Railways”. This report compiled by Dr. David Bottomley of the Health & Safety Laboratory on behalf of the Health & Safety Executive in 1999 can be found at http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/crr_pdf/1999/crr99225.pdf The report analyses the data from the Clapham Junction accident in 1988 and the Cannon Street Station accident of 1991. The report clearly states, “there may be a ‘cushioning effect’ provided by other passengers” and that “no evidence for an increase in upper torso injuries in overcrowded situations was found”.
These two documents show that this story is simply an excuse to bait the government and shows the inconsistency when dealing with the Health & Safety Executive. It is easy to ridicule their role in society when seemingly pointless legislation is brought in and easy to ignore it when it can prevent a bandwagon from forming.
Although I have dealt with the major crux of inaccuracy it is the little things that reek of bad journalism. The picture that comes with the online edition of this story has the caption “Safe?: Rail bosses c,aim packed trains are safer to crash it”. Not only is this terrible grammar and show typing skills not worthy of a chimpanzee, but also is inaccurate. No rail boss has said any such thing on record. Some would call this nit picking but I would ask if it was too much to expect from a supposedly ‘reputable’ newspaper? It is also very worrying that this is at least, the second edition of the story!
The lack of accuracy in this story is merely the tip of a very large iceberg. It seems to me that it shows an almost complete disregard for the truth and is a simple excuse for conservatism nay saying. It makes me think about all the other articles The Daily Mail may have neglected the facts of. Not only does this article raise simple questions of factual integrity, but it also raises the question of quality of online editions of newspapers and more general online news outlets.

J101-News Analysis-6/10: The Sun; 23rd Jan 2007

The story “New race storm for Channel 4” by Emma Cox and John Troup is about another supposed ‘race row’ started on a Channel 4 programme aired on Sunday (21st Jan 2007). But whereas the row sparked by Jade Goody’s bullying on Celebrity Big Brother raised almost 50,000 complaints across the nation and sparked rioting in some Indian Cities. But with less than 200 complaints two days after the fact, this is more like the second firework that never really went off.
For a start The Sun is a day late on the story. In the Media Guardian of the 22nd January a small story was written about the chatter in the ‘Shipwrecked’ (the show in question’s) web forum about a young contestant’s comments about the British Empire and the issue of slavery.
It is a classic example of bandwagon journalism that the popular press can’t seem to help themselves getting into. The argument against a story like this is that the first story was tenuously in the public interest to begin with. But where the Jade Goody story has sparked (in more responsible outlets) a debate about the state of racism in Britain today; this story only serves as fuel on the fire of hatred. This girl is not an enemy, as this article seems to portray; she is an innocent whose narrow upbringing is brought into question not the person herself.
Even on the online copy of this story the favoured tool of the tabloid press: the bold typeface is used to stir emotion in the reader. My argument against tactics such as this is that if the audience knows that the outlet is using it to manipulate and the outlet knows this then doesn’t that make such things totally redundant?

J103-Reading Analysis-8/10: Photojournalism and the Tabloid Press; 7th Nov 2006

This essay sets out clearly the tensions between quality and tabloid journalism from the perspective of photography. Karin Becker uses the history of photography and it’s use in journalism to explain what use it has and how that use is abused. She shows clearly that through the development of photojournalism, the reluctance among the quality press to pick it up and its immediate use among the popular press, photojournalism has come to mean something very clear in the mind of the industry.
The idea that photography degrades the value of “verbal forms of journalistic practice” is consistent all the way through the essay and forms the basis of her major conclusions.
Becker’s argument that I agree with most, the one that is articulated the best in this essay is that the tabloid press uses the photojournalism as a means, above all, to sell their paper. This, in Becker’s eyes represents a “deconstruction of both the seamless and transparent character of news and the ideal of an unbiased and uniform professionalism.” Becker makes this contradiction that this fact creates very clear right from the beginning of the essay. She explains that from the start the photographic medium “could have been the foundation for treating photographs as news by institutions whose credibility rests on the facility and accuracy of their reports about the world.”
What Becker says (as many philosophers do) is that a photograph can be doctored to produce a different reaction. There is no limit to the amount an image can be changed and therefore is never something that can be relied upon in entirety. Becker says that this changing of images is now so fundamental to tabloid photojournalism that images held within tabloids pages do the complete opposite of what photography represented in the beginning. She says that photojournalism in tabloids is used to adapt or even hide the truth from the readership, to make it more emotionally stirring, to make it more sensationalised.
Becker uses the example of “The execution of Ruth Snyder, found guilty of murdering her husband after a much publicised ‘love triangle’ trial in 1928” and the exploits of The Evening Graphic during a high profile divorce trial in New York around the same time to illustrate how little morality was exercised during this historical period of tabloid journalism. Becker uses the sources well and is able herself to stir emotions within at least one reader: me.
This could be argued is the biggest flaw in Becker’s essay. Although she uses the sources well to illustrate her points, it is the limited field from which these sources come that is debatable. There is no doubt that at the turn of the last century and for the three decades after, the changes within the popular press were vast and inextricably linked with the rise of photojournalism. But surely there has been a reappraisal of everything photography adds to journalism in the past twenty years. It is this temporal limitation that seems to limit Becker’s essay, but with the sources she uses and the conclusions she makes this piece is very useful to understand the rise and limitations of photojournalism as we know it.

J101-News Analysis-5/10: The Guardian; 22nd Jan 2007

The story “Crowds gather goods washed from stricken ship” is about people on the Devon coast “‘recovering’” items that fell from the stricken ship ‘Napoli’.
Really the emphasis of the article is on the illegality of taking items from a shipwreck. Ms. Sophia Exelby, the receiver of the wreck has been given a lot of space in the article to make clear to the public that the contents of the ship are not free for the taking. It is mentioned, “the finders of wrecked items have some rights.” But it is not made clear what those rights are (although in the online version of the story there is a link to the Merchant Shipping Act 1995 that runs to thirteen parts and over three-hundred pages).
This article faithfully represents the facts of the wreck, the status of the cleanup operation and touches upon the legal ramifications of the wreck with ease. One criticism might be that much of the emphasis is put on the legal and economic situation and little is made about the environmental impact that such a wreck might have, especially when it has taken place off a coastline that is protected as “Britain's first natural World Heritage Site”.

J103-Reading Analysis-7/10: The Politics of the Smile; 31st Oct 2006

In this essay Patricia Holland discusses the history of the feminisation and consequent sexualisation of the press. She begins with the changing nature of popular journalism in the 1970’s at the same time adding the original changes that occurred at the end of the 19th Century. Holland explains that this degradation of the quality of journalism “brought greater democratic freedoms-for women as well as for men.” She also says that the new mass production technology of the late 19th Century allowed the newspaper industry “to please a wider range of people, many of whom had little time and less inclination to plough through the convoluted metaphors…which characterised nineteenth century newspaper prose.”
As she continues Holland explains the socio-economic changes going on all over the country. At the turn of the 20th Century advertising and the “consumer-based, leisure economy began to get under way.” Holland says that this change was energised by this new female market that had it’s own personal wealth. This argument is well sustained and sheds light on what these stark changes meant to the industry and I agree with the points that Holland makes.
Holland explains the founding of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror with interest and verve, choosing to put emphasis on the sacking of the original female staff by Lord Northcliffe soon after they began. She describes Northcliffe’s actions as “symptomatic” which she explains in further detail in the next passage’s ideas of inferiority of women within the consciousness of a largely male society.
My biggest reservation with this essay is the lack of challenge to seemingly widely held beliefs. As a woman herself, Holland displays no willingness to call the beliefs held at the time into direct question. As with many of the essays that we have been given this semester, it goes through the motions of representing the facts and makes no effort to look for solutions to the acidic nature of the trivialisation of women. It disturbs me to find that I seem to be more militant a feminist than the author.
It is accepted that the ‘softening’ of the news today is described as “feminisation”; this doesn’t sit well with me at all. I believe that this does damage to any possibility to the further advancement of the feminist cause in the 21st Century. The sexualisation of the press is given credit for the changing “of alignments between public and private domains, and between masculine and feminine concerns”. This I believe is true, but it is almost as if the blame is placed squarely at the female readership and not at the oppressively natured dominant male industry.
I find this inequality that is starkly realised within this essay without reaction quite offensive. I believe that it is the duty of all women to realise that “the use of the female body as spectacle and as commodity” is a method of control that must be eradicated if true sexual equality is to become a reality. The acceptance of this, the “interplay between…‘information’ and entertainment” within the news media and the constant attempts of newspapers like The Sun to find “good news in contrast to the ‘gloomy and threatening’ news of the ‘serious’ broadsheets” as the norm is the most damaging thing to democracy and world harmony.
The connection between the female form and the trivialities of the modern world is something that should be broken and something that this essay makes no attempt to change.

J103-Reading Analysis-6/10: Notes on Deconstructing the Popular (Part 2); 17th Oct 2006

I have chosen to split this essay by Stuart Hall because of the wholly different arguments that appear. In the last reading analysis I discussed the ideas up to halfway down page 446.
In the second half Stuart Hall discusses his ideas about the meaning of the words ‘popular’ and ‘culture’. He starts off simply enough by setting out what he believes to be the common understanding for the word ‘popular’. He argues that until this point in the essay he has been using the term as “the direct opposite”. He explains that the common use alludes to the fact that those who subscribe to popular culture are “‘cultural dopes’”. Hall says that this view only serves to make “us [the sociologically initiated]…self-satisfied about our denunciations”. He entirely dismisses this idea as it does not provide “an adequate account of cultural relationships; and…is a deeply unsocialist perspective”. I tend to agree with Hall at this juncture and I think that his reasoning for this view is suitably persuasive enough to get a number of people to feel the same.
The two solutions to this problem that he says make up the “quite unacceptable, poles” of “The study of popular culture” are both recognisable to me and through his explanation, no longer seem to make sense. In essence he says that popular culture is either includes everything or nothing within culture.
As mentioned in the previous analysis, culture is made through “containment and resistance” Hall explains this as a means to describe the forming of popular culture as taking place on a “constant battlefield” that renders the idea of “cultural dopes” useless. He suggests that the idea of purely manipulative cultural forms do exist, that no one really fully accepts them, but that there are “recognisable experiences and attitudes, to which people are responding.” Upon suggesting this he picks holes in his own argument by saying that this too assumes that culture is made up of absolutes, i.e. that cultural forms are “either wholly corrupt or wholly authentic.” He gives the example of “The language of the Daily Mirror”. Explaining that it is neither “‘newspeak’ nor is it the language which its working class readers actually speak.” He says that such cultural forms must contain some recognisable element of the people they are trying to reach otherwise people wouldn’t buy it. The second definition of popular culture is one that is all-inclusive. The problem with this Hall suggests is that society selects useful parts of “history to be transmitted”. This brings the risk of stagnation: “freezing popular culture into some timeless descriptive mould”.
The third definition that Hall settles with (however limited it is) basically takes both these two definitions into account and forms an inevitably more complicated idea. This is my biggest problem with Stuart Hall’s essay: by the end he is still succumbing to simplicity. With every definition comes more complexity, which he doesn’t seem to be satisfied with. The reason why I am frustrated by his conclusions is that he still doesn’t go far enough. Popular Culture is a very complicated ‘thing’ that could never be described in a few paragraphs. The idea that it is made up of everything that people do and the way the classes that create those cultural forms relate to each other is satisfactory for an essay, but don’t really go any way to describing the infinitely complicated “battlefield” of which Hall writes.

J103-Reading Analysis-5/10: Notes on Deconstructing the Popular; 17th Oct 2006

In this reading, Stuart Hall formerly marks out the arguments that he intends to cover in the following paragraphs and pages. He points out that there are problems with the fundamental definitions used when describing not only the history of popular culture, but also history in general. He intends to make the points against definitions of periodisation and even the terms ‘popular’ and ‘culture’ themselves.
The best thing about this essay is that it puts everything into perspective first; i.e. the larger issues are dealt with first. Hall starts by dealing with our obsession with defining historical periods of time with unbreakable, sharp edges. Essentially, he argues against the idea that with a changing of Royal Family, for example, you get a total re-imagining of social structures and culture. Instead he suggests “there is more or less a continuous struggle over the culture of working people”. With this and the subsequent passage he is saying that people change social structures and culture in their own time and within a framework that doesn’t really change: the people in power are still in power and the workers are still toiling. It is all about “containment and resistance”.
Having worked in Britain for all of his adult life I think he may use the traditions and histories of the British class system and it’s influence on society too much. I think that this limits its compatibility with other countries and cultures around the world. This is not to say that other countries could learn a great deal about our history and culture, but the emphasis should be on the word ‘our’. This brings into sharp relief the mistakes that we as a nation and European culture in general has made during the Imperialism of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is because although the essay is about the history of struggles against oppression by the ruling peoples upon the working classes, he pays little respect to the generally unsuccessful outcomes, or the instances of true reforms that occurred through War and Revolution.
As Hall moves into the twentieth century, he starts to ‘unravel’ the complexities associated with the reformation of the popular press in the middle of the nineteenth century. He cites the adaptation that the previously radical and marginalised working class presses went through as the main reason for renewed vigour in the correction of social imbalance. The main reason why I take issue with this, is that I believe that major, multinational conflict has had the biggest effect on the way the twentieth and twenty-first century has changed our outlook on social and cultural structure. The press played their part, to be sure, but I think that what they report on should and generally is the most important factor within our history.
I agree with Hall when he implores us to “radically” look at “the period of what we might call the ‘social imperialist’ crisis.” We strongly need “to examine closely popular culture in a period which begins to resemble our own”. We needed to know more about the social changes that have occurred since the middle of the nineteenth century and I think that since Hall wrote this in 1981 this has been something that has changed a great deal since then. Television and the Internet now play a positive role in divulging what was previously unknown about that period to the masses.
As a British Afro-Caribbean man, Stuart Hall illustrates an interesting perspective, which I think adds a great deal to the nucleus of the debate about popular culture and its changing face throughout history. My disagreements with this essay are personal. I simply don’t agree with the credit given to the change in the methods of broadcast over major conflicts and other momentous events, in the effect that they have had on our popular culture. I believe that equal importance should be given, especially when we look back over the past 150 years and the changes that have occurred.