My latest project work says it's necessary.
I am working on two different projects.
My Digital News Writing class has me researching the Olympic Borough of Waltham Forest in search of new news in relation to the noisy sports event moving into their back garden.
I expect I'll be hounding local shop owners and kids playing football what they think and if they have heard any new news which is newsworthy for our upcoming website to sit alongside the existing east london lines site run by the MA Journalists.
The Digital Sandbox class project has troubled me.
I'd say I am a decent 'ideas man'. Granted these ideas are normally hair-brained, inherently stupid and contextually redundant, but I can come up with a few (anyone remember my lunchtime stuffing-muffins?!).
We have been set the challenge of coming up with a [news] theme, then using google keywords to find our niche, hone in on an idea for our ongoing digital escapades for the next year.
Where do I start?
There must be a website for literally everything.
This is the whole point of a 'googlewhack'.
I was stumped.
Not even a nibble of an idea-lett.
"I forgot better shit than you ever thought up", I can't help but envy Kanye West's mind sometimes (!).
Maybe I was going at this the wrong way. Instead of looking for an original idea, I should instead be looking for a new way of delivering.
We had a really interesting guest lecturer in the form of Neil McIntosh, Deputy Editor of Wall Street Journal Europe last Monday, who spoke about invention and innovation. WSJ's new 'Live' app was particularly impressive, as was it's popularity to them.
By Friday the world had lost one of the greatest ever innovators.
I think Stephen Fry perfectly describes how he was so good at what he did, 'Steve Jobs didn’t invent computers and he didn’t invent packet switching or the mouse. But he saw that there were no limits to the power that creative combinations of technology and design could accomplish'.
He spoke about the Knight-Batten Award and what it looks for in a journalist/medium. The words included;
'engagement', 'sharing', 'interactions', 'conversations', 'meet information needs', 'actively involve'.
I looked at what I was interested in and mind-mapped from there.
Although I'd love to cover the latest in tech, and would be fascinated and could geek out over NASA/ISS/ESA press releases, I'm not directly involved and would be reproducing their content with my comments pasted over the top.
Then in our lecture preceding Ed Roussel's talk on innovation in Newsroom, The Swiss Ramble's blog was mentioned. This economist by day, football analyist by night tore apart Arsenal's financial situation and looked at football from an economists point of view (it's long but take a deep look when you get a moment - its engrossing for football and economics fans alike!).
From there I have been playing with the idea of creating a case study based website, looking at either the up and coming young players based at the London clubs, or to focus on the U18s set-up as a whole, using the London clubs as examples.
The majority of the work will hopefully be going up onto Kicked in the Alberts which is my pet project. I'm looking for football contributors to pen articles for it so if you're interested get in touch.
One thing I've learnt from both McIntosh and Roussel is that media organisations don't get much, or see much value in the comments and message boards sections. Roussel admitted much is 'outsourced' via integration through Twitter and Facebook. I find it quite amazing how there is only a very small percentage who actively invest time in commenting, but we can only look to YouTube as to why media companies may not take much inspiration on future debates, content and delivery from these posts.
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