Last week has been a busy time for the free taster sessions we’ve been running, with two new groups starting on 16 and 19 February. We are working with a total of 8 new people. Exciting times!
Here’s my write up of how these two sessions went.
Tuesday 16 February session
Three new people came along to the session at Community Base. Three smart, savvy women with lots of experience amongst them, including poetry, scriptwriting, teaching, radio production and youth work. There was meant to be four more people, but some gave apologies – given the bitterly cold weather, I couldn’t blame them!
The smaller group, however, meant that the session was strongly bent on networking, helping one another and pooling resources. We learned, for instance, that there’s a Brighton school that offers 5 pounds CRB checks for small grassroots groups; people gave each other information about fundraising.
The question of how to make money from community reporting came up again (like it did at our February meet up) – still no answer to this. We got two great examples of how reporting to funders can be community reporting including a project with young people about food and how they documented a workshop on what food travellers ate historically. I’m sure I’ll have to film her telling this story to me as I’m not sure I captured it correctly here!
For the next session, we’ll be looking at blogging and writing and video production. We’ll be trying out a new venue, on the recommendation of one of the participants. Check out the video clip above where the group gave me feedback on what they’d like to get from the second taster.
19 February taster session
I was pleased with the turn-out: 5 new people. Again, it was so interesting to hear what people were already doing – lots of experience and expertise in the room.
Participants included the following:
- former teacher with a taste for writing
- woman who runs a community newsletter
- marketing professional with an interest in the history of the local community
- retired civil engineer who’s dabbled with lots of mediums, and
- seasoned citizen journalist getting her professional qualifications.
People were quite interested in other community reporting sites such as helpmeinvestigate and fixmystreet, which I have to admit I didn’t know about until a few months ago. Questions like ‘what is a blog?’ came up’, while there was lots of discussion on the general issue of what is community reporting.
We also talked about the legal implications of reporting and whether you could anonymously blog and a few examples came up, such as London sex blogger Belle du jour and Nightjack, a Lancashire copper who last year lost his right to anonymity in a court case due to the sensitive information he was posting on his blog.
The session was a bit more structured as I had enough people to run some exercises. I paired everyone up, gave each person 5 minutes to interview one another, followed by another 5 minutes to write up their feature. It was meant to be an exercise in interviewing and writing up immediately after interviewing. Plus there was lots of practice with the HD Kodak camera (as you can probably tell!)
I got the group to give feedback about both exercises. As I imagined, people really enjoyed interviewing one another (I had to tell people to stop several times!). Even though the focus of community reporters or the tasters isn’t about writing or blogging per se, I think it’s still good for people to practice working on the spot – again I think it went down well.
Lessons learned from interviewing practice include:
- it’s important to work out an angle and associated questions (at least 5) in advance
- not to be afraid to interupt people who are rambling and move them on to the questions you want answered
- not to get sidetracked if you find something interesting (but not related to your purpose for interviewing)
- to remember to ask personal questions (if you’re writing a feature on a person), again rather than getting sidetracked
- expect the unexpected!
- stick to your questions
For the second session, I’m going to need to split the group as people are interested in different areas. One half want to learn more about blogging, Twitter and general online stuff, while the other half are more interested in film and editing. We’ll start out with a review of everyone’s assignments during the first 40 minutes, then we’ll launch into the equipment side of life.
