I’m in London tonight for the second official Future of News Meetup. It should be pretty good if the last one was anything to go by. With all hope that luck is on my side, I’ll be tweeting from the meetup itself with others (follow me here if you aren’t doing so already). If you feel bored and want to follow the latest tweets, have a look to your right to find the feed for all tweets with the tag #fong.
Hope to see some of you tonight!
Last night I went along to London for Adam Westbrook’s Future Of News Meetup at the London School Of Economics. There had already been one meetup in December of last year but this was the first ‘proper’ meetup. I think there were about 45 other people there from a range of different backgrounds (journalists at all kinds of levels, multimedia people etc.). I was slightly nervous beforehand because I was going on my own and wasn’t really sure what to expect. It was what turned out to be a really exciting and progressive meetup, with two excellent guest speakers and I got to speak to a few people from different backgrounds, one of whom I had only just realised when I got home had actually been following me on Twitter for a while now. An epic facepalm right there.
The first speaker was Cynthia O’Murchu, deputy interactive editor of the Financial Times, who showed off some fantastic data visualisation tools that showed that you can take a story from a subject like economics and present it in a way that makes it easy for the reader to understand. She showed a basic and humorous presentation that explained the shrinking finances of some of the people involved in the recession (at least, that’s what I think it was, someone might have to correct me on this). She explained it as “goofy and silly, but it tells a story.” It’s essentially data visualisation that doesn’t look like data. I think most people in the room were won over by it.
The second speaker was Alex Wood from Not On The Wires, who was part of the highly ambitious and brilliantly innovative Berlin Project in November last year. He explained the story of the Berlin Project, dating way back to their first experiment in April with G20 Live, which was only set up a day before the protests itself. His attitude of “if we couldn’t do what we wanted to do, we did it” really stuck with me. He also announced that there will be a conference in March or April called Digital Storytelling ’10. It’s completely free and is timed quite nicely since it’ll be of use for some other stuff that I’m currently planning.
After that was a brief brainstorming exercise and then off to the pub where I spoke with a couple of people afterwards. Unfortunately, I had lost track of time completely and had to leave a bit suddenly. I just missed my bus home so I had to taxi it back. Oh woe.
But all in all, it was a fantastic evening. The one thing that left me feeling very optimistic about the future was the positive and progressive attitude of the group. From the outset, Adam banned all negativity, banning certain phrases and questions, and the group in general seems to be one that is keen on trying new things. We as journalists have to be the ones making the change, ultimately, and we are the ones that have to find a new way of telling people what is happening in the world. I hate to use the word ‘inspirational’ because I think talent shows have absolutely destroyed the meaning of the word but you get the idea.
It’s dawned on me that this coming semester is my last as a university student. Blimey. It’s a miracle that I’ve managed to survived for as long as I have without going insane but what I do know, eh?
Anyway, the next two weeks will be spent finishing off my dissertation. I am currently at 4,500 words and need 3,500 more to complete it. It’s just a case of writing done all the ideas in my head into coherent sentences that are constructed in a way that flows well. It’s now gotten to the point where I’m not too fussed if I am right or wrong…I just want the thing to make sense. I’m going to show my girlfriend some of it before she goes off to Finland next week for a two-week holiday (which, incidentally, couldn’t have been better planned as, even though I adore her, I am free of distractions). Once it is handed in on the 4th February, I will be going to a pub in a state of relief. I don’t care what pub it is, just any pub will do that sells Peroni.
After that is all done and dusted, I have two things to work on. One is my work experience placement, which is going to be a demoralising experience just to find one, and then my final project. Even though my skills are more suited towards online journalism, I’m going to take a gamble and go for print. The way I think of it is that the print project will actually allow me to focus a lot more on what I’m trying to achieve with it – something that has been lacking in the previous two group online projects. I’ll have to re-acquaint myself with InDesign, but it’ll be worth it.
The other reason I’m skipping online is because I’m working on another project at the moment that is quite ambitious and may well take up a lot of my spare time in terms of organisation alone. I’m not willing to explain much at this point but all I’ll say is that we think it’s something that people will be interested in.
Before I go, if anyone is going to the Future Of News Meetup organised by the brilliant Adam Westbrook on Wednesday, feel free to say hi to me if you want to have a chat with a journalism student who couldn’t possibly predict the future of news. This should be an interesting evening and I’m really looking forward to chatting to new people, especially those are happen to be in a similar position to me.
