Descending the Ivory Tower

I have been meaning to start this blog for ages; there’s just been one snag which I was warned about by my master’s tutor before I even started the course…

It may just be an excuse for being lazy but I do feel this new chosen path of mine is one that doesn’t leave a lot of free time. Even before my course began I felt overstretched; twelve hours of meeting-and-greeting the dozens of other journos I felt socially exhausted, I was on the verge of quoting John McClane from Die Hard 2 albeit without kicking someone in the face. 

The constant updates of people and information in my life has left little room for habit and old ways. Video games are now an occasional hobby, I’ve accepted the likelihood that a great many people are out of my life for good now and I doubt I’ll be emerging from a library droopy-eyed at 3am again. I’ve always believed you need balance in life but now it’s hard to place the pivot, how can I lift the work side of the seesaw when it is being weighed down by the whole world? I chose History and journalism as degrees because they cut no area of study off, everything is interesting but now I can understand why people narrow/focus their view of the world, we are human.

The infallibility of humanity had been a lesson repeated repeatedly in all the books I’d read before the course, this influenced my decision to go on a broadcast journalism course. Opportunities in the media are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain and you have to make use of them when you have your chance, so it’s best to make those initial mistakes in a situation that’s not going to cost you your dream job. 

Sheffield is a brilliant place to begin my journalism career, with a diverse, riveting city and course to explore for stories. All of my tutors know their stuff and know how to teach it; even the media law classes are interesting. I’ve refined aspects of my speech, writing and filming and absorbed anecdotes galore. Getting rid of the ‘extra detail’ (referred to as  ‘waffle’ by my old History teacher ) that has been a feature of my academic work has not been a painless experience, choosing the facts and the words to describe them in an accessible way can be surprisingly tricky, especially when you’re against the clock.

Radio newsdays have been very stimulating on the mind even if all the hair surrounding it is falling out. Everyone’s getting an idea of what’s expected of them; find a story, confirm a story, get more information on a story, write up a story all in the space of an hour, including a bit of spare time to allow the bulletin reader a chance to rehearse names like Yanukovych and Rajapaksa (for when there’s not enough going on in South Yorkshire). I’ve carved out a niche as biscuit supplier but I’m looking forward to being an editor, hopefully by that time we’ll all be comfortable enough to be short (i.e. rude) with one-another.

Going out on the patch has been good fun too; I was allocated to cover stories between the villages of Loxley and Bradfield at the edge of the Peak District National Park. At first I felt apprehensive, I joked with other rural-based journalists that we’d have to hope for a hidden corruption story akin to Hot Fuzz but when I visited each village I realised it wasn’t so bad.

I was confident that I had the most beautiful patch of anyone so I set about looking for stuff to film, I soon struck gold when I realised the Sheffield Canoe Club did something called a Candle Light Paddle in Oughtibridge…



I had a massive apprehension dream before filming caused by the fact someone else booked out the low-light DLSR camera before me, this meant my footage with a standard DSLR wasn’t as vivid as it could have been. I had to make sure I edited it in such a way that viewers would know that they were watching kayakers. I also had to beg my girlfriend to join me filming because the paddle was a one-off event, at least she got to see countryside again after being in London for a month even if that meant being bit my midges (sorry again Sally).

Stories for radio and for a web article were decent adventures too. In my first radio piece I got to gallivant around the Peak roads in an army truck with John Gill from the Bradfield Brewery.

 I had arranged to get my second radio piece that same day; I had cycled to my patch on a fine clear day which was without difficulty until I had to cycle down the steep road from High Bradfield to Low Bradfield. I started descending the hill and started to pick up speed pretty quickly, my cautious side kicked in too late, possibly due to the adrenaline rush I was still feeling from the truck, I started braking when I was going 20mph downhill on what turned out to be a slippery road, I didn’t slow down which made me panic, pressing down hard on the brakes which locked. I knew I was going to crash, I had three seconds to think: ‘fall on your left side you don’t need it as much.’ I fell to the tarmac bashing my left knee and wrist, my water bottle sprang from my bike and started rolling down the hill, I chased it as fast as I could with a big rucksack on my back. When I eventually collected everything together I headed down to Low Bradfield where I was able to fix the chain on my bike thanks to the staff at the post office.

I limped to my next story, Bogfest, an open mic night trying to raise funds for Bradfield’s public toilets.

While I was there I got chatting to several locals, many of which immediately said to me “Are you the chap who fell off his bike earlier?” Word travels fast. It turns out a further two accidents occurred on the same bit of road later that day, including one car that ended up on its roof, lucky nobody was hurt. May have made a decent story but it may have been awkward to interview myself! So I ended up with three stories out of five quite quickly, even if I did now have a slightly bust wrist that excused me from going in goal on cold winter nights, what a pity.

I attended several City and Bradfield Parish Council meetings where my shorthand struggled to keep up but gave me some interesting leads, namely the proposals to put up two wind turbines in Deepcar. The eventual planning meeting was a certainly a revelation in how long administrative stuff goes on for and how furious elderly people can be in public. The turbines were rejected so I had the story but it missed one big element, the farmer who was going to put them up, which made it difficult to be impartial when it seemed like I had the opinion of a whole City against nobody!

This was going to be my web story but it was shunted from my portfolio by the revelation that a local library in Stannington had no owner, which was a problem for a group looking to take over the running of the library from the council. I rang numerous people involved and got my story, I just needed a picture to go with it. I therefore decided to take pictures of the front of the library of people coming in and out. Partly to avoid looking like the nerdiest paparazzo ever I spoke to a few library users about what they thought about the library’s future.

Getting a three minute radio interview was very frustrating, I tried a charity worker, an old school friend and a nun but none were available to talk. I eventually found a local Historian who was working on the commemorations for the Great Sheffield Flood which made for a decent feature.

However this interview also nearly got trumped by the Twitter revelation that there had been an armed robbery at the Oughtibridge Post Office where the owner had been hit on the head with a gun.

This caused a minor panic attack; this was a story too ‘good’ to miss but which I didn’t have time to do, not-to-mention the difficulty of handling such a traumatic situation. I tried ringing the police but the officer handling the case wasn’t on duty, so I had to sink my anxieties and call the Post Office itself. I first got hold of the victim’s daughter, the shakes in her voice made me feel like putting the phone down immediately but I persisted and asked whether he was available to talk, she told me he would in five hours. The screws in my chest rotated with the clock five times as I waited. I finally rang back with one thought in my mind, be sensitive, I can’t understand what this person has gone through so be gentle. When he picked up I spoke a bit too softly and he asked me to speak up, I apologised and said I was sorry to hear what had happened to him and would be available to talk about what had happened. He said the police had told him not to speak to anyone about the incident, I said I respected that and said I hoped whoever did it would be caught soon, he thanked me for calling and we hung up. Although I had no story I can say I’m glad I spoke to him, it made me realise that such things are only as awkward as you make them and that strangers aren't always hostile when you take interest in their well-being so you might as well ask.

The return to academia has not been a return to footnotes and books; it has been a lesson about how to apply oneself to real world situations, situations with normal people. I’m not excluding my study or communication to academics; I’m descending the ivory tower into the real world. Just like a tower my task seems constraining, steep and dizzying but this is the price I’m prepared to pay for what I want to do with my life.

Marie has not been wrong so far about the intensity of the course, which is why this overseen tweet makes me wary of whether I will be able to keep this blog fresh…