Month: September 2018

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World’s biggest coffee morning proves that a lot of good people exist- like this old Indian couple

I saw on the tube station an ad about the Macmillan charity- World’s biggest coffee morning, about a month ago, and I felt deep in my heart that I had to get involved immediately. What I had to do was to host my own coffee morning on a place of my choice. I decided to welcome people at the entrance of the nearby park, with the hope that the British weather would smile at me. It did.

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What I noticed was the fear of people when I approached them trying to explain what the charity is all about. Some of them just passed by, others were polite to say that ”they are in a rush”. I find their behaviour completely understandable – I would do the same in the role of a passenger.

The sad thought that occupies my mind is that most of us have hard time trusting people on the street that collect money for charities. We cannot recognize the ‘real ones’ between the ‘liars’ anymore- they both look the same- smart-dressed and good-looking.

 

But there were people who were happy to give some change for the charity and get a cup of coffee/tea and/or a cupcake. I even met people concerned about not bringing any cash with them, so they asked me if they could donate in another way.

After all, it is not about the money raised, but for the goodness that you spread around and gets back to you. When I put my coffee ‘morning’ (it was actually an afternoon) to an end and got home, someone ringed on my door. What my eyes saw was an adorable old couple that received my invitation by post, who lives near me. These two people told me they wanted to donate money to the Macmillan charity as they did the previous years, but they did not find me in the park, so they decided to come to my house, as I left my address on the invitation for contact. My heart melted when I heard their words. I immediately took my guests home and we drank tea together. I was really impressed by their courtesy and vast knowledge on different kinds of topics. They like to travel and have seen a lot- from Istanbul to China, from Morocco to Singapore and Russia.

And I have an invitation for tea at their home this Monday. I never expected such a good ending to my coffee morning.

 

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Where does the journalism hide in my weekly media consumption

      I had been monitoring my media consumption for a week (21th- 28th of September) and I put the results in a chart below:

mediaconsumption (1)

      It turns out, as I expected, that I spent most of my time in reading newspapers- in print or online (Evening Standard, The Guardian), magazines (Cosmopolitan, Writing, ES Magazine), excerpts from books (Media, Culture and Society by Paul Hodkinson, Why study the media? by Roger Silverstone) during my everyday travel from home to university and vice versa – 36 hours.

      Some other 24 hours were spent by me watching TV at home after a hectic and yet exciting day in university (BBC, Sky News). In order for me to get a rest from the journalism world, I decided to post on social media and see how my friends’ day on Instagram was, and this took me 28 hours of my priceless time and a lot of my iPhone battery (after making this monitoring on consumption I am thinking of reducing the time spent on social media a bit) . Last, but not least, my radio consumption (BBC Radio 4) was 7 hours only.

     The conclusion to be drawn from the above, is the fact that I tried to balance my active hours between keeping up with the news and getting in touch with friends, colleagues and relatives. The one thing I would like to correct is the time I spend on social media, so that I could have free hours for some extracurricular activities.

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‘We need much more critical reading’, says Felix Salmon in ‘Teaching journalists to read’

Felix Salmon’s piece of writing provides some good food for thought. My first reaction when reading the headline was, ‘Can’t journalists read properly, or is there something more than meets their eye?’ . It turns out, Felix has the ability to witness the biggest problems concerning journalism:

  1. He believes that what is missing in the journalistic establishment is people who are good at finding and curating great material.

The main focus on Salmon’s speech during The Audit’s breakfast, is that the journalistic entities- newspapers, magazines, websites, have to start putting much more emphasis on reading. The reason why he emphasizes on this was because journalism is becoming much more conversational.

Think about it this way: reading is to writing as listening is to talking — and someone who talks without listening is both a boor and a bore. If you can’t read, I don’t want you in my newsroom. Because you aren’t taking part in the conversation which is all around you.

2. According to Dean Starkman, journalists who no longer work for old-fashioned media cannot be called ‘journalists’ , while Salmon thinks quite the opposite, and here lies the second issue- between old-fashioned and contemporary media.

Both of them produce material worth reading. The difference between ‘now’ and ‘those halcyon days’ is that today we have got more high-grade journalism available to the public than ever before.

3. And last, but not least, it is not about the shortage of journalists, but that of critical readers, who absorb the information, without misinterpreting it.

What makes one person a good journalist is his ability to read between the lines, to engulf fully in a situation until all points of view are considered. Everyone can be a publisher on Twitter or Facebook, but not everyone can create a content worthy of notice.

Teaching Journalists to Read

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