Thursday 28 October 2010

Girl Geek Dinners - Tech Journalism

Last night me and the boy went to a Girl Geek Dinners event. I've been to a few recently and really enjoy the discussions. I don't think of myself a geek as such, but I have a few gadgets and like to know about tech things, so I dunno really!

This talk was held at the headquarters of ThoughtWorks in the Soho.
First up was Angela Saini is an independent journalist based in London, who spoke about a career in Journalism in general and mainly spoke about ethics. I wasn't too sure I agreed with her, but she did have a few interesting points to make.

Next was Connie St Louis, who is the Director of the Science Journalism MA at City University. She's been in the industry a few years and knows her stuff, she was a good speaker, who made the course sound like something worth pursuing if you wanted a career in Technology Journalism. The course has a very high employment rate and students are assisted in gaining employment. Impressive.

Lastly and the most interesting was Ramaa Sharma is a Senior Multi Media Journalism Trainer at the BBC College of Journalism. She emphasised the importance of being multi skilled, with the ability to shoot edit and upload your material. She also showed us a selection of video cameras the course uses and showed as a few microphone, tripod which are light and cheap for your work.

As the BBC are having their funding reduced, it makes sense to become multi skilled, this is a parallel in the publishing industry too. As a picture researcher I am also expected to contribute the website, and have to source, edit and upload image galleries onto the work website. This goes along side my normal print/publishing picture research.