Why I won’t run back but I can’t sit still

I decided to be a social worker, a teacher, a writer, a dreamer; I decided to be an astronaut but I wasn’t good at maths. I decided China was the best place for me until I’d seen enough. I decided to stand but I missed the cotch. I decided to smoke, then I decided to not.

I thought about but decided against starting this blog with cliches about parking lots and green grass on the other side of a brighter life. I feel sorry for cliches; they are so true that they have somehow lost all meaning and are mocked by those who think they know better. Many of us think there is something better, something to work towards, to strive for with an unnerving amount of tenacity but when we arrive there, we automatically look for the tourist information booth. Some coast, expect the world owes them something or wait for the answer to fall like snow in the Sahara. Others hyperbolically rock the boat: megalomaniacs, I’ve dated a few sides of one of those. A few, the enviable few, take every day and waltz with it, treat it right and think of little more past that. But can those people be the high flyers? To fly high don’t you have to at least think about the flight?

The path to journalism is a tricky one for someone who is somewhat inclined to human ping pong. I want to see the world, all of it, every single back alley, every temple; I want to turn over rocks and watch crabs scuttle and hike across the Himalayas with a mule (two mules, I can’t travel light). Yet I also want a career, I want to do that well. Maybe this is a product of the ‘I want it all and I want it now generation.’ I am ansy for adventure and challenge and up until recently, this has been making me feel quite miserable…ahhh poor diddems with her first world problems, yeah, yeah I am aware!

So I’ve decided to see things differently, put on my funkadelic glasses, the kind that create a kind of optical illusion of your eyes. Through these I can see that adventure doesn’t have to happen over seas, I don’t need to roll down sand dunes on the Gobi desert, or sleep in a yurt on the grasslands of Mongolia (although I have an unending appreciation of these memories). This new adventure, this new challenge comes in the form of learning how to be. Be comfortable with commitment; be capable of forcing my brain to accept and digest information given to me, even when I don’t necessarily note it’s merits; be able to see that every experience is valuable and that learning is exciting, in every context.

I don’t believe that I am the only one who struggles with decisions, with growing up and saying goodbye. I think this is a product of our culture and generation. Last night I watched a short film at the underwire festival about an older woman who went off for the night with some drugged up teenagers; she was obviously torn between being sensible and flirting with her youth. The next morning she stood in front of her beautiful house, inside of which was her worried husband. The windmill in the front garden blew in the wind; underneath were the gardening tools left over from another time.

So you think you can write…

The NCTJ is the media equivalent of a ‘how to draw using a series of circles’ class. The final picture seems so simple, it’s just a dog after all, yet the reality is a disproportionate, whirling acid trip.

        (It is bloody difficult to give an image depth and form)   

News writing is all about form and the formula is this: inverted pyramid. 

Most important facts must be placed at the top so that if the sub editors need to cut words they can just chop from the bottom upwards…there can be no lexical separation anxiety in this business. Nor can one experiment with language, twirl it around town, make it blush with compliments and cheeky double entendres. Simplicity is key, poignancy essential. In the words of Jay Rayner, ‘Everything the reader needs to know should be in the top line.’ Simple.

Or so it goes.

The NCTJ news writing exam has an extraordinarily low pass rate, around 50%, which, as the exam is fast approaching, seems more than a tad terrifying. Is it not bad enough that the short line outline for ‘the last few weeks’ plays like the crazy frog remix through my brain cavern at the exact time I should be joining Joseph and his technicoloured dream coat?

Life, you are unfair and I seem to be paying out of the arse for the privilege.

 

I am disenchanted, internet world. I want to write about the plausibility of unicorns and how blind people dream in colour. Alas, as I approach my quarter of a century mark, I am forced to don my sensible jacket and smoke outside.

While I may be utterly pants at this news writing business (as anyone who reads my words knows, I am not the most adept at simplification), I AM improving. And that can only be a good thing. Because as reluctant as I sometimes feel to admit it, learning to write in a consolidated manner is a skill that will continue to improve writing in other areas. Plus it’s a challenge, kind of like putting together a puzzle where you have to pick the correct ten pieces from a selection of 100.

Gumption is my friend, tenacity, my dueling partner.

 

Media, realism and a touch of grace

It is important to be realistic.

Journalism is a tough industry. In order to successfully infiltrate, make your way to the ‘Don Chair’ and be so awe inspiring (or utterly ruthless) that you manage to actually stay there, you need a heavy dose of gumption.

It is important to understand the political, hard hitting nature of journalism, where idealism makes way for sensationalism; reporters wait outside the houses of families who have just lost their loved one; getting the ‘scoop’ becomes an all encompassing pursuit; the world is seen through a series of stories far weightier than the lives that form their tapestry.

 

 

However, there is the other side. We do not and should not have to accept that our role in the evolution of the media can only ever be one of passive aggressive subservience. I don’t have to refer to the blood and gore and misery of stories reported in news bulletins as ‘sexy’. There is nothing sexy about war or child molestation or Nick Clegg. I say this because that is exactly what one university lecturer recommended we do: “Find the sexy part of the story.” Shock. Stun. Sell. Desensitize the masses with over-sensationalized, bias accounts of evil Asian politics and ever increasing death tolls. Misery sells.

 

 

 

There is another side. A side endorsed by the kind of satirical genius of such greats as Charlie Brooker, Jon Ronson, George Orwell, Tom Wolfe and John Jerrimiah Sullivan  (side note: we need to add some more x chromosomes to this list). A side that reports culture, that can shove a tongue into the cheeks of the public, that looks at all sides of a situation and reports humanity humanely. This is the side that has the power to make a difference.

The most frustrating part of the past two weeks was when we were visited by a well known media figure: female, attractive and clothed in a coat made from arrogance and sexual prowess. She started the talk with a blow job joke, clearly a pioneer of the power of fellatio (because feminism only goes as far as the quality of your sandwich making and blow job skills). Her most pertinent piece of advice, when asked how best to go into column writing, was: “Get good at giving a blow job”. Only ox bridge educated,  white, middle aged males work at The Guardian. Someone should tell Tania Branigan that.

There are many sides to a pine cone and this is not the one for me.

Tenacious optimist as always, this will be a new challenge. In my peripheral I shall team media with realism and more than a touch of grace.

 

Journalism, Consumerism and the ‘need to know NOW’ generation

We have entered an age of advanced expectation, a need to consume which expands far further than shopping centres, quirky market streets and ‘oh my gosh, isn’t e-bay fantastic!!?’ Welcome to the need to know NOW generation, where taking a quick coffee break no longer impedes on a constant stream of information, barraging from all angles and introduced by a myriad of different pings and rings and ting a ling lings. Self created, inundated, manipulated, exasperated, yet somehow, completely essential to the day-to-day runnings of our lives: this is the media of the 21st Century.

The first few days of my new life as a journalist in England (as opposed to the strange hybrid I assumed in China) has been intense and slightly overwhelming, yet exceptionally eye-opening and interesting.

 

Doing an MA alongside a diploma is no easy task, which is why it is sure to be one of the biggest accomplishments of my life to date. With a head-boggling cocktail of law, ethics, writing styles, constant media consumption, social networking, story hunting, shorthand and academic theory, this writer’s brain is preparing for the high jump. Luckily there is a bright-faced bunch of trainers on board to support us, as we prepare to compete for a place on the world’s stage. The teachers at BJW are exceptionally supportive and informative; the lecturers at the university, well connected and grounded. If this is the making of journalists, Nick Clegg’s recent rant is surely a case of self-projection.

One thing is for certain: the MA Multimedia Journalism course at Sussex University is great ….

Journalism is a demanding job, even more so if you want to force your way into the serious sphere and away from such headline as ‘Dog Killed By Giant Pencil’. Hard work is essential. I am now connected to the internet 24/7, a constant consumer of an expanse of information…Did you know that a man is suing a popcorn company for damage done by butter fume inhalation? Or that Leo Trayner recently experienced the most atrocious display of trolling, which I like to hope that Twitter has ever received? (Read this, it is incredible). It’s time to enter a new life stage, a world of tweeting and chasing and investigating.

The Hansel and Gretel Conundrum

We live in a time that is as terrifying as it is exhilarating (there are several arguments to suggest more so but I for one avoid Fox News).

It is exhilarating because we are young. This is the time, they tell us, where anything could happen. Steve Jobs, in his 2005 address to the graduates of Stamford University, advised, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

It is terrifying because many of us have conflicting inner voices, spirals of inconsistency, which solidly affirm a need to be an astronaut, followed promptly by the whimsical desire for a Nomadic existence. You cannot have it all, although personally I find the idea of being an eternal space wanderer rather appealing – much less people on the quieter side of the stratosphere = secret bonanza!     

More terrifying than this is the frustratingly consistent version of ourselves who has little to no idea what he (it’s always a he in my head, the bastard) wants to be and would rather just take a little bit more time to watch this re-run of ‘How I Met your Mother’ and deal with the whole life shaaabang later. The problem is, we’re also a species of extraordinary guilt; we love the stuff, thrive off of it, eat it for breakfast over last night’s beer and a cigarette.

People like Steve Jobs exasperate this guilt, make us feel like we need to really be something. And how fortunate we are to live in the part of the world where this is even possible.

While I was in China, living in ‘the fortress of solitude’ and passing, every day, the couple who make xiao long bao for 1 pence a piece, I started to really think about my own place in the world and what I want that to mean. I started, reluctantly at first, to believe that since we’re already being – we have no great choice in that one – we may as well listen to our guilty inner man-beast, stop complaining and get on with making the best of the being we’re forced to be. Or something to that persuasion. For me this doesn’t mean changing the world (although I can’t deny grandiose feelings of self worth and the desire to save all of man from the EVIL GRIPS OF CAPITALISM!!!!!!!!!  But this is usually quenched by a nice cup of tea and a flick through this week’s Company magazine).

 

Instead, it is maybe more about a feeling of being able to do something, of not being impotent, of claiming that what the omnipotent media-government coalition have surreptitiously stolen from us. Wake up world: WE ARE NOT FUCKED!

     There are no certainties, and thank the Lord’s giant pantiloons there are not because that would be super boring. There is no bread laid on the road, the terrorists (haha autocorrect says tourists) bombed that long ago (winky winky) and maybe we need to work a little bit harder to make our own way, but it IS possible.

In pursuit of this and an attempt to see how far I can go, I am now back in Blighty with my pen at the ready. This blog is about how hard the journalism craic really is. It may not be China, filled with sights and smells and ‘Oh my, did that really just happen?’ moments, but I have a sneaky snook that it may well be just as eye opening…

 We shall see.