New Community Reviewer’s Blog!

The Community Reviewers program is going full swing, with people reviewing left, right and centre!

Some people have mentioned that even though they’re up for producing reviews, you’ve got nowhere to put them. So I’ve created a special Community Reviewer’s blog, which all Reviewers will have access to. You can either post your review (as text, audio or video) straight onto the bog, or cut and paste it from another source, such as your own blog. It would be great to get as many reviews in the same space as possible – it’s a great way of convincing more venues to give us more tickets, so it’s in your interest to post!

If you don’t know how to use a blog, we’re going to arrange a blogging workshop for Community Reviewers in the New Year – watch this space. And if you’re comfortable posting stuff up there already, then get in touch with me and I’ll give you the login details.

It’s still in it’s infancy, but you can find the blog here: http://communityreviewers.wordpress.com/

Community Reviewer’s Great Expectations – and free workshop!

We’ve got a festive treat for Community Reporters old and new. We’ve teamed up with the Library Theatre to get discounted tickets to their Christmas play – Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and if that wasn’t enough, we’ve got a professional theatre reviewer coming in to give us a free workshop on how to produce a theatre review!

Tickets are only £3, and anyone who wants to come can – even if this is your first experience as a Community Reporter! The production is on Saturday 20th December at 2:30pm, and the workshop will be running for about an hour afterwards – we should be finished by 6pm at the very latest.

If you’re interested, please get in touch with me as soon as possible, letting me know how many tickets you want. You can email me at jess@mcin.net, or ring me on 0161 230 1430

Community Reviewers Get Active!

Community Reviewers have just teamed up with the wonderful people at Manchester Sport and Leisure who are so keen to get people off their sofas and jumpin around that they’re offering Reviewers a wealth of opportunities to get active. They’ve got facilities all over Manchester, so there’s bound to be something going on somewhere near you.

Ever wanted to give yoga a try? Or maybe a game of squash? Or perhaps you’d like to throw yourself about doing a bit of aerobics? We’ve got a plethora of free sessions available. We can even offer you a week’s free gym membership. There are so many possibilities. We just want to get you running around, and then letting the world know what you thought about it!

The best thing to do if you’re interested is to check out the Manchester Sport and Leisure website and have a snoop around and see what’s going on near you. If you find something you’re up for doing, get in touch with me (jess@mcin.net), and I’ll let you know if it’s possible. You might as well try your luck – you never know! Happy snooping!

Community Reviewers Are Born!

Hear ye, hear ye!

Never let it be said that we at MCIN never do anything for our Community Reporters. Through equal amounts of charm and pestering we have linked up with some of the kind folk in Manchester’s entertainment industry, who have agreed to give us free tickets to some of the city’s top events in return for reviews. We’ve already had people go to the Comedy Store, the Royal Exchange and the Velodrome, and we’ve got also contacts with the Greenroom, Contact, Sportcity and SJM Concerts – they of Manchester Academy fame. Details of all available tickets are available on our brand shiny new Community Reporter’s Newsletter, which went out today. If you haven’t received it, and you’re registered as a Community Reporter, let me know (jess@mcin.net) and I’ll include you on the list.

Likewise, if you’ve got contacts at any venues in or around the city who you think might be up for taking part, then let me know, and if you’ve got anything you want other Community Reporters to know about – events, courses, news…whatever really – then get in touch and I’ll send the email round.  We’re still waging the charm/pestering offensive at MCFC and the Lowry.

It’s worth noting that Community Reporters who go to events WILL be expected to write/record a review (we’re no stranger to nagging. Some of us are exceptionally good at it), and priority will be given to people who haven’t had tickets before. If you’re unsure about how to write a review, one of our Community Reporters, who has written some professional reviews, has agreed to give a free workshop. Let me know if you’re up for it so we can organise it.

Have fun!

Birely Fields in Hulme

A 2 minute video made in 2006 by Hulme resident, and Friend of Birley Fields, Nigel Woodcock. Birley Fields is a 40 acre brownfield site in Hulme, central Manchester, which has remained undeveloped for the last 10 years since Hulme was regenerated. During this time, the open space as evolved its own interesting wildlife ecology. Many local residents like it just how it is, or would like to see it used for social, or ecological activities. However, Manchester Metroploitan Univiersity recently unveiled plans to develop a new 3,000 people campus on the Birley Fields, which will destroy the green space, and dramatically transform the character of Hulme. The video includes an interview with Nigel, and other local people, shot at a Friends of Birley Fields event, which was held to raise awareness about the future of the area.

AllVoices – The first open media site where anyone can report from anywhere

There’s a brand spanking new website just out, and it’s taking what we’re doing here at People’s Voice Media to an international level.

AllVoices.com “brings together multiple voices or points of view via news stories, videos, images and blogs from the Internet, to provide context and build momentum.” The idea is simple – it does what it says on the tin. Anyone, anywhere in the world, with access to a computer, can post ‘news’ on the site. The site is computer-moderated, so inevitably some spam gets through, but most of the stuff posted on there is legitimate.

Unshackled by advertising, the site is bringing together a whole range of voices, opinions and stories, many of which would not normally be considered ‘newsworthy,’ or would even, for various reasons, be deliberately left out of the mainstream media (see eg Proof That Media Controls the Election) It’s a fascinating experiment, and what we at PVM are aiming towards, if on a slightly smaller scale!

If you live in or around Manchester, and would like to get involved in some way, please email jess@mcin.net

Happy Surfing!

My Life In Limbo

This short film has been made by one of our Community Reporters. Two asylum seekers living in Bury talk about the difficulties they face as they wait to hear if they can stay in the UK.

This film is a perfect example of what Community Reporters are all about – real people, real issues. We have put it up on our Ethni-city website (www.ethni-city.net), in the hope of both raising awareness of the problems asylum seekers face in this country, and also as a way of letting other asylum seekers know that they are not alone.

If you have something you want to shout about, or you want to highlight – and it can be anything!- then get in touch with us – we can help you get on your way, or just provide a wider distribution channel! You can email me at jess@mcin.net.

Have fun!

BBC trip

Following on from my last post, this is what some of our Community Reporters had to say:

Technoboy – Today was a bit special, as a community reporter I got to visit the BBC along with fellow community reporters, and take a look behind the scenes of the Northwest Tonight programme…more

Rob ‘Roblog’ Squires – This week we were treated to a visit to the BBC to watch the live recording of Northwest tonight, and we are to recieve free training from the Programme’s news editor, about how to produce newsworthy stories….more

Paul ‘The Hulme Tune’ Ridyard They are really holding their arms out to us, giving us a taster of what goes on behind the scenes of live regional news programming. It allowed me to imagine myself sat on the red couch next to Ranvir Singh =yes, please – reading the news!…more

I’ve also got to give an extra special shoutout to Mr Paul Techoboy, who wrote an uncharacteristically (!) upbeat piece on what it means to him to be a Community Reporter:

“I thought today I would talk about being a community reporter, and how you can turn a hobby into something useful for the community. I am not a professional and neither do I want to be. It’s a hobby that I thoroughly enjoy, and will continue to happily snap away until the cows come home, and that is the key, enjoyment and enthusiasm”….more

Community Reporter’s Trip to the BBC

On Tuesday a group of us went along to the BBC to watch NorthWest Tonight being filmed
as part of the Community Reporter’s training programme.

For half an hour I sat up in the gallery in complete and utter confusion as somehow a televsion show was created out of what appeared to be the control system of the Starship Enterprise. 30 different screens, millions of flashing LCDs, all sorts of gizmical buttons and twiddly bits, people speaking into important-looking headphones (including a guy who, for some bizarre reason, insisted on repeatedly counting down from 20 even though no-one seemed to be paying him the slightest bit of attention). There was even a teleport machine standing in the corner.

Ok, no, there wasn’t. But the whole thing was very digital and space age. And as all these people fussed about millions of pounds worth of equipment, I couldn’t help chuckling to myself as I thought about the looks on their faces when they realised that they could actually film Gordon with a mobile phone. One day the light will dawn, and e-bay will be flooded with spaceship monitors. And that day is getting closer, if the BBC’s interest in social media continues. But until then, the power is in our hands.

“It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy – not just companies, but whole countries.”

This musing on social media belongs to no lesser person than Rupert Murdoch – the media king himself. That Murdoch went on to buy MySpace shows just how serious he was.

As long as there is a way for ordinary people to tell and share their stories and experiences, this power will remain in our hands. The introduction of expensive equipment, as well as making media dependent on advertisers, was what destroyed a really vibrant working class press in the UK in the 19th century. People today have reclaimed that voice, and not just the working classes – every strata of society, the disabled, minority communities, the young, the old. We’ve all been given a voice by social media. And we should use it! Maybe not to take down countries, but to create positive change in things that are affecting us.

Get crackin!

PS Thanks for the photos TB!

MCIN and the BBC

The latest buzz around the MCIN office is that we’ve agreed a partnership with the BBC. The idea is to work together to develop new media talent in Manchester and Salford. We all felt that this would be a great thing, especially for our Community Reporters – we are now in a better position to offer them training, support and contacts -so I was very interested by the response of one of our Hulme-based reporters, Paul Ridyard.

I too am curious about this new partnership. The BBC are a notoriously hard organisation to get a job in – they require bucket-loads of experience, not to mention expensive qualifications – so their interest in getting involved with MCIN and the Community Reporters is encouraging, and I hope they are serious about it. It would be great to take the elitism out of the media.

One of the main reasons I am so enthusiastic about the Community Reporters scheme is because it gives the media back to the people, to let us tell our own stories. Most media nowadays – be it newspapers, telly, radio – all comes down to money, at the end of the day, and as such stories are judged according to their ‘worth’. Unsurprising, then, that most of what we hear about Manchester is sensationalist – murders, stabbings, celebrities and footie. Which isn’t actually what normal people deal with in real life. And as media organisations become increasingly dependent on advertising, this situation is only going to get worse.

And that’s what the Community Reporters are all about. When you hand the cameras over to the people who actually live here, the stories are so different. We’ve got loads of content on our website from people doing really interesting, really positive things in Manchester, which never make it into the news because they’re not going to sell, but they actually paint a much more realistic picture of what’s going on in our community. Whether its a young people’s anglers club in North Manchester, a refugee  talking about their experiences, or a report of a local event, its real news and real issues from real people. And its not about profit, its about people.

We’re looking for more people to get involved with us, and talk about things happening in their lives and their communities. It doens’t matter what it its – working tax credits, public transport woes, environmental campaigns – we want to hear what you think and what you’re doing. Podcasts, videos, blogs – they all do the job, and we can offer you training on all of it.

If you’re interested, contact me (Jess) at jess@mcin.net, or ring me on 0161 230 1430

NB A really great organisation looking at how the demand for profit is distorting the news we receive from our media is Medialens