Capture Cardiff: Online and Mobile Journalism Assignment

Tribute bands in Cardiff: Big names, small price, compromise on quality?

Darren, Steve, Craig and Simon - not quite as catchy as John, Paul, George and Ringo. But what's in a name?

The Beatles Experience are just one of many tribute bands who have taken to the stage in Cardiff recently. Some of the capital's coolest venues have been playing host to grown men pretending to be rock stars.



So, what's the appeal?

Experience

Anyone who went to the Beatles Experience gig at The Globe last week saw just how experienced these 'Beatles' are. Complete with Beatle wigs, scouse accents and a Paul you'd be forgiven for mistaking for the ex Mr Heather Mills, this tribute act is the whole package.

They've been together in their current line-up for about eight years, giving them plenty of time to perfect their homage to the godfathers of pop music.

"People don't actually need to know us personally. I think they just think, oh it's a Beatles tribute band . . . they kind of know what they are going to get" said Simon, the band's Ringo.
He thinks part of their popularity lies in the collective reputation of all Beatles cover bands.


"A tribute band draws a certain amount of people; they know what they're going to get . . . we don't necessarily have to have a following".

This reputation gets them some high profile gigs; they regularly play alongside original Sixties acts such as Gerry and the Pacemakers at Bultins weekends dedicated to the decade of free love.

Paying ten pounds to see professional musicians play songs they've perfected over the course of a decade seems good value for money.

Listen to Simon and Darren (Ringo and John) talk about the Beatles tribute community


Time travel

At least half of the crowd at the gig weren't even born when John Lennon was shot outside the Dakota building. Going to see a tribute band can be an opportunity to get a taster of the music of the past.

"I wasn't even born when the Beatles had any of their hits, but everyone knows them all, even little kids" said Tom, a 21 year old student.

"I came to see the band tonight because all my mates were coming . . . . it was bound to be a good night out, good music. Obviously I never saw the actual Beatles".

Tom would need to set his time machine to December 12th 1965 to see the real Fab Four. It was the last time they played in Cardiff.

Watch the Beatles Experience perform I Want to Hold Your Hand at The Globe



Location, Location, Location

The Beatles aren't the only band you won't see in Cardiff any time soon; Led Zeppelin recently quashed rumours they would reunite for a tour. Over twenty million people applied for tickets for their one-off reunion gig at the O2 in London. If you were lucky enough to be allocated a ticket, you still had to fork out £125 to see them.

The Point, in Cardiff Bay, regularly features rock based tribute bands, like Whole Lotta Led. It's a lot easier to book them than to convince Page and Plant to reform. And to play a gig in Cardiff.

AC/DC are playing the O2 on the 14th April, and Live/Wire are playing The Point on the 14th February. One may be an imitation, but both are extremely popular. Emily works at The Point -
"Some bands, like Live/Wire, have their own following. They sell out in their own right".

"Some of our clientele are of a certain age and don't have the time or motivation to travel far to see bands. "

The Point played host to the UK Guns N Roses in the same week Axl Rose released the long awaited Chinese Democracy. Emily said it went down really well - Cardiff fans of eighties rock are unlikely to get the opportunity to see Rose's rehashed version of the band, let alone the original line-up. The UK Guns N Roses features a Slash look- and sound alike on lead guitar.

Emily said "Tributes of bands who are still together aren't likely to do well - Coldplay put an album out every few years and will tour with it, so it's likely they'd play in Cardiff. There isn't the demand for a Coldplay tribute".

Money Money Money

The Rolling Stones still tour, but their gigs are not accessible to everyone. They brought the 'A Bigger Bang' tour to the Millennium Stadium in 2006, and the most expensive tickets were £150. You can see The Rollin' Stoned for £10 at The Globe on the 23rd January, or The Rollin' Clones for £11 on the 9th May at The Point.

In times when most of us are tightening our belts, a night out to see a tribute to one of your favourite bands seems like a good way to save some cash.

The ticket price is considerably cheaper, and the travel costs are minimal. And it may be another fifteen years before Jagger decides to strut his stuff in Cardiff again.

Cardiff venues hosting tribute bands - click for directions

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Is the internet undermining contempt of court laws?

As journalism students, most of us have thought about the legal problems thrown up by widespread internet access (those of us who stick around for Media Law on Wednesday afternoons, at least).

Shane Richmond, Communities Editor for the Telegraph, touched on a thorny issue when he came to speak to us last Thursday.

Shane said contempt of court laws will be challenged by the internet, and won't survive. A seemingly dark prognosis for the British legal system.

Contempt of Court is based around a 1981 Act, and it affects journalists as its stops them from publishing, or broadcasting, anything that could prejudice a trial. It becomes active once an arrest warrant is issued, or an arrest is made.

Ensuring a defendant is tried fairly, rather than by the media, hasn't been easy for a while. No media organisation was prosecuted for coverage of the Soham murder trials, despite widespread recognition that many publications were in contempt of court by revealing a wealth of potentially prejudicial material about Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr.

Online and mobile media are making it even harder to make sure potential jurors aren't influenced by evidence they hear outside of the court room. The naming of Baby P, his mother and step-father has sadly demonstrated this.

I don't think many people would be surprised this information was in the public domain, and could be accessed by typing keywords into Google. But developments in social media and its uptake mean people have been exposed to their identities without looking for the information themselves.

My housemate received a text from a friend listing their names and addresses, and people joining facebook memorial groups unwittingly viewed comments made by other members, determined to 'shame' those involved.

The people publishing this information aren't journalists – this is a huge problem with citizen media. And if journalists aren't getting punished for risking the 'fairness' of a trial, then why should people leaving comments on a social networking site?

Barrister Clive Coleman thinks we should get rid of contempt of court laws. And Shane Richmond agrees that current plans for dealing with prejudicial information on the internet have no chance of working.

I don't think ordering news organisations to delete archives detailing information about cases before they became active is the answer.

But I also don't think we should abandon the principles behind the legislation altogether. They were established in law for a reason, and the reason remains valid. The means of enforcing the Act are insufficient, but the intention of the Act remains sound. The risk of exposing jurors to information outside the courtroom which could influence their opinion should be minimised.

The beauty of the British constitution is its evolving nature - we might not have found a way to successfully deal with the internet problem yet, but we don't have to abolish the Contempt of Court Act to bring it in step with the digital age.

Maybe New South Wales has got it right? Only time will tell.

Educational schemes could be the answer - if people understood why reporting restrictions were enforced, maybe they would think twice before blogging about a defendant's personal history.

If they understood the possible reasons why Baby P's abusers haven't been named, they might realise keeping quiet could be a better way to achieve justice.

Image courtesy of Billogs @ http://www3.flickr.com/search/?q=scale%20justice&w=31876869%40N00

Read my blog

I couldn't make Adam Tinworth's lecture on blogging, so I scoured my peers' blogs to catch up on what I'd missed.

Kat Collins' post on 'Attracting blog traffic' does exactly what it says on the tin. Kat was unhappy with the one sided nature of her blog, and wanted to open up a dialogue about her musings on online journalism.

She's decided to link to other blogs more often, include more Flickr pictures and comment on other peoples opinions. She's also advertising her blog on other social media platforms, like Twitter and facebook, and is tagging each of her posts carefully.

I'm going to follow Kat's example. I've been blogging about opening up 'the conversation' for weeks, but have done nothing to make my own contributions more democratic.

So I'm off to try and find out how to 'ping' my blog posts.

Image courtesy of MrLomo @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrlomo/2547112275/

The Times They Are A Changin'

Every lecture seems to start with a depressing diagnosis for the media - traditional journalism is on its last legs and has a Do Not Resuscitate order taped to its chest.

Luckily for us, Matthew Yeomans got to the good news quickly. Us Bright Young Things will have a head start in the world of online journalism and social media - we are entering the trade ready equipped with the tools needed to succeed in this quickly evolving environment.

But if journalism is changing so quickly, will our tools be outmoded in ten years time? Ten years ago the blog didn't exist, and now there are 110 million of them. We can't predict where journalism is going, but we can use our awareness of the pace of change to keep abreast of technological developments.

The idea that the media has some kind of utopian endpoint isn't constructive, and is comparable to the Marxist theory of History. We aren't working towards the ultimate mode of journalism, it is always going to change and evolve. If we want to keep up, we will have to change and evolve with the media.

But, it's not what we have, it's how we use it. Having the technology to produce sites like blogger, Twitter and MySpace is meaningless if we don't use them innovatively.

Matthew Yeomans says web 2.0 levels the playing field, allowing small organisations or individuals to punch above their weight. He gave us the examples of Money Saving Expert and Greenpeace. Both sites use social media to exert a level of influence that would have been impossible before these tools existed.

Social media allows communities of interest to grow, and express themselves without having to spend extortionate amounts of money. Charities can have websites more powerful than large corporations just by engaging with media available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection.

If this isn't democratising, then I don't know what is. Social media has the power to make our society more plural, once the revolution reaches everybody.

But I'm not sure old Karl Marx would approve. Afterall, isn't democracy a smokescreen? Not in web 2.0.

Image courtesy of Dunechaser @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/dunechaser/104968043/

Capture Wales - Capture imaginations?

Our lecture with Daniel Meadows seemed to capture the imagination of the CJS diploma students, just as his Digital Storytelling project captured the imaginations of the 'ordinary people' who took part.

The project encouraged people to construct two minute digital stories, based around personal pictures. Daniel Meadows and his team held workshops around the country, and the results were broadcast on BBC Wales.

Alan Jeffreys was one of the participants. Alan's video illustrates his life through his relationship with his favourite stuffed animal. It's both touching and informative, taking us through the major markers in his personal history, while painting a clear picture of an older man reminiscing about bygone days. In just 120 seconds.

The people who took part in the workshops were helped by the Capture Wales team, but the idea spread beyond its seeds, with community groups producing similar videos without guidance.

If I had been told this before going to Daniel Meadows' lecture I would have been surprised - in my experience, people can be scared to do creative things without encouragement. But after seeing the digital stories produced for BBC Wales, many of the diploma students were rushing out to make their own narrative. Cemlyn Davies told the story of his beloved Liverpool triumphing over Chelsea.

Getting journalists to tell stories may be as difficult as getting the Pope to pray, so our enthusiasm as a group may not be the best example. So I typed "digital storytelling Wales" into YouTube, and one of the first hits was from a group called Merthyr Stories.

Merthyr Stories have produced videos like this:




The Capture Wales stories focus on individuals, whilst this video narrates the story of a community based around a mine in Treharris.

Daniel Meadows says digital stories, "when imagined as a tool of democratised media, it has -- I believe -- the potential to change the way we engage in our communities". He also talks about giving "a voice to all who are accustomed to thinking of themselves -- in a broadcast context anyway -- only as audience.”

Essentially, making digital stories has the potential to be a democratic form of media. But people need to be given the facilities to contribute to 'the conversation', and taught the skills to produce creative media. Merthyr Stories is run by the borough Council, the Welsh Assembly Government and Glamorgan University.

If people can be encouraged to produce creative media, could schemes to engage people with news media more directly be successful? People like to tell and hear stories, and what is news if it isn't a collection of stories? The success of digital storytelling in Wales shows perceptions of who is entitled, or able, to broadcast can be changed through involving people directly in the process.

If people are encouraged to contribute to news media in a similar manner, then "the conversation" could become truly democratic.

Image courtesy of wadem@flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/wadem/2901137499/

Web 2.0 - the linotype of the digital age?

Our session on citizen journalism left me with more questions than answers. But most of these questions hadn't occurred to me before the lecture, and surely as journalists its part of our job description to explore unfamiliar areas.

My explorations in citizen journalism haven't led me to any solid conclusions regarding its democratic potential, or how to overcome problems with representation.
If anything, more questions have been added to the pile.

Is this a bad thing? A lot of the issues raised focus on the future of citizen journalism and user generated content, and their place in the media landscape. We can't predict the future, and as journalists, we shouldn't try, so failing to draw concrete opinions from an ongoing debate should only be seen as healthy.

Could late nineteenth century contemporaries have predicted the rise of the mass media with the invention of the lino type machine? The new method of printing allowed newspapers to be produced quickly, cheaply, and in great volume, meaning that they became relatively affordable for the masses for the first time.


People all over the country could read the same news, at the same time, which can be seen as a democratisation of information. But it was only possible because the industrial revolution provided Britain with an extensive road and rail network, meaning papers could be printed in London in the evening, and be read on the streets of Manchester the next morning.

Is the internet the lino type of the digital age, and web 2.0 its industrial revolution?

Maybe, but the revolution will have to reach everybody before a true dialogue can be opened. It certainly hasn’t yet.

The statistics discussed in the lecture suggest the conversation between broadcasters and consumers is nowhere near democratic, with the majority of contributors belonging to a narrow socio-economic group. This doesn't detract from the democratic potential of citizen journalism.

George Reedy was talking about an over powerful presidency when he said "A thesis which could not survive an undergraduate seminar in a liberal arts college becomes accepted doctrine, and the only question is not whether it should be done but how it should be done”.
The sentiment he expressed is transferrable to this situation - an open discussion can help paint a truer picture of a situation.

Rupert Murdoch is not a man who's views I thought I would be championing when I started this course, but he made some good points in his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 2005.

Whilst most of the speech is a promotion of all things NewsCorp, his description of the "highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know" serves as an advert for a more open discussion and the inclusion of user generated content by news providers.

The handful of powerful editors can be seen as Reedy's over mighty president, who doesn't discuss what his citizens want or need, and comes up with ideas that would be quickly rejected if put up for open discussion.

I'm not sure that the rise of the 'prosumer' will comply with Davide Casaleggio's futurist vision.



But that’s the point. We aren't sure if embracing citizen journalism will lead to a more democratic mass media, but we can invest in its potential. It seems foolish not to.

Image courtesy of Marcin Wichary@Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/2252094942/