Sarah Hartley

I’m guessing people outside news organisations don’t see many press releases. These nuggets of “information” find their way into newsrooms across the country and then a system of churnalism removes errors, writes into English and attempts to turn it into something entertaining or informative.
I thought this one deserved to be seen unadulterated. Let me know what you think.
One Would Rather Talk Like the Queen.
Three quarters of Manchunians don’t like the sound of their own voices.
29th July, 2008. Speech is one of humanity’s greatest gifts – but it has now been revealed that over three quarters of people (77%) from Manchester don’t like the sound of their own voices.
Given the chance to change the way they talk, most Manchunians would prefer to sound like the Queen
And it’s not just in Manchester that people don’t like their own accent. The problem is at its worst in Birmingham. Brum, made famous world-wide by foul mouthed Ozzy Ozbourne, not only tops the league of regions where people dislike their own accents, it is also bottom of the league of voices other Brits would like to exchange for their own. Just two per cent of people from Manchester would choose to speak like a Brummy.
Said Tony Robinson, SpinVox linguistic expert: “It seems Manchester is being gripped by an epidemic of Accent Envy and Accent Self Loathing. After decades where dialect diversity has been celebrated, the majority of Brits now aspire to Received Pronunciation (RP) and to share the sound of their voice not only with The Queen but with celebs like Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant.”
A poll* of more than 2,000 people around Great Britain, by voice-to-content company SpinVox, found that after the Queen’s accent, most people in Manchester would choose an Irish accent, followed by Geordie.
The Manchester twang fares badly with the rest of Great Britain too with only two per cent hankering for the accent.
When it comes to who actually does like the sound of their own voice, the Scots, Geordies and Welsh take the podium positions.
Overall the Queen’s English is the most popular accent in Great Britain.
Tony Robinson continued: “Accents are intricately tied into our own sense of identity. It’s interesting that those with distinct cultural or class identities are more satisfied with the way they speak and it’s precisely those accents that the rest of us want to acquire. The fact is that English as spoken in the UK is incredibly dynamic, precisely because of the regional variations in the way we speak – we are still seeing new words being added to our D2 system’s dictionary at the rate of thousands a week 70% of those words are not even contained in published English Dictionaries.”

It seems the heat has been getting to the brains of Apple geeks, and tempers are fraying not just here in Manchester but all over the Northern hemisphere.

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There’s some fighting talk coming from north of the border. If the statement below sounds familiar to your experience of the current climate;

“senior managers seem to be more concerned with spouting buzzwords & standing still than actually doing something, sometimes it feels like there’s little point in trying to do anything at all.”

Then perhaps Iain Bruce could help do something about it. He’s issued a rallying cry with this blog post: “journalism is dying on its feet, and we have to do something to keep the old flame burning”.

He proposes we all do something constructive this summer and get together in Glasgow for the Digital Media Meal – an evening of food, drink and discussion. 

As he says: “A platform for encouragement and debate, it would be a chance to chew over everything from what to do with multimedia journalism to XML standards for news bulletins and press releases.”

Sounds like a plan – something to cheer us on for the summer. If you like the idea, leave a comment at his blog here.

About a year ago I found myself joining in the decades-long bemoaning the of computer, science and engineering industries – locally and globally – for being dominated by the “unfairer” sex. Thankfully, in Manchester at least, a few women are trying to redress the balance and this Friday is an event I’d hope some here would be interested in.

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An online soap opera which goes across social media networks launched in Manchester today.
Called Spinning Jenny TV the enterprise was dreamed up by producer Colin Bannon and director Matt Stansfield – and they have high hopes for what they’re describing as a “social soap”.
Colin explains; “We’re a small production team based in Manchester, using the latest Web 2.0 technology to create our own TV programmes.
“We are also looking for the viewers to interact – even act! – with the characters in a way never before seen, or attempted in a broadcast drama, whether online or on television. They will help create the story line, or even appear on screen as part of the plot!
“We hope Jenny will be as ground-breaking as Manchester’s other soap was in the 1950s.”
The soap follows the story of real-life PR girl Jenny Hargreaves, following her life and loves, friends and family, ups and downs in and around Manchester with a deliberate blurring of fiction and reality.
Some professional actors (such as Casey-Lee Jolleys who played Fred Elliot’s Thai bride in Corrie) take part in the show as well as Jenny’s real-life colleagues at Brazen and friends.
Viewers will soon be able to vote on storylines to be included in the show and, in time, they expect viewers to be able to vote characters on and off the soap.
Jenny goes across all the Social Networks. You can find her on FaceBook (with more than 1,000 members), YouTube , bebo and MySpace as well as the blog http://spinningjennytv.blogspot.com/

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Lounge of flat for sale

I’ve put my money where my mouth is and am attempting to sell a property using social media tools.

After all, the whole idea sounds perfect. First advantage – no costly estate agents.  Second advantage – it’s easy. It took me six minutes to set up two ads on Facebook, with a selection of pictures. (Compare that time spent to placing an online ad on a newspaper website)

This activity was also fed into Friendfeed , this blog post will also publicise the sale and then twitterfeed will kindly syndicate to another new set of potential purchasers on Twitter.

I concede using my Flickrstream is possibly a bit random, but I figured that you just never know who might be looking to relocate and searching for pictures in the locality.

Free and easy then, but will it work?

I was astonished to get an email within hours of posting the ad - but opened it to see it was from another journalist wanting to know whether advertising on Facebook was working!

And to date, that’s my first and last inquiry.

So, it you’re reading this and would like to purchase a two-bedroomed genuinely spacious (trust me, I’m a journalist not an estate agent) apartment with views over the Peak District and just 12 miles from the centre of Manchester (in the UK) drop me an email to sarahhartley2004@yahoo.co.uk and we’ll come to some arrangement.

I’m doing a bit of research at the moment in the hope of learning from the experience of others when it comes to the work of video journalism.

By asking the question; “who in your organisation edits and processes video?” I hope to get some ideas on how to streamline the workflows of  busy newsrooms coping with this often time-consuming task.

It was interesting to see that the debate about where this activity sits is also featuring on David Dunkley Gyimah’s blog where he poses the question Digital Journalist versus Integrated Multimedia Video journalism which one’s the future?

And comments: “Some outfits however interpret digital journalism as video journalism so on a pedagogic level herein lies a crux.”

So far a few respondants to Twitter and Plurk have come back to me to say that the VJs themselves (generally print reporters who’ve been trained) now carry out the video editing and associated work to get their video reports online.

What’s your experience? Does your newsroom see it as the VJ’s job? Do you consider it as a production function and if so how do you manage that? Do you have a special unit which takes responsibility?

All responses gratefully reecive – by all means email me if you want to comment off-the-record. I won’t be blogging any individual’s experience (or naming, names) just seeking some wisdom!

Following on from the various comments I received yesterday, I’d just like to point out that the spokeswoman from illicitaffairs.com who shares my name is NOT me.

Yesterday’s PA story which made its way into the newsrooms of the country isn’t me moonlighting for websites of an adult nature.  Just so as you all know – I have no knowledge of the extra-marital activities of the UK.

A Manchester student has gone where no internet user wants to go – into the world of spam.
21-year-old Danni, who describes herself as a heavy user of the internet , was one of a team of five UK volunteers to take part in a global S.P.A.M (Spammed Persistently All Month) Experiment, in which fifty people from around the world surfed the web unprotected for 30 days.
The results are published today and show that most Spam is sent to carry advertising while financial spamming is on the increase.
Danni first became aware of the issue when she noticed more and more spam on her Facebook site and was intrigued to learn more about it.
She said: “I have learnt that you can’t trust anyone on the Internet. Spam creates a vicious circle of which, as consumers, we can gain no relief. I cannot believe that spammers encourage us to give over personal details by recalling a story of a girl who had no family or money in Africa. I think it’s sad that the spammers have got to the point where such messages are produced.”
During the experiment, the participants from ten countries received more than 104,000 spam emails, that’s 2,096 messages each, the equivalent of approximately 70 messages a day.
Participants from the UK received the fifth highest number of spam attracting 11,965 messages in total; 1,149 of them in the first week, the third highest first week spam count across the globe.
One UK participant, software developer Simon, received 5,414 spam emails – the fourth highest number of all the participants.
The results reveal residents in the UK are most likely to be targeted by the infamous ‘Nigerian’ spam emails – where someone supposedly from Nigeria contacts their target to let them know they are a beneficiary of a long lost relatives’ will in a bid to extract money from them. Participants in the UK received 23% of the global total of these emails. The UK participants also attracted a high level of spam of an ‘adult’ nature, coming second only to US with 18% of the emails received.
One of McAfee’s goals of the experiment was to highlight that spam is not only a nuisance but it also poses a very real threat and is showing no signs of slowing down.
Read Danni’s blog of the experience here.