At the Bedford Clanger we want to encourage as many people as possible to become ‘citizen journalists’ during our Portas Pilot Town journey. We want you to video, photograph, interview, blog, tweet and generally tell the world about what we’re doing in Bedford to help revitalise our town centre.
Whether you’re a student or retired, a business person or unemployed, a stay-at-home mum or house-husband, we’d love you to get involved!
We can’t do this without you and there’s … ABSOLUTELY NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY!
You’ll have the opportunity to take part in free training sessions and meet like-minded Bedfordians eager to record the events, actions, successes, failures, highs and lows of the Portas project.
Bedford Portas Pilot, The Bedford Clanger and Media Trust would like to invite you to join us on THURSDAY 11TH OCTOBER at either 4.45pm or 7.30pm at the South Bank Arts Centre, Bedford College to find out more.
To book a FREE place at this event, please email your details to: portaspilotbedford@gmail.com specifying if you would like to attend the 4.45pm or 7pm session.
Background
Bedford has been selected as one of the 12 initial Portas Pilot Towns. The aim of the Town Team is to utilise the £51,000 funding to encourage new BUSINESSES to take premises in the town centre, to provide training and guidance to new and existing retailers and to engage with Bedfordians to collaborate on how the town centre can be improved.
Media Trust is a charity that works with charities and not-for-profit organisations to empower them to have a voice and to be heard through the media. Media Trust’s newsnet initiative is championing citizen media/citizen journalism and Bedford is a beacon town for the project. Following the success of the Olympic torch relay in Scotland (#citizenrelay), our aim is to work with Media Trust to create a similar network of reporters, bloggers, videographers etc… under a common ‘hashtag’ across all traditional and social media to document this extraordinary journey that Bedford and the Town Team are on.
#citizenrelay – A Template
University of West of Scotland’s #citizenrelay project, which has inspired the #citizenportas idea, brought together a number of partners, including Media Trust and Leicester’s Citizens’ Eye, to train citizen journalists to capture the stories of the Olympic Torch as it passed through communities across Scotland.
At four key cities across Scotland Media Trust’s newsnet worked with UWS and Citizens’ Eye to deliver training to some 60 citizen journalists to enable them to utilise a range of free tools from video to Twitter and Audioboo to report on the progress of the torch relay.
Training enabled potential citizen reporters to understand how they could produce short reports, often using nothing more that a mobile “smart” phone, that reflected the community perspective on the Olympic flame’s journey, capturing the sights and sounds that would otherwise have gone unnoticed or unreported.
The training sessions were practical and focused on helping people to grasp simple interview techniques, how to prepare and create an interview without the need to edit. For the #citizenportas project Media Trust’s newsnet aims to replicate this training and to help those wanting to play a part understand how they can capture the stories that will form part of the Portas Pilot in Bedford.
Over the course of the training people will learn how to prepare for and conduct interviews, whether on video or audio, how to shoot video interview using a Smart phone (iPhone’s or Android’s), and how to upload video to You Tube and Audio to Audioboo.
#citizenportas – A Vision
It is of the utmost importance to the Bedford Town Team to involve as many people as possible in the project. It is also paramount that we remain as open and transparent about our plans as possible.
It is with this in mind that we want to encourage a wide range of people to become citizen reporters on the events, actions, successes, failures, highs and lows of the Portas project.
Whether it’s out and about interviewing shoppers about their view of the High Street, to filming focus groups as they discuss specific elements of Bedford Portas, we want you to be involved every step of the way. Who knows, you could be selected to interview a government minister, or could be part of the #citizenportas film crew filming the Channel 4 film crew filming the town team? Or you could even put some questions to Mary herself.
The overall aim of #citizenportas is to amass documentary evidence charting all aspects of the project – on video, twitter, blogs, facebook and in The Bedford Clanger and other traditional media. This can then be used by future Portas Pilot town teams to learn from our experiences.
#citizenportas – A wider aim
It is our further aim to encourage all Portas Pilot towns to sign up the the #citizenportas initiative, providing nationwide coverage of all projects.
Bedford will be leading the way in citizen reporting of this exciting event. Join in so we can spread the word around the country.
