Thursday 10 January 2008

War, what is it good for? Jobs in journalism.

This week, my colleagues and I, studying journalism at Westminster University, have been up to our nipples in exam stress.

The tidemark of stress didn’t quite reach our necks and if I’m honest, only reached my nipples if I ducked down a bit.

Reporting week, as it is known, consists of only one exam in the traditional sense, which was on media law.



We spent the rest of the week turning over reports from surveys, speeches and press releases in a very short space of time.

The culminating event in all this occurred today and it involved a man from NATO fielding our questions about the deployment of peacekeeping troops to the conflict zone in Northland.

You may not have heard about the conflict in Northland and the current problems enforcing the arms embargo on the Jumblez insurgents but don’t worry, that’s because it’s all made up.

Confused?

Each year, NATO runs exercises to train its personnel.

The exercises use hypothetical scenarios, occurring in fictitious, invented war zones.

These are big training operations, using around 30 vessels, some of which are huge warships, with helicopters buzzing around and everybody getting very excited indeed.

It sounds like the kind of thing that an 11 year old billionaire would organise.

Anyway, to make the situation more like a real war zone, they take 5 or 6 student journalists with them to report on events.

Today’s exam was our chance to impress the guy that decides which students will go on the exercises - Lt Cmdr Rupert Nichol.

He answered our questions in a role play about the deployment of NATO troops in a prelude to the training exercise, which will run in June.

One former student, Tamer Al Mishal, who got involved in the NATO training, went straight into the job of Gaza correspondent for the BBC after he left Westminster.

So, reporting week is now over and we go out on work placements on Monday to do some real journalism, by which I mean, making coffee.

This blog can also be seen at www.thewordfromwestminster.blogspot.com

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