Hello hello! Sorry I’ve been such a slacker on the blogging front lately – my laptop has been taken off to be repaired (and my god it needed it) so I’ve been left to do battle with the painfully slow desktop computer! This week at Journalist Works, we went off to Lewes Crown Court. Crown…
Author: Kayleigh Tanner
I am a writer and a journalist and I love all things creative, black cherries, the crisp autumn, perfume, garden centres and going places. I sometimes write about these things. I'm a nice person.
Summer Sun(day)
Hello! WHAT is going on with this weather? My body simply cannot compute this temperature. After the wettest April on record, we’ve been thrust into this searing heat day after day! Insanity! I spent this afternoon on the beach with Shopping Saviour’s Rachel and some frozen yogurt, tutting over the ridiculous amount of people slathering on…
How to learn shorthand in six weeks
Hello! Here it is, the shorthand post I’ve been promising! As you may recall, I’ve already posted about shorthand, ten days after starting the course. Now here we are, six short weeks into the course, and we’re finishing the theory of Teeline this week. Yes, that’s right, by Friday we’ll know all there is to…
Off-duty journalists
Hello! Sometimes, we trainee journalists need to chill out and put the brakes on the constant bombardment of work work work. So, yesterday, a group of us went to see The Ladyboys of Bangkok! It was so much fun, and absolutely hilarious. We got right into it (you can’t not really), and we were sat…
A variety pack of thoughts
Hello! Some fun news today is that my studentbeans.com article is now live! It’s all about some new ideas for toast-toppers. I’m doing a fair bit for the student web world at the moment, what with being a studentbeans contributor, and I’m also signed up to write for Kettle, and I am also in the process of…
Tanner’s Top Tips for Telling Tales
Hello! Today’s entry combines information I’ve learnt on my NCTJ course so far, particularly the Reporting module, and little nuggets I’ve picked up from books and the internet, about how to write a good news article. I don’t profess at all to be any kind of expert on the matter – I am merely acting…
Burnout
HELLO Sorry about the shouty greeting, but I need a way to release my stress. The past couple of days have been a bit mental. I’ve had a ‘take-home exam’ to do for uni (Syntax, the worst subject ever…), so I’ve been stressed up to my eyeballs. If you’re unfamiliar with the term ‘take-home exam’…
Bank Holiday Bunday
Hello! Today, I am sporting my Bank Holiday Bunday bun. It’s something I put in when I know I won’t have to see anyone. Or sometimes when I will have to, because I like to embarrass the people I’m with. Sometimes, it is branded ‘Partybun’, when I am going to a party and want a bun. Today,…
Minor Success Saturday
Hello! Just a quick one to report a couple of minor journalism-related successes that have popped up today! Firstly, Underground Magazine, a London-based satire magazine, has invited me to join its writers’ article discussion group, so I’ll get the chance to possibly have my own satirical pieces published if they like them enough. SECONDLY, a travel…
Freaky Friday
Hello! I must be honest: there’s nothing freaky about this Friday at all. It’s Normal Friday if anything. I just wanted an alliterative title. Soz. SO, we’ve just finished week 3 of the NCTJ. My mind is just slush at the moment, after a particularly intense couple of days of shorthand. This week, we’ve been…
Time’s a-tickin’
Hello! Here’s a shocker for you: I’M REALLY REALLY BUSY. I’m trying to finish off my Sociolinguistics coursework (should’ve done it weeks ago, but my excuse is that I’m a student), write my studentbeans.com piece, finish off the feature I want to send to a magazine and also keep on top of life in general….
The diary of a melodramatic 16-year-old
Hello! This is a special entry. It doesn’t have much (anything) to do with journalism, but for my English A-level coursework, I analysed a diary entry from the book Cringe. I recently found my own diary from when I was 16, and my god, I need to punish myself for being such an appalling person…
Time for Teeline
Hello! The shorthand post has arrived! Shorthand is terrifying, at first. Even once you’ve mastered the alphabet, and the commonly used words, the second you’re given a passage to write in shorthand, it’s heart-stoppingly freaky. ‘I… will… be- WAIT SLOW DOWN OH GOD WHAT IS THIS TORRENT OF LANGUAGE COMING MY WAY OH MAY THE…
Weekend workhorse
Hello! I’ve had a pretty busy weekend. I’ve been chasing stats and stories, and I’ve managed to conduct two phone interviews. I think we actually have training for phone interviews coming up soon, but they went fine anyway, haha. I’m really feeling the pressure now, from trying to finish my uni work (one essay down,…
Vox pop, pop, pop music
Hello! I’m now at the end of my first week of training. I can’t believe how fast it went actually… Today we did some vox pops in town. Lots of people see the notepad and cross the road or speed up their walk to avoid you. My piece of advice for vox pops would be…
Learnin’ and… journin’…
Hello! I’m almost at the end of my first week of being a trainee journalist and I love it! I’ve finished lectures for the week, and yesterday we started our modules in Public Affairs (all about central and local government, the monarchy, how things are funded, how the country functions…) and Media Law. Media Law…
A learning curve
Hello! I am now officially a trainee journalist! I started the course yesterday, and I met my coursemates and we did some general admin. Then we had a reporting lecture, where we had to come up with potential sources for our allocated patches of Brighton, and then practice writing a short news story. Then we…
T’was the night before Coursemas
Hello! WELL, it’s the evening before I start the course. I’ve been slowly trying to work through the essays I’ve been putting off over Easter through the day, and to be honest I still have a hell of a lot to do. This week is going to be pretty intense, as I still have three…
Back to school
Hello! So, this is the last weekend of my ‘summer holidays’. My uni course, bar a couple of last essays, finished at the end of March, so effectively the last few weeks have been my summer. I’m intrigued to find out how I’ll adapt to 9-5 days, but I think it’ll be good for me…
Gloomy Monday
Hello, It’s a typically grey, drizzly Bank Holiday Monday, and it’s a week today until I start my journalism course. I’m slightly terrified. I’ve never done anything 9-5 before, especially not entire weeks… especially not like 15 entire weeks. I think it’ll be good for me, insofar as it’ll prepare me for the real working…
A whistlestop tour of Copenhagen
Hej hej! I have, of course, returned from Copenhagen! It was fantastic, despite the wind and the grit (more on those later) and I’m back in one (slighty whiplashed) piece, which is a plus. So, this entry is dedicated to a travel journalism piece about the trip. We arrived around midday last Wednesday, to a…
Hello Europe, Copenhagen calling
Hello, and yes, the title is indeed Eurovision-inspired, Tomorrow, at the painful time of 5:30am, I will be waking up to go to Copenhagen! Therefore you won’t be hearing from me until Monday, when I will do a writeup of the trip, which is of course, good practice for travel journalism (the ultimate dream, pretty…
The British National Party: Who are you?
The British National Party is undoubtedly controversial. Throughout the 2010 general election, Nick Griffin became a widely hated figure in the British political system, appearing on a particularly memorable episode of Question Time, where he was met with contempt from audience members throughout the show, and defaced images of the party leader’s face appeared across…
Absent note
Hello! Sorry I’ve been MIA recently – had a bit of a technical issue earlier this week (by which I mean my laptop charger quite literally fell apart, and a certain useless computer company have been particularly sluggish in sending me a replacement.) I’m back home now though, so my online presence has been restored!…
What’s up with Wood Green?
For those of you who aren’t aware, I’ve been living just off Turnpike Lane in Harringay, North London for the past six months, in a student house. Not a lot of people know where it is, until you meet their furrowed brow with ‘It’s near where the riots started last year.’ It always gets a…
Va Va Voom: A Beginner’s Guide to Sports Car Racing
Alright, I confess. Prior to this interview, I knew quite literally not one thing about sports car racing. Apart from, perhaps, that sports cars are similar to normal cars, except they are constructed a bit differently to allow for optimal racing prowess. So, in a sense, speaking to Simon Clark was an exercise in education,…
In the pipeline
Hello, I spent quite a while last night tirelessly emailing potential future interviewees. It’s quite a varied mix, so even if I managed to snare a couple of them for an interview, I could have some really interesting posts coming up. Currently I am working on a post where I have interviewed Simon Clark about…
A roving reporter is born?
Hello, Not a huge amount to ‘report’, if you will (or if you won’t; it’s just tough, because you’ve read it now and there’s no way to unread… unless it’s an email, but even then, you’re not actually UNREADING the email… I digress) from the past couple of days in terms of journalism-related matters. As I understand…
Dulces sueños, second language shirkers!
In 2004, the decision was taken by the government to remove the compulsory status of foreign language GCSEs. Although this move may have left some schoolchildren jumping for joy when they could leave their un deux trois behind for good, it wasn’t necessarily a fantastic way of quashing the stereotype of the ‘Brit on holiday’,…
An interview with Sophia Danielsson-Waters: Around the world in not-80 days
It’s one of those things a lot of people give as a response to the age-old question, ‘What would you do if you won the lottery?’ It usually comes just after ‘I’d buy a mansion with tennis courts and its own zoo on my own private island’ and just before ‘I’ve kind of always wanted…
This is Art Attack: Neil Buchanan interview
Hello! Today’s news is that my Neil Buchanan interview has made it onto Pi Media’s website: http://www.pimedia.org.uk/features/art-attack-an-interview-with-neil-buchanan.html There is a chance it could also make it into the print copy of the newspaper, rather than the magazine, but this all depends on whether a). There is space left for it and b). Whether an interview…
Exciting news du jour!
Having had one of my articles in the last issue of UCL’s Pi Magazine, I thought I’d give it another shot this month. My idea was to get in touch with a staple of 1990s children’s television and find out what they’re up to these days. The person I chose was Art Attack’s finest, Neil…
Give us, this day, our daily soup (du journalism)
Hello! My name is Kayleigh Tanner, I’m 20, and I am half student, half soon-to-be trainee journalist. I’m at University College London, in my second year of a Linguistics degree, and in just over a month I will be returning to my hometown of Brighton to embark upon my journalism journey (journ-ey-lism?), where I will…
Hello Hygge 