Multimedia journalism personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I got interested in journalism through arguing about it. My grandfather reads two newspapers a day and takes issue with almost everything in them, so Sunday afternoons at his flat usually involve him pushing a page towards me and asking why a story was written that way. Trying to answer him properly sent me to books, starting with Nick Davies's Flat Earth News, which made me think about how much of the news cycle is shaped by pressure of time and cheap copy rather than deliberate bias. Later I read Alan Rusbridger's Breaking News, which was useful for a different reason: it showed how quickly the working habits of journalists have changed, and how unsettled the funding of reporting still is. I do not find that discouraging. It suggests that people entering the industry now will have to be able to report, film, edit and publish, and that the skills are worth learning carefully rather than picking up piecemeal. What draws me specifically to multimedia journalism is that I already work in more than one format and can see how differently each one behaves. A written piece lets me set out a sequence of facts and attribute them cleanly. A ninety-second video carries tone, place and voice that writing struggles to reach, but it hides its sources unless I am deliberate about showing them. Audio sits somewhere between the two, and I have noticed that people speak far more freely when there is no camera. I want to be taught the law, ethics and verification behind all of this properly, because the technical side can be self-taught to a point while the judgement cannot. I am also interested in local reporting, since much of what my grandfather complains about is the absence of any coverage of the places he knows.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A levels feed directly into this course, though not always in the ways I expected. English Language has been the most useful: analysing register, nominalisation and how agency can be hidden in a sentence has changed how I read headlines, and it has made my own writing tighter. I now notice when a passive construction is doing the work of avoiding a name. History has taught me to handle evidence and to keep track of where a claim came from. For my coursework I looked at the reporting of the 1926 General Strike in the British press, working with digitised newspaper pages, and it was genuinely difficult to separate reporting from advocacy, which felt like a useful problem to have wrestled with. Media Studies gave me the vocabulary for institutions, regulation and audience, and my production unit was a short documentary about the closure of a bus route in my area, for which I storyboarded, interviewed three passengers and edited to a fixed running time. Handing something in that had to work as a finished piece rather than an essay was a shift in mindset. Outside my subjects I completed an online introduction to data journalism over last summer and learned enough spreadsheet work to clean a messy dataset of local council spending, which taught me how much of that job is unglamorous tidying before any story appears. I also attend a fortnightly college debating society, which has improved my ability to ask a follow-up question rather than accepting the first answer someone gives me.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

For the past two years I have run the college's news account with three other students. We publish short videos and written notices about open evenings, sports fixtures and the occasional grievance, such as the state of the common room. I learned quickly that people are more careful about what they say once they know it will be published, and that a quote read back to someone before posting saves a lot of trouble afterwards. We agreed a simple rule that we would not film anyone who had not been asked, which sounds obvious but needed enforcing. My uncle manages a Sunday league football team and I have edited their match highlights for three seasons, usually from footage shot on a phone on a tripod. It is repetitive work, but it has made me competent in editing software, taught me to record decent audio in wind, and forced me to think about pacing: nobody watches four minutes of a goalless draw. I also write short match reports for the team's page, which has to be honest without embarrassing anyone. On Saturdays I work in a garden centre café, taking orders and clearing tables. It is not journalistic, but it has given me practice at talking to people I have nothing in common with and reading when someone wants a conversation and when they want to be left alone, which I suspect matters for interviewing. I have learned to work steadily through a rush without panicking, and I am reliable, because a rota depends on it. At home I help my grandfather with his shopping and appointments, and I have started recording some of his stories about working at the Longbridge plant, partly for the family and partly because editing an hour of unstructured speech into something listenable is the hardest thing I have tried. It has shown me how much of audio journalism is patient structuring rather than good luck with a microphone. I would like to keep building those skills on a course where the reporting is taken seriously and the deadlines are real.

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