Creativity never stops, sometimes it’s just less visible

This year has been quiet on the personal production front which is mostly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It instigated a monumental shift to mostly online for delivering multimedia journalism education. This provided some opportunities to think about how to communicate learning in a non face-to-face setting.

As someone who loves digital content, the challenge was both creative and satisfying. In the space of six months I produced:

A podcast series examining the role of journalism in society that included original interviews with industry figures. My colleague and I put special emphasis on covering the history of radical journalism in Manchester, ethics and impartiality, the uneasy relationship between journalism and social change incl. Black Lives Matter and the climate crisis, the problems with diversity in the industry and how to effectively cover politics.

A podcast series that accompanied MA journalism students as they prepared their final projects. This helped them think about original news stories to investigate in depth, producing content for an audience and market, choosing between research dissertations, audio, video or feature writing, and designing their own projects.

A series of engaging short form videos guiding students through producing their own photo journalism, websites, audio and video. It was a great opportunity to focus on women photojournalists too.

I did manage two projects for a client. These were to:

Edit a book entitled ‘The gift of how not to be a charity dickhead this Christmas’ which was part memoir and part guide to giving better. The author wrote the book in two weeks so it was a whirlwind to get it edited, formatted and on sale in the lead up to the giving season. It’s a brilliant read and you can buy it here.

Create a website that profiled her as a textile artist who uses traditional African weaving techniques to tell authentic stories in her cloth. This extended to supporting her put together an accompanying online exhibition that focused on the idea of victory. You can find Ubuntu Fibres here.

Creative work never stops. Sometimes, it’s just less visible.