Alex Harries's diary

I've just come back from Ravelin Park, where SADO Ben Norman and RAG bods Jenny Leggott and Sarah Blatchford have been bedding down for the night with only cardboard, damp sleeping bags and tarpaulins (err, and each other...) for warmth.

No, they're not trying to recreate a summer picnic atmosphere - not at this time of year, anyway. The event is the University-organised "Sleepout", which has been planned to raise awareness for the homeless population of Portsmouth.

There were around 25 bods milling around when I left, including three Purple Door staff (one of which is Alice Hickman, the University's Volunteer and Work Experience Officer and Ben Norman's oppo, who I may have met before...), two security guards, and a full tea urn.

It looks like the choice spot for the night will be under a pair of large tarpaulins which have been erected between two trees in a loose-but-functional impersonation of a giant tent. The area surrounding the shelter was intertwined with the string holding the shelter up, leaving the whole area slightly resembling a giant spider's lair... Ewww, spiders...

Hopefully everyone will have a fun - if chilly - night and get some sleep into the bargain. This kind of event is good (as long as it serves its purpose to raise awareness for the homeless, naturally) and it would be great to see the University collaborating with the Union more often to publicise such events. Pugwash News is always available to help, of course.

Ms Blatchford has my camera at the moment, so once it's back I'll get some photos online. In the meantime, look out for pics and even (possibly) some footage on BBC South Today and in the Times Higher Education supplement - when the Uni want to promote something, they don't 'arf go for it... :o)

Find out more on the University's website.

I'm just grabbing two minutes' free time between meetings, so I thought I'd put a quick update on here about UPSU.net, which has seen a lot of new things going on over the last month or so, not least the new JobShop (which I'm going to do a full write-up about shortly).

The UPSU.net homepage has had a bit of a reshuffle; UPSU and BBC news headlines have been condensed into column 3, and column 4 has been freed up to make way for the forthcoming "latest photo galleries", reprioritised "forthcoming events listing"  and new "Social:Life" boxes, and - most importantly - a shiny new "JobShop" box has been added below blogs and forums in column 2, with the latest jobs and a mini tag cloud listing.

This should pave the way for the forthcoming news section reshuffle, which is proving to be a bit of a headache to work out at the moment, because it's very hard to find a balance between presenting a unified news section with navigation based on the content - for example news, features, reviews, etc - and a news section which presents articles based on which printed publication (or other media area - for example Pure FM) they're from.

Time to see what the experts would do, methinks... ;o)

Ttfn - Al 

Radio 1's Newsbeat have responded on the BBC's Editors' blog over their coverage - and Radio 1's handling - of the banning and subsequent un-banning of the word "Faggot" from Fairytale Of New York, and how Newsbeat's coverage may have triggered the public backlash against the "overzealously PC" attitude of the radio station.

The interesting aspect for us at the students' union is how Newsbeat works within Radio 1, as well as the BBC's non-profit objectives which aren't entirely dissimilar to the union's.

Newsbeat operates as a news team within Radio 1 - vaguely similar, perhaps, to the way Pugwash News operates within UPSU. Newsbeat's coverage of Radio 1's censorship has been objective and arguably fair - entirely as any quality journalism should be - but the issue here is that, in effect, one part of Radio 1 has caused a backlash against another part of the same organisation for its handling of a potentially sensitive matter.

Within the editorial teams responsible for the Pugwash, Pugwash News and UPSU News output, discussions have often centred around the "what if" scenario of whether and how the Union's media should publicise a story which levels criticism against the Union. Questions have ranged from the broader "can we criticise the Union?", "should we criticise the Union?", and "if we do, how would we go about it?", to some occasionally hilarious potential (and entirely theoretical) scenarios which I obviously can't relate here without libelling myself...

Rod McKenzie, editor of Radio 1's Newsbeat, writes on the BBC Editors' blog: '[this issue] raises some interesting dilemmas for us though: without Radio 1's 10 million plus audience Newsbeat wouldn't exist. But what happens when the station itself IS the news? Does this cramp our journalistic vigour or make us feel we shouldn't take on "the mother ship”? I don't think it does - nor should it ever do so. If we argue that our job is to report the news without fair or favour for other organisations, why should Radio 1 be exempt from that rule? I think pulling our punches would be failing our listeners - Radio 1's listeners. That's just my view.'

Apologies for the lazy journalism - quoting such a large chunk of Mr McKenzie's words - but that paragraph pretty much summarises the way student media should act towards its parent institutions, at least at Portsmouth, but in the wider context of student journalism as well. Our editorial teams should never feel that can't report on something they feel is in the interest of their readers simply because their story might level criticism at the Union or the University.

The counter to this argument, of course, is that this freedom can only work as long as the student journalists maintain a professional approach. Anyone with common sense might wonder whether, on hearing about a story which might criticise them, the Union might feel compelled to "pull" - cancel - the article, preventing it from being published.

This is where we come to the grey area which I think is somewhat unique to student media: the Union should never be allowed to prevent the publication in its media of an objective, balanced and fair article which levels criticism at the Union, but it would be remiss of the Union to play little or no active role in ensuring the content produced in its student media was legally and morally acceptable.

This balancing act is a relatively new consideration for student media in Portsmouth as, until the start of this year,...

I've been skyving from work again, and while I was catching up on some blogs I should read more often but don't, I spotted on Derivadow.com - a blog written by one of the tech bods involved in the BBC's new media projects, e.g. the iPlayer - a post about Flickr's new Places application, which basically gives each place on earth it's own homepage listing photos which have been "Geo-tagged" in that location.

The interesting part for me, apart from a very random camel, was how Derivadow gets so excited about URLs and making good, easy-to-remember web addresses which make sense.

This is something I've been working on for the last couple of days with our new JobShop application to make sure we can maximise the site's ease of navigation, and to make sure we can get the most out of Google's search index of UPSU.net, all of which is really important if the UPSU JobShop is going to remain a primary choice for students seeking work during their degrees in the face of all of the competition out there.

... I was going to give an example of some of the URLs, but even I have limits to how geeky I'm prepared to be... 

As a student looking for a job, I wanted three things: I wanted a job which paid a decent wage and wasn't so mind-numbingly dull that I wanted to throw myself off a tall building, I wanted to be able to easily and quickly find jobs of the aforementioned type without breaking too much of a sweat, and I wanted it now, if not sooner.

In redesigning the JobShop website - in fact, in completely re-writing the JobShop application from the ground up - we can focus on making sure students who haven't already got an account on UPSU.net can see what vacancies we have, find out whether it's the right job for them (even if it is "just a part-time job to get you through Uni"), and to make sure that searching for these vacancies is as simple and intuitive as possible. In other words, we have the opportunity to make the JobShop as attractive and easy a service as possible for students to use.

The UPSU JobShop has one thing going for it which few if any other job agencies can offer, and that's the fact that companies can advertise their vacancies for free, and don't have to pay anything to the Union (although there are a number of eagle-eyed checks in place to make sure the companies are all above board) - the JobShop is a completely free service for employers and students alike, and is without doubt one of the most valuable services the Union can offer to any student.

For that reason, if nothing else, it's really important that the end product - the new JobShop application - really makes the most of what the JobShop can offer, and does a great job of showing off all the opportunities available.

... which worries me a bit, since I'm the numpty doing the coding! No pressure or anything, then... ;o)

/al 

I know I should be doing coursework, but while doing some research on the BBC's Access 2.0 accessibility blog for my final year embarrassment project, I realised that the alternative high-contrast stylesheets I put together to provide a text-only version of the UPSU.net homepage could be very easily rolled out to all the other pages on UPSU.net with a couple of simple code changes.

So, now, if you're a Firefox (or similar browser) user, you can change the stylesheets on-the-fly by going to the "View" menu, and choosing a different page style - 2 or 3. Layout 2 - light text on black - is designed to be easier for partially-sighted and dyslexic visitors to use, while style 3 - dark on white - should make also make viewing easier for visitors with certain requirements.

Naturally, this isn't a complete solution to our commitments to providing greater accessibility on UPSU.net, but it's a short step from here to enabling every page to respect the settings of the homepage's high-contrast choices, and also to allow visitors to choose a different level of accessibility as they browse around the site.

One day, maybe, I'd love to see UPSU.net making use of the accessibility features the BBC are trialling on their homepage layout customisation tool.

As always, I'm keen to hear feedback from everyone who visits the site, although I'd much prefer to read the reasoned and well thought-out criticisms over the ranty, angry comments (but anything's better than the tumbleweed of a quiet blog... ;o), so please let me know your thoughts on accessibility, or UPSU.net in general.

/al - I need to get out just a teeeeeny bit more....