Alex Harries's diary

Since the whole point of us Sabbs having a presence on the front page of UPSU.net is to let the students of Portsmouth know what we're up to, this is a (slightly edited) version of the report us Sabbs present to the Board of Trustees meeting, which takes place monthly at the Union and is used as a way of us all reporting on what's happening with the Union.

Although I'm sure not even the terminally bored would want to read this, here it is anyway. Enjoy! ;o) 

August report – Alex Harries, Media & Publications Orifice

My first three weeks in office have been a very busy period of work, with a lot of travelling around on training and our Sabbatical “tour”, and accompanied by an inevitably steep learning curve.

This month’s highlights include…

• Sabb tour: I think the whole team gained a good deal of insight into the workings of the differing ways in which Students’ Unions have to prioritise their resources and efforts as we visited Liverpool, Sheffield and Birmingham SUs. To this end, I believe the UPSU is very fortunate in a number of respects in terms of its successes and strengths as a Students’ Union,
• Communication in Action training: this was a good opportunity for me to learn some of the key aspects of my role as a communications officer, and to gain an insight into various methods of prioritising and focusing my workload. The course also gave me another opportunity to examine how other Students’ Unions various media operations have taken shape, and the reasons for their development, helping me to develop a clearer understanding of the UPSU’s media position and its relative strengths and weaknesses,
• LGBT society: I have been working closely with the Union’s LGBT society to determine whether our website can offer them the feature set they require in order to communicate with their members, and to allow them to provide an appropriate online web presence,
• Pure:FM society: the Union’s student radio society are in the process of re-branding, involving a change of logo and online presentation. I have been focusing on working as closely with them as possible to ensure their work is completed on time in order for them to be a fully-functioning arm of UPSU Media in time for the start of the year,
• UPSU.net: I have spent some time this month further developing the Union’s website presence, with major updates to a number of pages including the Get Involved and sports clubs homepages in order to provide a clearer and better-advertised service in these areas. I hope to be able to continue this hard work in time for the Union’s major areas to be highly presentable and content-rich in time for the start of our Freshers’ marketing phase, beginning around mid-September,
• Media Executive: discussions have taken place with the Sabbatical team and trustees about the benefits and need for a Media Executive to lend direction and guidance to the Union’s media presence. Having discussed this at length, I am confident that the introduction of a Media Exec can bring a powerful and tangible benefit to the Students’ Union’s presence both on campus and to wider audiences, and will be working hard to realise the exec committee as early within the academic year as possible,
• News: I have also spent some time on finding ways in which students and staff (at the Union and University) alike can quickly and easily submit news to the Union, to allow a greater focus on news-led media to develop at the Union. We can now boast a very simple news system which allows even the least experienced members of the Union’s contributors to create news articles on the UPSU.net website to a presentable standard, and will be creating documentation and publicising this system further during the run-up to the start of the academic year,
• Media Review: the often-spoken about Media Review pr...
  
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A few days ago I looked downwards and had to lean over my ever-growing gut to see what shoes I had on (flip-flops, of course), so yesterday I decided to make an effort to start getting fit. In all fairness, Ed & Rep Sabb Andy Machin was also starting his training regime, so I've really just stolen his idea. Given how much I smoke, I decided cycling might be better than running for my knees and pride (since collapsing in a crying heap wheezing for breath before I get to the end of my road is ... well, rubbish).

So, yesterday was cycling day, and pelting off down the seafront for a sprint/cruise/sprint session was going fine until My New Best Mate decided to pull out right in front of me in his shiny new BMW while following his mate (also in a BMW) out of a side road. Cue the only perfectly-formed string of expletives I've ever shouted at anyone in my life without a rehearsal; his face was a picture. So was mine, I imagine....

Today was spent wheezing up and down the local swimming pool with Andy, and since I was late (as always), he'd done 32("-ish") lengths by the time I'd done 1. I managed 11 and decided to call it a day before I drowned - something tells me I need a bit more commitment here...

Meanwhile, back at work, I've been getting more than a little twitchy, thanks to a combination of some extra-potent filter coffee and a backlog of e-mails and to-dos which I'll probably be working on until midnight tonight. I've also been trying to tie up a number of loose ends left over from last year's web work, and get some new projects rolling, with the end result that I've been sending out literally hundreds of e-mails to my unfortunate colleagues, several of whom have now no doubt put me on their junk e-mail list, so this (from the BBC News Magazine) made me grin a bit today...

Anyway, there's no real point to all this rambling, but I guess I ought to mention what I've been up to over the last couple of weeks, since that is (so I'm told) the reason for this blog...

NUS Communication In Action training, Loughborough Uni

Interesting and good fun, and I think I picked up a load of very good ideas. The last day included a debate over how much control the Union's executive should exert over its media, i.e. should the Sabbs have the right to, for example, veto something they don't like? How about something they know is libellous? Illegal?

On the other hand, how much right should the Union's media - for example, the student newspaper/magazine - have to say what it likes, and to ignore the wishes of the exec?

This generated a lot of debate, but (imvho) I suspect in practise that the media should be allowed to write whatever it likes - within some bounds of reason I won't claim to know as intimately as our more experienced staff do, but also that the Sabbs - who have been elected by the whole student body to represent their views and needs - should also have the ability to have items published as long as it's in the student body's best interests.

As always, it's a bit of a balancing act...

Scouts' Jamboree, Essex

I was also shipped off to the Scouts' Centennial Jamboree by Making Waves, a PR company who do a lot of work with students, to do a spot of reporting on the event. Of course, not actually being a journalist of any shape or flavour, I felt like a total fraud all weekend, but managed to write copious pages of notes and will hopefully be able to write My First Feature with the results.

While I was there I also met a lot of the Sabbs who are heading off to Ibiza to promote the About 535 more words in this entry