November 2011 - Patrick Chalmers

Bragg channels Guthrie into Occupy London

Posted on 25th November 2011

Learning how to do live TV interviewing with visionOntv is a laugh, you never know who might walk into their instant pop-up studios. I found myself interviewing the songwriter Billy Bragg this week down at the newly squatted Bank of Ideas, having dropped by to lend a hand. Bragg is a veteran of political activism […]

Not the nine o’clock news

Posted on 24th November 2011

It’s not the 9 o’clock news but then that’s probably a good thing. Below you can watch three no-edit videos I produced as part of a mobile phone training run by visionOntv for citizen journalists. It was part of a whole series of events being run at the Bank of Ideas, a building that used […]

Occupy your smart phone

Posted on 19th November 2011

You may have guessed I’m obsessed by democracy and journalism. I’ve read a lot about both and done a lot of the second. Journalism that helps improve democracy is what really gets me going. Not fake democracy, the odd meaningless election, but real democracy. That would mean people having direct and ongoing power over their […]

Hackers and hacks – dangerous liaison, lost in translation or the odd couple?

Posted on 6th November 2011

It’s not an obvious union but like all the best ones, it could be a winner for both partners. As a long-time hack journalist I have been a distant admirer of computer programmers – hackers, coders, geeks, call them what you will. Not so much for their coding skills, of which I am an enthusiastic […]

Tired of the TV news? Think you could do better yourself?

Posted on 5th November 2011

If you have ever dreamed of making TV news rather than just watching it, here’s some good news: it’s not nearly as hard, or as expensive, as you think. I am at the Mozilla Festival 2011 in London this weekend, a meeting of hacks and hackers working on media freedom and the web. Rather than […]

Media, freedom and the web – 2011 Mozilla Festival

Posted on 3rd November 2011

I’m going to this event on Saturday and Sunday in London’s North Greenwich – looks excellent. The aim? To assemble Open web developers, journalists and educators to reinvent media on the web. Not too ambitious then. Rather than just consuming and participating, I also plan volunteering with the prodigious VisionOntv crowd, interviewing people and reporting […]