Will the 'naked rambler' do time forever?

According to the newspapers today the naked rambler, Stephen Gough, faces life in prison if he continues to appear nude in public.

The 50 year old is famous for his two "boots only" treks from John O'Groats to Land's End. During his first hike he was arrested 15 times and spent 140 nights in jail.

The famous naturist was yesterday found guilty of causing a breach of peace by walking naked after being released from Perth prison in December after finishing a 12 month sentence for the same offence.

He has been warned that he will be jailed every time he steps out of prison with no clothing on- which at the moment is one big vicious cycle. Thus posing the threat that he will remain in jail forever. An offer to send him home in exchange for him to put clothes on was presented to him but he has rejected it stating "this is about individual freedom".

But is it right to continue placing someone so adamant to walk around naked back in to prison when it will achieve nothing? There is no law against being nude in public in the UK and to continue putting someone who poses no real harm back in to prison is only costing the tax payer more money. So far placing Gough in prison has cost the taxpayer £200,000 and it is set to rise. Also it must surely be taking up a space that could be taken by someone who has committed a more serious crime?

I can't say that I would personally be offended if I was to see the naked rambler walking past me. But I suppose a person with children may think differently. But then what is it that they're really seeing? Just a naked man- surely something they would see or learn about in sex education?

Yes I can understand that breaking the law needs to result in punishment and if they let one person off then they open the flood gates to letting other people get away with things. But is nudity really such a crime when really it's just all about being natural? It's not as if he is flashing his sexual parts randomly at people or being perverted about it; its not anything sexual.

An extremely thought provoking debate between law, the ideals of a naturist and what's truly acceptable within our culture and society.

'Wanted'....or not

Somewhere between the snow and the over indulgence of chocolate during the Christmas holiday I got very bored and was somehow talked in to seeing a film I knew I already hated- 'Wanted'. OK so hatred is a pretty harsh word and there are most definitely worse films out but this one just seemed to irritate me so much that I feel extremely foolish for watching it a second time round!

Sure if you like the whole Hollywood bullshit narrative and characters then go right ahead and watch it but for me it all seemed so "samey" (can you tell I'm good at English?) and laughable.

We have the stereotypical wimpy guy character (played by James McAvoy) whose life amounts to nothing and then is changed in some dramatic way and he decides to grow a pair and become someone.

Then off course the sexy woman with attitude (played by Angelina Jolie who doesn't amount to much more than a skeleton in this one) with a stereotypical nick name such as "fox" who pulls these "I'm a hard ass bitch with a gun" faces about a million times throughout particularly when bending bullets. ha.

We have the classic older wise guy character who holds all the power and thus putting him in the easy position to screw everyone over in the end (played by Morgan Freeman).

There are also other samey characters along the way like the hard guy who likes to punch McAvoy's character in the face and calls this training and the Russian who likes vodka and explosives.

The main stupidity of the story lies in the idea of what drives this team of assassins. That is "the loom of fate". And from this Freeman's character can determine who is to be killed next just because "the loom of fate" dropped a stitch or two. There surely could have been a million other more believable and substantial methods that the writer could have chosen other than some sort of magical loom.

Of course lets not leave out the ridiculous idea that 'Fox' can drive a car with her legs whilst lying out on the bonnet shooting at the person behind and flip a car and land perfectly and drive off. Oh and as if bending bullets wasn't impressive enough she does it so well that she can kill everyone in a circle with a single bullet going through every one's skulls and finally in to her own! It's also worth noting that the bullet in the head is heavily focused on throughout the film and the makers have gone heavy on the CGI, forcing us to see every one's heads bursting open by each bullet with the splatter of blood, brains and bone. We get it- you know how to use a computer.

It isn't all bad and there are some watchable parts and twists and I'm sure Angelina showing her naked ass will keep a lot of male members engaged. But this is most definitely a film I will never watch again, no matter how boring the Christmas holidays are!

Law for Journalists Freedom of Information

The following notes have been taken from "McNae's Essential Law for Journalists" (20th Ed)

Freedom of Information Act (2000)

The Freedom of Information Act was a New Labour policy objective and came in to effect in 2005. This was the UK's first general right of access to information held by government departments and other public authorities in the UK. It makes it mandatory on a public authority to disclose whether or not it has the information being requested. However it isn't necessarily easy to use and a user of the Act must be prepared to argue for the 'public interest' justification for information to be shared.

The authorities must supply the information requested without any financial charge for finding and collating it; that is if meeting the request costs them no more than £600 (national government) or £450 (local councils & other types of authorities).

In total there are around 100,000 major and minor bodies in the public sector that are covered by the Act. However there are some that are exempt from the Act, meaning that they do not have to respond to a Freedom of Information request. These include the UK's security and intelligence agencies- MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Courts and tribunals are also exempt.

So how does it work? Well a 'public authority' must respond to the request within 20 days of receiving it; supplying the information or explaining why it cannot be supplied.

Reasons why information will NOT be supplied:

• The public authority does not hold the information in which case this should be made clear
• The request would exceed the cost limits (see above)
  
• The information is exempt under the Act e.g. the information is held in confidence or concerns national security

The motive of the request, however, should not play a part in the authority's decision on whether is can provide the information or not.

Section 16 of the Act requires public authorities to give someone who has requested or is proposing to request information "advice and assistance so far as it would be reasonable to expect the authority to do so".

They should tell you before you make the request what information, of the type that you want, is available. They should also give you guidance to avoid your request breaching the cost limit for such information to be provided without charge.

Some exemptions are absolute. The public authority doesn't have to give a reason for not disclosing the information other than stating that it is exempt.

Some exemptions are qualified meaning the public authority must give reasons and have applied the 'public interest test' to justify its refusal to provide information.

Public Interest Factors:

• Furthering the understanding and participation in the public debate of the day
• Promoting accountability and transparency in the spending of public money
• Allowing individuals and companies to understand decisions made by public authorities affecting their lives
• Bringing to light information affecting public health and safety.
  

WINOL - our progress so far!

Wow, two weeks worth of bulletins have gone by already! Well I'm sure you can tell from the lack of updating my blog that I've been swept off my feet with work so allow me to explain whats been going on....

WINOL- bulletin number two.

They main thing that sticks in my memory from this bulletin is the fact that I had to stand in as director because Leanne was unfortunately struck down with the flu! I was asked to do so with only a short amount of time remaining before the bulletin was due to be recorded and I had to say I was very nervous! I'd previously been the director for our news bulletins in year two but we had the luxury of three weeks to work on these!!!

Luckily the bulletin went well with only a couple of slip ups. I was quite happy with my performance but I could have improved it by using some of my time to ask the news team to describe the stories to me so I knew what we were working with. I also need to learn not to panic at times but I thought I remained fairly cool in the live bulletin- especially when we had a baby babbling away in the gallery just behind me!!!!

As I said the broadcast went well with the stories showing clear improvements from last week. Everyone worked well as a team and we were all happy with the results.


We were lucky to have Andy Steggall of Sky Sports and ITV to come and be our guest editor. He offered us some really good professional advice such as the need for our links to be longer and being aware of moving the guest from the set when we were live. He was really positive about our bulletin and I think he gave a good boost to the team's moral!

During this week I also began working on the 'barker' - this is the banner at the top of our news page that draws people's attention to the features. More often than not magazines' and newspapers' barkers comply to the same model:

• Win
• Free
• Sex/Glamour

As long as the baker contains these words then it will be successful in catching people's attention and drawing them in to the content.

To make the barker Chris introduced me to 'Adobe Fireworks'- a programme similar to 'Photoshop'. It is very complex and requires a lot of patience to use. Because of this Chris did most of the work whilst I observed and made notes. My job was to establish with the Features Editor, Alice Rimes, what would be placed in the barker. It was also my job to find the photos and to make sure that they were legal to use. Using photos from places such as Wikipedia is safe as it has a Creative Commons licence. To find out more about Creative Commons visit: http://creativecommons.org/about/what-is-cc. We mostly used our own photos though.

To sum up I learnt a lot this week and was looking forward to the next week!

WINOL- bulletin number three.

This week there seemed to be a far more laid back and relaxed atmosphere within the news room and I have to say this was a bit unnerving. I wondered where our buzz had gone!

We did have a fair few technical difficulties this week which would inevitably make this a bit a bogus bulletin. First the tape deck in the studio decided to eat our tapes and refused to spit them back out without force and by this point the tapes were wrecked. This meant that any recording for our feature, sports and listings channels that usually happened on Tuesdays would have to wait until the following day. So I think some people felt at a bit of a loss that day and didn't have much to do.

In this time I did some further work on the barker. This time I used the previous one as a template and chose to only change a couple of the images. This still proved to be hard work as I had to, again select the correct images, cut them out, ensure the edges looked smooth and then add a shadow effect to the make them stand out from the page. This was the final result:

I'm very keen to continue working on this as I want to be able to perfect my skills on such a complex programme. I also want to learn how to use 'Flash' as this enables us to put the barker on to the web site so this is my aim for next week!

Anyway on to the day of broadcast. The tape deck was luckily fixed but this meant we had three items to film, edit and put up on the website before run throughs were due to begin for the bulletin. Luckily this happened and I have to say that there were clear improvements on people's delivery to camera. Glenn Hutt's listings piece was done in one shot this week as his diction and confidence has improved greatly!

This week Matt Clifford was using ENPS to construct the the script and running order. This is an advanced programme that many professionals use and it makes the job easier. However the final layout was new and there was an air of confusion amongst the team when these were landed in our laps 30 minutes before recording. Because of this there seemed to be a chunk missing on the auto prompt which lead to a mistake in our bulletin. Hopefully these problems won't happen next week and can be easily resolved!

As well as an issue with scripts and the auto prompt, there were technical difficulites with the microphone and the computer running the VTs.

To sum up it all seemed to go wrong even though most of it seemed to be out of our hands! This week's lesson: technology will always let you down, so be prepared!!!

Oh and just to add we were lucky to have another professional editor this week! Chris Ship, ITV's Political Correspondent, was a great help when it came to writing links and editing the script. He also gave some good advice to the presenter and it was great to have him about!

When I met Denise Van Outen...

...I was put on the spot and told to invent a show with three features plus an interview with Denise herself in a ridiculously small amount of time with a few people I'd never met before. All of this was part of a "Celebrity Masterclass" competition we'd won with our Premier 21 accounts.

Here are the results.....

Another WINOL update

This week was the official first live broadcast of our news bulletin for Winchester News Online (WINOL) and despite a couple of technical glitches it was very successful.

Roles were changing and swapping again as everyone helped each other with various tasks which is brilliant as everyone gets a chance to try something different and learn something new. I introduced Claire (last week's presenter) to the autocue and taught her how to use it whilst taking on a new role myself as camera operator. There is a lot of pressure and responsibility on the person who works the auto cue and I feel this is often over looked by other people. I wonder if that is the case in the professional world? Anyway Claire did a good job, however she seemed eager to pass the responsibility back to me for this week's bulletin! Perhaps we'll encourage another person to have a go on Wednesday.

My attention turned to the features team on broadcast day as we discussed how we could pull in viewers to the web site. We came up with a few ideas for competitions, one in particular called "Date with fate". This involved printing out a set of random dates and handing them out to students on campus. The person who had the corresponding date to the website won three tickets to that evening's bop. Simple and effective. I understand that Paul Carrett's "How many sweets in the jar" competition is also proving incredibly popular which is excellent!

Our viewing figures are good and according to Friday's figures we rank 822th in the Alexa rankings which are set to rise after more search engine optimisation (SEO) and publicity. This means we are currently getting more traffic than the Hampshire Chronicle! Our next aim is to beat the Basingstoke Gazette who are currently 755th. Lets see if we can beat it this week!

Take a look for yourself:
www.winol.co.uk

Calorie guide set to rise!

ATTENTION ALL FOOD LOVERS!!

According to the papers today the government's recommended daily calorie intake could be wrong! The guide used for healthy eating and to aid those who are dieting has been set at 2000 for women and 2500 for men for the past 20 years.

The good news is that it might go up! So those of us who have opted for that chocolate ice-cream dessert or the extra glass of wine can now enjoy guilt free! According to the papers, a report from the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition claims that the calorie guide could be raised by 16%. For a man that means consuming an extra 400 calories which is the equivalent of an average sized cheeseburger.

The new figure is a result of researchers discovering better ways for the body to burn off fat during exercise.

However as much as this may sound good to some of us it does raise concerns over how this may be perceived by those who are overweight and what affect this could have on their health as it could send out the wrong message.

Top nutritionists only advise people to eat more if they are going to exercise more given the current obesity levels which currently predicts that 33% of women and 32% of men will be clinically obese within four years.

The commitee's suggestions will be considered during a 14 week consultation before final recommendations are made.