Capturing Cardiff: How Fair Trade are your shopping bags?

(An assessed feature article for my online journalism course incorporating various online devices)

Many people are not aware that in June last year Wales became a fair trade nation but little is known about what actually makes a fair trade shop. I spent a few hours with Ruth Poole one of the directors and employees of Fair Do’s of Cardiff. Fair Do’s is a fair trade shop with ethically sourced products and is based in the Canton area of the city.




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The shop is very much a success of the ethically sourced products revolution in recent years. Although, as Ruth Poole told me they have noticed a dip in sales recently due to the economic problems, the shop has just passed a major milestone. In the last few months of 2008 Fair Do’s celebrated the tenth birthday of their current shop in Canton. Ruth has been involved in the shop throughout these ten years and also when it was in its previous home in the basement of Cathays Methodist Church with just two paid members of staff.

Now a busy shop full of fair trade products ranging from chocolate to wooden craft gifts and from pasta to clothing as well as employing five members of staff; all who are supported by a team of volunteers. Throughout the years Ruth has seen growth in popularity of ethically sourced products and the fair trade movement as a whole. Ruth became involved with ethical products through her local church. She told me she has seen the idea of ethically sourced has ‘widened its appeal’ in recent years with more and more people coming through the door.

More than just a shop?

The shop was founded by Jan Tucker who is not only often behind the till at her shop, she is heavily involved various fair trade initiatives across Wales. These include serving on the Wales Fair Trade Forum and being heavily involved in making Wales a fair trade nation.

As part of making Wales a fair trade nation there was a major emphasis on education. Fair Do’s is the home to a lot of material used by Fair Trade Wales to educate school children in the Cardiff area. With Jan’s connection and Fair Do’s popularity it is fair to suggest the shop is a key figure in fair trade products.

Events are also held at the shop to educate various groups about fair trade and ethical shopping.


What is fair trade?

Well the products stocked in the shop are sourced from the suppliers approved by the British Association of Fair Trade Shops. This means the suppliers have been granted fair trade status for their products as either the material and/or labour force involved in the product are seen as ethical. This can mean the workers have been paid a fair wage or the products (for example cotton in clothing) are sourced ethically.

Ruth Poole feels the most popular products in the shop are the craft gifts as similar products aren't easy to find. Perhaps their most impressive crafts are a selection of Zimbabwean pottery currently displayed in the shop window (right).


So then...expensive?

There is often criticism about how expensive ethically sourced products are to buy; Ruth said they often get criticism over the price of their Zimbabwean pottery. Yet, as it is hand painted and imported into the country she says the prices (for example £16 for these plates left) is a fair price. The vast majority of their products are sourced from developing countries.

In her experience Ruth says over the years prices are coming more into line with non-ethically sourced products. This is part of the reason why buying ethical products is becoming more fashionable. Fair Do’s have around 50 different suppliers now – another sign of the growth of the company and also the expansion of fair trade products nowadays. I was curious as to whether emotive television coverage about under paid workers; Ruth said although she has not precise figures, they do notice a small rise in sales after television programs based on ethical products or the opposite.


The past, future and hippies…

Every now and again I hear people campaigning for fair trade products being labelled as hippies and depicted in bright clothes. Ruth said that criticism about the fashion of ethically produced clothing has been listened to and now there is a project called the Trade Craft Exchange. This advises producers on the current trends, as this picture from the winter Trade Craft magazine shows.

Ruth admitted that when the shop moved 10 years ago she hoped it would be successful but didn’t expect it to have been as popular as it has become today. Her hope for the future is that everything becomes fair trade with all workers being paid a fair wage.

…many thanks to Ruth Poole and Fair Do’s for allowing me to interview them and take photos of the shop.

Hear more from Ruth here...

From men in cardigans to…?

This part of the conversation stems from arguably the best lecture of the term from Rory Cellan-Jones. In a lecture subtitled ‘Typewriter to Twitter’ he charted how the news media had changed from when he started until the present day and gave us an insight into his beliefs for what a journalist needed to be in the future. He has been a business and economics reporter for many years and since 2007 has been the BBC’s Technology correspondent, regularly contributing to the corporation’s technology blog dot.life.

Rory Cellan-Jones compared the world when BBC Breakfast news first started in 1983 with the journalistic world now. He touched upon regular themes that I often mention in these conversations. As a sort of conclusion to the posts so far I want to borrow his overall comparisons between 1983 and 2008 and then move on to develop his ideas about the role of a modern day journalist.

1980’s – Large teams behind the news and people largely had one skill which they used all of the time. There was a large regular audience and little competition in the way of broadcast news media. Also the idea of immediacy meant will a package be ready for the next bulletin whenever that would be.

…whereas…

2008 – The audience has become more fragmented and is seen to be becoming more interactive. Within the newsroom journalists are expected to be multi-skilled and immediacy means NOW. And I am sure I don’t even need to mention citizen journalism/UGC!

Twitter, Flickr and Digg are buzzwords in many newsrooms and more sites are appearing. Rory Cellan-Jones introduced us to Demotix which acts as an agent for UGC helping contributors receive some money for their work as well as Qik where people can broadcast anything live onto the net. YET how much does this actually affect what makes the news and how broadcast journalists work? Rory Cellan-Jones used Twitter as an example and commented that it’s great although not for people who are not on twitter.

A point which Rory Cellan-Jones mentioned which I feel supports my idea that traditional attitudes to journalism haven’t changed and online journalism is simply an extra string to media’s bow helping to get stories to consumers and make create interaction. He mentioned how there is a reading of the most popular news stories on the BBC News Website, yet this does not dictate the run order of the news stories. Rory Cellan-Jones concluded by saying journalists had to maintain pride in their own editorial judgement. I passionately agree with this idea, whilst at the same time accept the internet is here to stay and is a major tool for the journalist.

I agree with Rory Cellan-Jones journalists need to be able to work on a multi-platform and always be actively experimenting with new media, although must have a key skill. It is of course impossible to tell what will happen in 2009 and beyond so from men in cardigans in 1983 to…?

Happy New Year!

Typewriter picture courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/justabiggeek/ (Creative Commons)

Mobile Journalism – A ‘pick n mix’ of journalism?

This week looks at the role the mobile media is playing in society and the possible convergence of material from all media outlets and companies. I also want to mention some examples of this, looking especially at the way mobiles made an impact in Mumbai last week. The basis of this conversation follows a brief lecture from Rick Waghorn last week. He left a traditional newspaper environment to start up My Football Writer on the Internet for Norwich City fans. His work on this site raises some interesting points about what is right in mobile journalism.

Rick Waghorn spoke about websites with experienced writers (such as his) teaming up with experienced broadcasting sites such as ITV Local. This creates a multi-media platform with companies sharing their resources. Rick Waghorn claims this would create a barter economy where he swaps a match report for clips of the game. However, would this not create a stale media where all outlets are carrying exactly the same multi-media content? This is a problem in my eyes as surely the beauty of the Internet is that there is so much content on it, people have the freedom to choose.

Although, as Rick Waghorn said the mobile phone is a publishing platform, yet the quality may not be amazing on film, pictures and audio. But surely if the writing is excellent and entertains the readers then some poor quality audio is excused. After all I would argue that the challenge for sites such as My Football Writer is to make enough money to be able to afford quality sound recorders and cameras (I am not saying that’s an easy task and would take years).

So we have discussed journalists embracing the online and mobile media, I would like to briefly develop points from earlier posts with a case study. Twitter and Flickr as well as other websites documented the Mumbai terrorist attacks last week almost immediately. Citizen journalism gave the general world population the initial insight into the attack. Whilst I am 100% in favour of UGC and online media I must re-emphasise my opinion that media outlets must make every effort to check the information they are given. (The 0750 Radio 4 interview gives a good insight into UGC during the attack)

Finally I simply feel I have to comment on the role of the media in the world and the continuance of traditional journalism alongside, and incorporated with, online journalism. Watching The Changeling in the cinema this weekend the plot re-emphasised the power the media has and how it can make change happen as well as holding the authorities to account. This took a long time in 1920’s and 1930’s America yet should mobile/online journalism have been around then I am convinced change would have happened quicker.

Journalism is now immediate but I don’t see why traditional quality, ethics and authority need to change.

That’s all for now…till next week…



Pick + Mix photo courtesy http://flickr.com/photos/dfluff/ (creative commons)

Blackberry picture courtesy http://www.flickr.com/people/breakdown/ (creative commons)

Newspaper Communities…online...not on paper??

This week the discussion revolves around a case study of what my last two posts have been debating. This comes from a lecture by Shane Richmond called ‘the what, why and how of newspaper communities’. As the Communities Editor for the Telegraph and a regular blogger on the media there surely can be few others better people to talk about this.

Two Telegraph foreign correspondents started blogging in 2005 and now there are around fifty blogs penned by Telegraph journalists. The topics are wide ranging and aim for different niches. Shane Richmond says that the blogs, which work best, are opinionated, for example Damien Thompson’s blog on Catholicism. There is a very obvious niche audience for this blog and it remains popular with readers. However they don’t have to be aimed at such a small community for example the political blog Three Line Whip has a much broader audience with less narrow interests according to Shane Richmond. Yet it is updated regularly and does have a niche audience making it increasingly popular.

Yet it is My Telegraph which is much more interesting to look at. On the site anyone has the opportunity to blog with a community already provided for him or her. Much has been said about building up traffic to blogs, well with My Telegraph that community is already there. A very recent example is Politics Cymru, a blog on blogger started last week and is promoting itself on Twitter and updating at least once a day.

Therefore, what I find slightly scary is that there is now a group of people blogging about whatever they like (within legal reason), are they doing the journalist’s job? I don’t think so yet although think it is something we need to watch. My Telegraph gives people opportunity to add their personal feeling to the news, this means journalists must ensure that the represent the feelings of the masses. At a recent lecture with Kate Adie she said journalists must ‘mirror’ society – I believe that as long as journalists remember this then the profession isn’t under threat.

The other problem is that of moderation, the laws ruling the media in this country are very strict and online media must also stick to these. Shane Richmond points out that moderators are always at risk however they chose to moderate their sites. Another problem is expense; it is expensive to employ people to moderate user’s content before it is published. The Telegraph combine, reading blogs before posting and more commonly don’t read posts unless they get complaints about them.

Like all other posts, I cannot claim to know where the online revolution will lead us in the media industry (if I did I’d be very rich now I imagine). My Telegraph has an older average of contributors disputing thoughts that only young people are online. Online is definitely here to stay but I doubt anyone knows in what form.

Till next week…

Newspapers picture courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/edwardfilms/ (creative commons)

Networked Journalism Take 2…the flip side

Well we have already looked at networked journalism in the mass media age and how online networks provide contacts to journalists. This time the conversation will focus on how the rise in online networks can help spread news content and get as many people as possible consuming it. The trigger for this entry is a lecture from Antony Mayfield from ICrossing entitled ‘Journalism in the Age of Networks’.

On a personal note I generated ‘traffic’ for this blog simply from a Facebook status update. A friend, Ellie who had no idea that I was blogging and indeed why, found my blog, commented on it thus creating a conversation. She had two ways of taking part in this conversation one being through the blog itself or the other directly to me on Facebook. Whilst this is only minor compared to the vastness of the web and Ellie only heard about my blog as she is a friend it does demonstrate, on a very small scale, how online networks can help to spread news literally.

This year it has been announced that for the first time over 50% of Internet traffic is personal. I am guessing that this is largely due to the popularity of social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. This must mean that the news media has to be involved in social networking to get their messages across. Many, if not all, have RSS feeds, many have applications on Facebook and profiles on twitter. The problem with this is that these all need selecting by the consumers and users of the Internet so can easily be ignored. Because of this these applications have to be simple to install otherwise people will ignore them.

One of Antony Mayfield’s final points was that media outlets must distribute their content everywhere to get noticed on the web. This is a huge task and I imagine totally impossible to achieve. The way, other than being available on social networks, that media can get noticed on the web is through search engines. I have a feeling that the letters S E O (search engine optimisation) will haunt journalists for the next few decades.

In recent lectures I have learnt that google results show twitter and blog results before standard web pages. Therefore, news can be broken on a blog before a main website in order to generate more traffic from a search engine. Yet, journalists must remember (and I imagine in some cases reform) the way they write for online, as the title of their blog posts must easily be picked up by a search engine. This meaning that their titles must be simple and reflect the headline of the story.

So there are many platforms for news within Internet networks, although I fear that if on every page, visited by the ‘normal’ Internet user, there is a link to a news website or news portal then they might lose interest. People might refuse to enter into conversations if they feel bombarded by them.

…as with all of this who knows?

Happy (belated) Birthday Blog

Yes the art of blogging turned ten at the end of October and this part of my conversation seems the perfect moment to mention it, as this weeks entry is all about blogging. Last weeks lecture was all about the blog and the increase of the use of the web by the teams behind trade magazines. Our lecturer was Adam Tinworth of Reed Business Information (RBI) he is head of blogging at RBI, has had his own personal blog since 2001 (One Man and His Blog) and is key in preparing RBI’s journalists for change. So I guess there cannot be many people better suited to teaching us about blogging.

Although, is there really an art to blogging that is different from any broadcast media? Adam Tinworth gave us two main principles that a blog must conform to and they were -
1. A blog entry must be interesting.
2. All blog entries had to show the idea of a conversation.
Now his first point is surely an essential idea behind anything that is in the media, I would imagine that no one would consume any type of media if they were not interested. Yet, it is the idea of a conversation that is not always possible in all forms of media all of the time. Radio phone ins, newspapers’ comments pages and letters to editors are all ways of triggering conversation with the media BUT not using the internet. Although I am not naïve enough to think that the Internet hasn’t helped in the conversation with the media and introduced other forms of conversation (such as BBC Have Your Say). I am guessing that one of the most popular blogs at the moment is Robert Peston’s. He is famous for using his blog to break news, which is one of Adam Tinworth’s plus points about a blog. This is where a blog then helps boost traffic for the media outlet. Robert Peston does not really have the space to go into in-depth analysis in his blog but can link to other BBC pages and also to news bulletins.

One of Adam Tinworth’s other main points was that to be successful and popular a blog must find a niche, be enthusiastic and have a vast range of idea within its subject area. He used one of RBI’s most popular blogs as an example if this. Flightblogger gets breaking news from inside the aviation industry. This blog fulfils the three ideas mentioned by Adam Tinworth and proves very popular event thought the niche it’s in is considerably smaller than Robert Peston’s.

Well that’s my blog about blogging, some things don’t change, Shakespeare wrote plays within/about plays (for example A Midsummer Nights Dream) and now I have written a blog about a blog! So happy birthday blogs, the advantages of blogs at the moment are clearly obvious although will they die out? Does it matter the word blog isn't in my spell check? Will they still be around in another ten years? Will I still be blogging then? What (if anything) will replace them? No one knows the answers to these questions and how things will turn out, to use an old fashioned cliché, only time will tell…

“READ ALL ABOUT IT READ ALL ABOUT IT” … echoes of the past?

After what has been a rocky week for broadcasting I was less than keen to listen to Matthew Yeomans’ (of Custom Communication) lecture last week when he started off by mentioning that journalism’s traditional models are “falling apart at the seams”. He mentioned that the American based Christian Science Monitor had stopped publishing in a daily print form and would only be producing a website and a weekly magazine, seemingly due to a lack of demand. Matthew Yeomans also quoted a columnist in the New York Times from the 29th of October 2008 suggesting that for journalism “clearly the sky is falling. The question is how many people will be left to cover it”. However, after this he did signal some hope to a room full of potential journalists, and this hope (yes you have probably guessed by now) is in evolving with the Internet.

He could not say where journalism would end up yet said that the traditional rules were changing. This idea is nothing new and appears in many of my previous posts, although Matthew Yeomans did provide a useful three-point summary of the three points that are at play;
1 - Everyone has the Power to Publish thus creating a Global Conversation.
2 - Anyone has the Power to Participate and share their opinions.
3 - All consumers have the Power to Choose the method of their news consumption.

It has certainly been clear in the past few weeks how immediate and influential the Internet and the advances it has created can be. There are two well-known examples for this. My first one is the interview on This Morning with Kerry Katona (broadcast live on the 22nd of October 2008). Kerry Katona’s health was called into question during the interview and was the subject of many media outlets in the following few days. I watched the interview live before walking into university just 20 minutes later; in that time my friends, already at university, had heard about and seen the interview. No one at university had watched the television program; they only had the Internet and saw information appearing on various websites within seconds of the interview. My other example is the message left by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand on Andrew Sachs answer-machine. The incident gained a lot of media attention last week and was listened to by many more people than usual as they could access the recording via the BBC website.

Although it is impossible to discern many people would have known about the above examples had there been no Internet it is clear that they would not have been able to access the information and word would not have been able to spread so quickly. I do not however feel that the ages of traditional methods of journalism are dead. Whilst numbers of people buying newspapers may be falling I believe they still will have an influence. I feel traditional media must use the Internet to remain in existence though.