The Student Media Awards took place last night in the Mansion House. Sadly,Trinity News failed to take home the big prizes.

My own personal disappointment aside, it’s particularly great to see DCU awarded many of the high-profile titles. The college really doesn’t offer the College View any kind of support- they have no office, for crying out loud- yet the team there does a hell of a lot better than many of the well-funded papers in the country. Great to see it recognised, and I hope they can use this kind of success when trying to negotiate a better deal for themselves.

The “other paper” in Trinity, the University Times, was granted the Newspaper of the Year award. I hope they don’t mind me saying that it was a bit of a surprise- it’s the first time the award has gone to someone other than Trinity News or the University Observer. Rob has been across the hall from me all year, and we’ve shared much banter, so if anyone else had to pick it up, I’m happy it’s the Times.

Well done to all the winners. I had been hoping for a replacement award for my 2007 Journalist of the Year award, pictured, which sadly didn’t survive the trip to the Harcourt Diner. I dropped it on the floor, and, amazingly, it bounced. When I dropped it about 30 seconds later, it didn’t. Ah well.

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Well, that was a fun year. Wow, what a ride.

The last issue of volume 56 of Trinity News came out two weeks ago, and so my five-year career in student media comes to an end. I’ve learned more than I can reasonably list in that time, but here’s some initial thoughts:

• People you work with are more talented, better, and have more potential than you think. I worked under four different editors, and under different news editors, as well as doing those jobs myself. We all did the job differently, but I’ve got a lot of respect for every one of them and the work they did. When it came to choosing my own staff, I honestly had very little idea what I was doing, but part of being in charge is making the best call you can and hoping it’s right. And my staff, in general, exceeded every expectation. I’ve watched unsure amateurs evolve into some of the most capable people I’ve ever seen, and it’s had nothing to do with anything I might have taught them. While there have been disasters, they’re far outnumbered by the successes. Working to deadlines in a stressful environment had taught me the power of relying on people, and how little they’ll let you down.
• I can’t do everything. There are only so many hours in the day, and working insane hours can only be maintained for so long. Something’s got to give, and for me, this year, it was my plans to learn more skills. I learned nothing of the things I wanted to, and a lot I never planned on. I think those things I never planned on learning are far more valuable.
• I have certain strengths and weaknesses. There are better people for some jobs, and part of a successful endeavour is finding them.
• Organisation is the difference between success and failure, or at least between a 2am finish and 10am finish.
• There’s a hell of a lot of talent in the student media in Ireland. Not just in Trinity News- I’ve read some great writing in the papers of other universities.
• There is always more I could have done, and always more to do.

Now it’s time for me to move on. Five years is a long, long time in college media, and I’ve gained a great deal for the hours I put in (and there have been so many). And I plan on blogging. I’ve missed it a lot this year, but the simple fact is that I haven’t had the luxury of time or been reading enough to have anything interesting to share. I’ve simply been doing.

But now that things are winding down, I find myself thinking about media-related stuff a lot more, and I plan on doing much more. Very much looking forward to my last student media awards tonight (it being midnight Tuesday). And I’m looking forward to some new challenges as I try to forge ahead in the media. If you’ve got any interesting job opportunities, let me know, eh?

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Many of you will probably have heard of the Your Country, Your Call campaign which was launched this last Wednesday. It’s an initiative looking for two ideas to revitalise the Irish economy, and is willing to pay €100,000 for each of those ideas. I am, by nature, slightly cynical, in that I always ask where the money is in any new project- who benefits? After all, no-one does anything like this without a good reason.

At a preview evening for this new initiative, however, I was massively impressed by the genuine enthusiasm and positive thinking of the group behind this- specifically, people like Martin McAleese and Ferdinand Von Prondzynski. There’s certainly no cynicism there. These men and women behind the project genuinely believe in what they’re doing. And at this event, no mention whatsoever was made of the sponsors, contributors, etc- the website itself doesn’t seek publicity for the financial contributors either.

In short, while many, and I include myself in that, may have low expectations for the outcome of this project (I don’t think we’ll kick-star the entire economy, I’m afraid), I hope I’m proven wrong. McAleese and his co-workers are doing something good for the country with the best of intentions, and I hope they get hundreds, thousands of excellent ideas and make something great out of it. It’s so rare to see something so apparently pure of motive, and it deserves as much attention and success as possible.

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I’ve got to take the hat off to Nick Petrie over at Redbrick (the paper of Birmingham University) for doing something I wasn’t aware could easily be done: creating an iPhone app for his paper.

The app is powered by a service called MotherApp, which takes content from RSS and Twitter feeds and plugs it directly into a pre-established template. Simple, yet effective. The app splits advertising revenue 50/50 between MotherApp and the content provider, or it can be taken ad-free for an annual subscription of $99.

Now, it’s not exactly perfect. There’s only an option for a single RSS feed, so far as I can see, so there’s no way of splitting content into news/sport/features etc. But for a starting point, it seems like a great and cheap (even free) way to dip into the mobile sphere. Now, there’s obviously the problem that it requires a consistently up-to-date web service, which, sadly, is a challenge for many student papers (my own included). But, if you are running a tight online ship that’s keeping your visitors coming back for more between publication dates of your print issues, it might e something to consider.

And, of course, it’s easy to point out that this functionality could be made available via a mobile web browser.But that’s not the point- Petrie is giving his audience options, and maybe many of them will appreciate having a dedicated app for the purpose. And, short of having a programmer to hand or employing one (who knows Cocoa, Objective-C etc.), simple yet effective services like this are the only real way for the student press to do this kind of thing.

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