Posts from — March 2010

If you’re a journalist like me, there’s a good chance that a few quid disappears from your account monthly, heading for Liberty Hall, in the form of an NUJ Membership payment. In these NAMAesque times, every penny counts, and union membership must be worth its money.

So I’m asking the question – what do Irish journalists reckon about NUJ memberhip – is it value for money?

One editor I worked with snorted at anyone who joined the NUJ. He had been a long-standing member, he said, and asked them for legal advice once, the only time he approached them. They completely failed him and he cancelled his sub. He was also of the view that NUJ rates, if adhered to rigidly, would preclude him from rewarding better journalists for doing more valuable work. And NUJ membership certainly didn’t help journalists I worked with who were let go, other than offer a bit of solidarity, á la People’s Front of Judaea.

But I’m a card-carrier, and curious to see how many other journalists reckon that card is worth the money.

So if you can spare 90 seconds, please go and fill out my survey, NUJ – Value for Money, and feel free to pass on the link to anyone you think might be willing to contribute.

http://tinyurl.com/nujvalue

I’ll post results here once I have them.

One of the many freelance hats I wear is as web editor for Afloat Magazine’s online portal, Afloat.ie.

Right now, one of the biggest stories in sailing is the news that Ireland will host the finish of the Volvo Ocean Race.

When Knut Frostad, CEO of the race, came to Ireland to announce that news, I got 20 minutes with him to ask him about his plans. The video is pasted above. What’s interesting today is that Auckland has, overnight, been announced as the final stopover port for the race. If you scroll through the video to around the 2.15 point, Knut talks about the possibility of sending the boats on a lap of Ireland (or possible Britain and Ireland) en route from Lorient to Galway. And he says that he’ll announce details like that once the stopover ports have all been announced. Which means: anytime after today.

Fingers crossed.

Video shot with Kodak Zi8 Camera on a tripod and a new lapel mic

Eolai from Markham Nolan on Vimeo.

Necessity is the mother of invention. The short video you see above is the result of keeping an open mind in a situation that didn’t exactly turn out as planned.

Thanks to Liam for allowing me into his studio again. I love his work and it’s a real privilege to get to sit with creative people like him while they do what they do. I’m experimenting with audio slideshows, video and other multimedia at the moment, and he agreed a while ago to be a guinea pig. It was a busy time for him too, as he was preparing for the Irish Blog Awards where he’ll be exhibiting.

Thanks also to the Redneck Manifesto for allowing me use their music for backing.

Some words on the production of the video over the fold. [Read more →]

Back when I was a humble backpacker, scribbling my way through South America, I earned some empanada money by writing for Christian Aid’s Pressureworks website.

Two months ago, a few thousand thermal-clad tourists were trapped at Aguas Calientes (translation: Hot waters – yes, they were stuck in hot water) due to landslids around Macchu Picchu. The tourists had to be airlifted out of the town, as the train line was out of action as a result.

The same company runs the train to and from Macchu Picchu, the access to the site itself and the biggest hotel at the site, which is, of course, Peru’s biggest tourist attraction by some distance. That company is the Orient Express Company. Nice little monopoly if you can get it.

While I was over there I wrote about how said train company cancelled a train to Aguas Calientes on the day we happened to be there. The locals of a neighbouring town planned to use the train to take their protest to Macchu Picchu that day. Their protest concerned a road project that was halted inexplicably, which would have linked their town to Macchu Picchu. Doing so would have allowed the town compete with Aguas Calientes as an alternate route on the Inca trail, and would have broken the monopoly of the Orient Express company on travel to and from Peru’s biggest tourist draw. But rather than have noisy protest about their monopoly on their doorstep, they used their monopoly to stop the protest from getting to their doorstep. Convenient.

The only way out of Santa Teresa and across the river when we were there was a precarious bucket-on-a-high-wire affair. Or, in the case of landslide, by helicopter. It would be glib to say this was karma in action, when the livelihoods of so many in the valleys around Macchu Picchu rely on the tourist dollar.

The article is here (in jpeg format, until I can OCR the sucker). The pic is my own, by the way. Just to prove that I was there to witness the fact that there were people waiting to get on that train that never came.

“What the hell do you know about fashion?”

That’s a fair question, asked by my uncle on Sunday as he was reading my bit in the SBP on African Fashion Weekend, which hits Dublin on April 2,3 and 4.

Personally, yeah, I’m no mannequin. I actually had to apologise to the stylish Stha Ngwenya (pictured right, the organiser of African Fashion Week) for my appearance on the day we met. I have to do that a lot, actually, particularly when I’m on a motorbike and dressed to suit. Fashion is like fancy dress to me. It’s something that I don’t really do that often, but I’m aware that it’s there and that I find an effort. My girlfriend is more concerned with it, and much better at it than I am.

But I’m always interested in anything African, and particularly any positive African stories, having done a thesis on the lack of them in the Irish media.

And this is a good one.

And on the day, I hope to be near the catwalk, wearing the one tailored shirt that I own, applauding in a genteel fashion. As one does, when one’s involved in fashion. Dahling.

Sunday Business Post, March 21, 2010

Continental Shift

There’s a famous Granta magazine article about writings on Africa that, unsurprisingly, says little about haute couture.

In mocking tones, it details all the stereotypes one should hit when describing anything African. The only reference to fashion states: ‘‘If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.” [Read more →]

Thank you is so simple, yet so important. This post from a blog about fundraising for nonprofits illustrates the negative power of failing to thank donors. And it jogged my memory, as did some fairly robust pleas for cash from the RNLI at a dinner on Saturday night.

I’ll be honest – and this isn’t a popular stance if you’re a sailor – I’ll find it hard to donate to the RNLI again. In 2003 I ran the Dublin marathon for three charities – the MS Society, the RNLI and Lohada, a small Tanzanian NGO I helped set up as independent back in 2001.

Of the three, the RNLI were positively ignorant about the donation I was trying to give them. The MS Society wrote to thank me, I was sent a hand-made card by one of the kids in the Tanzanian orphanage. The RNLI were obstructive from the start (as I wasn’t running solely for them, they had no way for me to fit into their system), and were completely ungrateful upon receipt of the cash.

I handed them just over €1,000, and was met with a ‘right, whatever’ response.

And at the dinner this weekend, their speaker, who was gifted the MC role at the event, seemed arrogant in her assumption that she had a right to demand money from us, as we were all marine-related folk gathered in one room.

All of which made me very angry indeed.

The old mantra of no shirt, no service, is a manners thing. If you can’t be bothered putting on a shirt to show me some respect, I can’t be bothered serving you food.

Same goes for NGOs. If I go out of my way to raise funds for you, it probably means I’d do it again. I’m a renewable revenue stream.

No thanks, no donations. Simple.

Below you’ll find a short vid I put together for the Irish Sailing Assocation’s Annual Conference, which kicked off today. I spoke at 11am on promoting your club and at the dinner tonight, the Youth Sailor of the Year award gets given out. The two candidates are profiled in this vid: Finn Lynch who sails a Topper, and Philip Doran who sails a Laser Radial. The video is being used to announce them to the audience at the dinner.

ISA Youth Awards Intro from Markham Nolan on Vimeo.

Rory, who works for the ISA and features in the video, had seen the aul social media guru vid from last September and wanted some of the xtranormal.com animation used at the start. The remaining 80%  was cut together from training videos of Philip that Rory had shot on the water. All we had to work with was pics of Finn so they had to be made work to tell his story. I edited the whole thing in iMovie. This was my first editing job ever, so I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

On the whole, this was low-budget, low-tech. Rory was sitting on a kitchen chair in my garden shed office. I hung a black sheet behind him and sat him with a window on his left (camera right) so we had nice soft, natural light.  On advice from Adam Westbrook, I had splashed out on a Kodak Zi8 HD Pocket Video Camera to record the interviews with Rory (a whopping €130). The Zi8 has a microphone line in, so I nabbed a cheap lapel mic, and the sound quality is great as a result. (I’ve worked with the Flip HD too, the Kodak is nicer, but a little bigger in the hand).

I coached Rory through what I wanted from him, and we taped his notes (scribbled in marker on the back of a plane ticket) to the tripod just below the camera so that he had something to cog from. I downloaded a free converter to convert Rory’s .wmv and other Windows-format videos, and nabbed a song from Mr Scruff.  All in all, we recorded three minutes of chat with Rory, which was more than enough.

There are some things I’d like to be able to do that iMovie won’t permit, like layer audio from one slide over another, but for free software it’s remarkably easy to use, and the end results are great if you put some thought into it.

“NGOs that are really good and efficient should survive and grow, and those which really don’t add value and can’t be competitive should wind up. You’re wasting money that could be applied to the poorest people in the world in a much more efficient way. Unless you can do it efficiently, I don’t think you should be in this business.“

Sunday Business Post, August 3, 2008

CHARITY IN A PC WORLD

Cormac Lynch’s charity supplies computers to the poor in Africa, but he admits his capitalist instincts are the reason for his great success.

The Irish love to play games that involve degrees of separation. For example, plenty of us can map out, in three or four steps, a link to the likes of Bono with little effort. Dubliner Cormac Lynch, founder of Irish charity Camara, is a master of the art – taking us from the world’s poorest people to the world’s super-rich in two short steps. [Read more →]

If your taxi driver had  been awake for the guts of 57 hours, would you be happy to let him drive you home? No?

What about if your doctor had been awake for 57 hours – would you let them take out your appendix?

Didn’t think so.

Sunday Business Post, August 07, 2005

Working around the clock, grabbing a snooze when there’s a lull in the action, going without meals and pepping themselves up with caffeine – how long can Ireland’s over-worked junior doctors keep going under these conditions? ‘You wouldn’t want your mother or fathe r on that operating table,” says the junior doctor, yawning down the phone. [Read more →]

Every now and then you do a piece that catches you in the throat. This piece stemmed from an interview with a blogger who was tackling some intensely personal stuff on his blog about his own self-harm, which he has now ditched as he has stopped harming. Result.

Sunday Business Post – Jan 26, 2006

John cuts himself. He takes a razor blade, draws its edge slowly across his upper arm until it parts the skin and glides smoothly, steely into the soft flesh beneath. He says that when he sees the blood, it feels good; it feels like the sting of sunburn and a release of pressure. [Read more →]