Media Schmedia

Yet another flight. And of course, yet another blog post. Perth has gone by amazingly quickly. In a rare opportunity, I have (this time) somehow managed to actually see some lovely snippets of the conference host city, for which Nic must be muchly credited. :)

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The rest of Ed Con was alright, and surprisingly civil (in comparison to the factionalised shit-stirring chair-throwing bitch-fighting screaming-match anecdotes I’d heard about past Ed Con’s). (Lovely, I know.) Unsurprisingly a lot of it was about the WA experience in dealing with VSU. And about running guilds and student associations under business models. *shudder*

Possibly the most useful workshop at Ed Con might’ve been … the media workshop on the 2nd day (300605). We had a couple of journalists speak, one of whom was a fairly senior reporter with the West Australian – so it was good to tap in to both her experience as well as her professional media perspective.

A lot of the stuff I had learnt on the job as NSW branch media officer with NLC, but it was good to rehash the pointers that were of particular priority for a representative/lobby group such as NUS. And certainly I’d picked up a coupla new ones as well. Yes, of course I’ll share.

And because I love screen shots –






It was interesting to see how some of these points were inter-linked to the discussion that was to happen the following week at QC, during our action planning for tomorrow’s (!) rally. More on that later.

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Update: Notables on the media coverage on the Nelson retreat --

It had been decided beforehand, collectively, that the action would be peaceful.

The police galloped on mounted horses in numbers that at least equalled the student congregation, ostensibly to invoke fear.

A mainstream paper dramatically claimed that a student, Craig Comrie, had lunged towards the police in an offensive move – actually, Craig fell.

From several observer accounts, the first incidence of violence began with the police. (Mainstream) media accounts portrayed the exact opposite.

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