Community Media Conference at MediaCity UK

The view from the BBC’s Quay House at MediaCity UK, Salford

Back to the day job today after a great weekend in the North!

I’ve been in Manchester (well… Salford actually) where the Community Media Association put on its annual conference at the BBC’s Quay House, at MediaCity UK.

I very nearly came to university here. The MediaCity UK site has buildings used by the BBC, ITV, the University of Salford, the Coronation Street set (not a TV programme I am remotely interested in!)

Representing Corinium Radio for the weekend, I drove up with my Corinium Radio colleauge Kate Jones (follow her on Twitter here) on Friday night ready for 2 days of radio and community media related discussions.

I particularly enjoyed the inRadio discussions session, and look forward to hearing the podcast(s) produced as a result of this. Other talks on SSDAB (Small Scale DAB) were also of particular interest; We’re currently an online-only community radio station, and are interested in digital radio.

On Sunday there was a Citizen Journalism workshop, also run by the CMA at the same venue – some of this was quite interesting (although, I don’t particularly enjoy the whole “get in to small groups” thing they do in workshops, way out of my comfort zone there) but did take a few notes during the discussion on how academia (universities and colleges) can work better with the communicy media sector.

We returned to Gloucestershire yesterday evening… Wasn’t the easiest drive home. Stop-start traffic most of the way down the M6 (it was fairly heavy even coming out of Salford from the moment I joined the M6) to the point I even made the decision to spend a little money and use the M6 Toll: Just to get out of traffic for a while!

Somehow the journey made me feel tired – I don’t normally tire while driving (Driving to work from Germany a couple of years ago was the exception to that!) But most of the tiredness didn’t catch up with me until later in the evening after I’d got home.

One thing this weekend has made me think about though… I love being in the BBC / media environment so much. Maybe I should again start looking at trying to get a job in radio. I need a new challenge!

FH

Fred Hart

Stock Controller and Radio Presenter/Producer

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