Jon Ronson is a writer and documentary film maker. His books, The Psychopath Test, Them: Adventures With Extremists and The Men Who Stare At Goats were international bestsellers. The Men Who Stare At Goats has been turned into a major motion picture starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges. He contributes features and columns to The Guardian.

 His many documentary films include Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes and The Secret Rulers of the World, and he’s a regular contributor to Public Radio International’s This American Life. He also makes the four times Sony nominated BBC Radio 4 series, Jon Ronson On…

I think this year’s festival will be the best yet. Derry is about an hour north-west of Belfast and the central area is beautiful, nestling behind a city wall. Right beside the wall is The Playhouse, where the great and the good of the Scottish, Irish, Welsh and other broadcasting communities will meet for a fascinating couple of days where the London media get barely a look in. It’s an amazing place, the result of two convent schools being joined and restored creating a warren of rehearsal and performance spaces. Better than that, it’s a thriving hub providing a home to numerous groups.

On the rainy Friday morning we were there I counted three different groups rehearsing and saw a group of really committed people working on a number of projects to deliver skills to folk who wouldn’t normally engage with the arts. And they were working on bringing people in from around the world to explore the city’s heritage and more recent troubles. Its run by Niall McCaughan, a whirlwind of a man who fills the place with his enthusiasm and can-do spirit. He also makes a decent cup of coffee.

We’ll be blogging and podcasting not just the festival but looking into the success of the venue and the hundreds of people it’s helped along the way. It just 1% of Niall and his team’s enthusiasm rubs of on the students that come to Derry with us, we’ll have the most wonderful time. I’m left with one thought about Scotland’s media scene, though. Can community radio not fulfill that role in it’s communities? Why not look to doing more than live radio? Our students understand multi-platform, so why not extend that and use community radio to become creative hubs in our Year of Creative Scotland?

BBC Radio Scotland are currently commissioning new programmes in a number of different genres, and here is all the information you need.  Submission is already open, and closes on the 13th December 2011.

Slots Open to Offers from Independent and In House Offers (WOCC)

• Saturday Morning Sport Magazine, Brief 72225
• Weekly Evening Specialist Music Programme, Brief 72291
• Late Evening Disc-Based Music Programme, Brief 72290

Slots Open Only To Independent Suppliers

• Comedy, Brief 72338
• Features, Brief 72336
• Drama, Brief 72346

Script-to-Screen: Acting out the scene with Libby McArthur

Helliate writes:

Pyrotechnics, rain, snow- prepare to be entertained. And this was just a summary of the Special Physical effects session delivered by Artem Ltd at the goNORTH festival in Inverness held on 9-10th June 2011. Indeed the Artem special effects was the highlight of the festival for me, but again I am easily impressed. Using the interior and exterior space at The Ironworks, this showcase also did impress even the most industry-savvy. We had rain, snow, blustery wind and a huge fire all within the space of an hour.

Some of the other highlights from the Screen programme included the script to screen workshop which was a full afternoon workshop aimed at new entrants to the industry.  This went through each of the major production stages in producing drama for television as a live process to deliver a special goNORTH very own written, shot and edited scene using BBC Scotland’s River City as the backdrop.

Nigel Pope from Maramedia took us through a session to explore the fascinating world of natural histrory programme making in the session aptly named From Mull to the Masai Mara: An Insider’s view on Wildlife Filmmaking which was fascinating, beats going on a safari.

And of course there was the music panels and the live bands which always add to the appeal of attending goNORTH. Panda Su were fantastic, Maple Leafs ( Glasgow) were just brilliant and all so talented and multi-skilled ( kept swapping instruments and roles, was that just showing off?)

Creative Loop student representatives from Perth College, Adam Smith College and Aberdeen College were there courtesy of CreativeHi which meant Creative Loop was able to be in more than one session at a time which was just as well as this was a fantastic programme of events and certainly one of the best ever goNORTH festivals to date.

“The Villager” is a new national newspaper for Namibia, which will launch in a few weeks.

We were demonstrating how easy it is to generate audio content using a cellphone, the edit it using free tools and pop in onto the web.

A longer-form version of the interview, by NUJ Scotland’s Mike Higgins, will appear on this site soon along with pictures and links.

This idea is one of them.

We arrived in Winhoek, the Capital of Namibia, on Monday lunchtime and have spent the week meeting people from all over the country’s media industry. The parallels with Scotland just a few years ago are spectacular. Namibia has very good infrastructure, with a decent 3G signal available over much of the country. In common with much of Africa, mobile phones are pretty much ubiquitous. We’ve noticed that a huge amount of web use is using mobile devices – at one meeting yesterday I counted five iPads!

The newspapers are all thinking about online and have considered different approaches. They’re also thinking about ways of involving their readers more in their journalism in this vast country.

That’s just one of the spaces we’re operating in, and we’ll update you soon.

Joe, Stuart & Ciaran with Graham Stewart

This is another of our feeds from the Creative Loop Student Media Festival, held earlier this month in Glasgow.

In this session BBC Scotland newsreader (and one time music presenter) Graham Stewart quizzes Capital Scotland‘s Stuart Barrie, Central FM‘s Joe Kilday and 96.3 Rock Radio‘s Ciaran O’Toole about what to put in you demo. And what not to!

Listen to it here…

If you listen to one session from the festival, make it this one.

You can hear it here… 

A former student of Adam Smith College found himself producing BBC Radio Scotland’s ‘Call Kaye” the morning after the Scottish Elections. The plan was to get on some students who had been first-time voters.

As it turns out Adam Smith weren’t able to help, and that would have been that. But Pat Joyce at Adam Smith pointed the programme producer at Reid Kerr College and they were able to jump in with a handful of students and an ISDN link back up the road between the college studio and the BBC studios in Glasgow.

Incidentally, much of the broadcast kit at the college had been purchased through Creative Loop when it established that college as its hub for radio production.

It’s safe to say that if the Creative Loop hadn’t existed, the network of potential contributors would have been smaller and the technical standards much lower.

If you’re a programme maker in Radio or TV and you’re looking for contributors, facilities, or both – get in touch! We work well together and our students love the buzz of being involved in ‘real’ programmes.

By the way, the piece is on the BBC iPlayer, about 1’03.00 in…

You have to get the links right, the music right and connect with your audience.

In this unmissable session two of Bauer Radio’s brightest programming talents talk you through what you need to know.

BBC Scotland’s Graham Stewart is joined by the Programme Director of Radio Forth, Brian Paige and Northsound, Gary Muircroft.

Listen to it here…