The Media School

Award is twice as nice for MAMMJ

19 October 2010

For the second year in a row an MA Multi-Media Journalism (MAMMJ) graduate has scooped a prestigious industry award.

A student from the MA Multi-Media Journalism at Bournemouth University scooped a national prize for his outstanding internet journalism last week.

David Murray won the award for the best multi-platform story at the Broadcast Journalism Training Council annual awards presented at the BBC in London.

This is the second year in a row that a student from the Bournemouth course has won the multi-platform category, which looks for the most effective treatment of a single news story showing the power of multi-media.

David, who hails from Ireland, said yesterday: “I am surprised and proud to have this award. The course helped me diversify my skills. You don’t have to be an expert on something but if you can cover a lot of bases, it prepares you. The course is really good for keeping up with current developments.”

David’s interactive website charted the crisis in regional newspapers and included cleverly presented inserts of video, audio, text and graphics. He fought off competition from students from accredited undergraduate and postgraduate courses in universities across Britain and Ireland to win the category.

After completing his MA at Bournemouth, David went to the BBC as Digital Design Executive in Internal Communications and is now Ad Formats Developer at the internet portal Yahoo!, based in London.

David continued: “This course makes you more open to new technology. You are not afraid of technology like many people when you go into your first job.

“We used Twitter on the course the year it began and it has taken off everywhere. In ten years it will be something different. But the course will probably be using it.

“The other thing this course does is take away the fear of finding stories and going out to get them. We were pushed out the very first week of the course. It was scary but you get good at it. It was good that we had to get the stories ourselves.

“It was harder doing the newsdays on the course than it was working in a professional environment afterwards. The stories are harder to get.”

In the past two years the MA course has taken three of the four BJTC internet category awards in the UK for excellence in journalism.