This is day 2 of the Park Post’s production on The Conflict Project. The Conflict Project, which is run by the third-year journalism students at the University of Gloucestershire, tackles everything from conflict between social groups or even between thoughts themselves. Today marked the start of content creation, whilst the website started to get its under-the-hood maintenance, courtesy of Hesham. He has been formatting the website and creating a landing page video that incorporates all of the themes we want to explore as a group. There are four themes that our ideas fall under: identity, science, health and society. Identity focuses on internal conflict, people not feeling they can be themselves and struggling to accept who they are. Society will focus on how the world works, from politics to bullying it will be covered here. Health will tackle the physical and mental struggles people face. Finally, science will cover topics such as drugs vs medicine and the flat earth theory. The stories being worked on by the team all have interesting aspects to them. There seems to be areas of conflict being explored that may have not been explored before this in-depth.
For some, today was a research day. Pieces like Romy’s ‘flat earth’ article will require a lot of case studies and an extra day of research seems to be helping this. For others today was a contact day where the team would be getting in touch with companies and interviewees to help strengthen their stories. For some of us, writing about conflict is a new concept and knowing where to look for contacts, or even approaching them in a sensitive way, can be intimidating or difficult. Pieces that revolve around “this vs that” will require the team to keep an unbiased opinion when interviewing both sides and also when creating their final story. There seems to be lots of progress with Owen, Natalie and Levana’s pieces. Owen has written ⅓ of his article and feels confident that he can get the sources he needs to complete his article. Levana has already conducted some interviews and will be incorporating those into her piece as well.
Today was another day of progress. There was definitely more planning than article writing but it is always better to plan out every step of the way than rush into everything.