Leyton Orient Work Experience Press Work - Photos

Finally got round to uploading these.. most didn't come out very well for some reason, so here's a couple just for show. Not sure why the pictures are low quality either, the camera's expensive!



(Left) Press Officer Leo Tyrie interviewing Leyton Orient Manager Geraint Williams for LOTV.











Leo Tyrie producing a match report for the Leyton Orient website at half time.








The press box, full of journalists and reporters from local and national media companies, including BBC London and News of the World.











The view!









The announcer's room. Surprisingly technical! Match videos are recorded here and sent to managers and referees to analyse performances.










The pitch before kick off, taken pitchside.

iRun

iDo. Lately I just can't seem to get enough in - usually it's my motivation letting me down, yet this past few weeks I've been on a little health kick and decided to dig out them running boots once and for all.

My last three training sessions have acculumated 11 miles, with my usual run being 4 miles now. Excuse the cliche, but it really makes a difference when you keep at it. I remember my first run, christmas eve 2007 (of all times I choose christmas eve!), and I ran 2 miles and was knackered, couldn't wait for sleep, and that says something because I can never sleep on christmas eve besides this time. I then started progressing, once even managed 3 miles in half an hour! I was chuffed to bits.

Well, skip a good few months, a few holidays, binges, neglection of fitness, and I find myself doing 4 mile runs consecutively. Sure, I can do more, and I realise that whilst writing this I haven't been running today since I was too cold at 6.45am to wake up and run (No worries though, tonight I'll wear socks to bed to aid this), but that said, I still love it!

I've got a gym membership, albeit with a god-awful picture of me, half-dead after running to the gym - hair a mess, sweat dripping down my face, you get the picture... I'm going to cancel this membership, just because I don't use it. The plan was to make it a monthly bill, and go everyday so I could tone up for my trip to Hollywood last month, but that only happened when I got a lift to the gym (defeating the purpose of exercise entirely). However, I have free weights in my bedroom, and miles upon miles of open road to eat up - something I intend to do daily by the start of April.

I did a quiz earlier today (Facebook applications are severly dropping in quality) and there was a question that I got wrong about walking. "The average person walks how many times around the equator in their lifetime?"... I guessed 2, since it was the smallest number, and the world is preeetty big after all. The correct answer? 5.... 5! That is alot of walking! (Roughly 24,901 miles ... times that by 5, and that is a pretty big number I'm sure you'll agree)

There's a fitness application on my phone (soon to be replaced by a big boy touch screen, sorry Sony Ericcson) that measures how far I walk/run, as well as telling me average speed, distance, steps, and calories burnt after inputting a few personal details - clever stuff, and remarkably accurate. According to this, today I have *only* walked 6,525 steps - apparently equalling 3.5miles. Yesterday, where I walked to and from college, as well as doing a 2.5mile run at 7am in the morning (stupid time, I know), I racked up 15832 steps - 9.3miles. So I figure, if I can do this everyday from now until the end of my college term, I will have accumulated 61 days worth of exercise (excluding my regular sunday tennis matches)
Luckily, my phone has a calculator, so will save myself the headache...

In the next 61 working days, I would have notched around 567.3miles.
In the next 61 working days, I would have notched around 152.5miles, running.

Following on from this, if I carry on my daily routine as I am currently doing, it would *only* take me 2,677.5 days to walk around the equator once. So to walk around the equator five times like the average person, I would have to continue doing what I'm doing for *only* 13,387.6 days.
So as long as I can stay alive for 36 years and 7 months, I would have achieved my target!

Simple.

Work Experience at the O's

Saturday 21st March 2009 - My first real experience inside a press office. The venue, Leyton Orient FC, on a matchday. My first thoughts before arriving were mixed; Would I be spending my time watching a football game in a press office? Would I occasionally shadow one of the journalists in the press room? Would I do anything?

It turned out there was only one person there representative of Leyton Orient, a man called Leo Tyrie, whose formal job title was Press Officer, and although there was a handful of old balding trenchcoat-wearing men in the press room, it would be this young suited-up man that would be my guide for the day.
Reveling in the whole experience, I was expecting to be rushed off my feet all day. However, the first hour I could sum up in one word - nothing. Quite literally, there was nothing to do but wait, which I was told was a wait for the teamsheets.
So. We waited for the teamsheets. At the time, I wondered why it took half an hour to make a team sheet, and why this was the only thing on Leo's schedule at 2pm, an hour before kick off; I was quite pensive.
Roll on half an hour, and Leo and I headed downstairs, out of the press office, past the administration offices, past the player's lounge, until we reached the car park - at which point I wondered if Leo had lost his way. But after a little walk, we reached a security guard, who let us into... the tunnel. Both managers came out, gave Leo the team sheets, and off we went upstairs. The whole time, players coming and going, giving Leo - and occasionally me - a friendly nod (One of who I knew, encouraging Leo to detail all of Charlie Daniels' successes at the club upon finding out that we used to play football together years back).
We went this time into the administration offices, where Leo proceeded to write up the teamsheets, with a vital role of my (shadowing) day being correcting the date from Monday to Saturday before giving the sheets out to the press, managers, cameramen etc etc. This was then relayed by Leo onto the Club Website, using an extremely easy-to-use publishing software that I had to take a picture of - simple things!

Another half hour of waiting commenced, with Leo having little to do until kick off. We entered the room where the announcer worked, whose role was to play the matchday music (Funnily, the track played at the end upon the consequent defeat was cleverly entitled "Lose" - the play count of the victorious "Win" had been played twice this season). Again, the switchboards and circuits in this room warranted a picture.

The game kicked off. We took our seats in the press gantry, sitting right above the television camera, with Leo scribbling away odd events in the game throughout the half. The match was a midfield battle - in other words, not worth much of a mention, so I won't. At half time, we hastily strode back to the administration offices, where Leo wrote up half of his match report for the website - The second half of which he later did, whilst I sat in the pub after clocking out.

Second half. A replica of the first, besides the missing opposition goal. Orient had lost. (I would write a figure here, but the play count of "Lose" is depressing, so I'll refrain).
After checking the scores of the other matches (subtly letting out a grin after reading Spurs 1-0 Chelsea), we went back downstairs and departed.

The whole experience was breathtaking, and the lifestyle of a journalist is one of great interest to me. Anyone budding to become a journalist needs work experience, alongside the experience gained, the tips and contacts you pick up will be fundamental in later life. I will hopefully be returning again before the end of the season - this time I might even accept a free pint afterward after refusing one this time due to my barren spell lately.

Pictures to follow.

The Power of Dreams

Take note Seat, Honda have just wiped the floor with television advertisements.
No offence to Seat, but you are one of the least known car manufacturers in terms of reliability, technology, satisfaction, and price. So when you own one of the advertisement boards at Villa Park, chances are people like myself will laugh at your new slogan.

"Where Beauty and Technology come together" - This isn't Seat. This is Seat trying to become BMW. And failing pretty spectacularly in my opinion. I admit, the Seat Ibiza is a half-decent car, close behind the Honda Civic in the hot hatch category. Then again, it's also behind the VW Golf, the BMW 1 Series, even the new Ford KA. So maybe it's visable to promote your unique selling point. The Ibiza is a sports car. Nothing else. So why not promote this?

If you want to promote your technology, maybe head over to the Honda offices, take a pen, some paper, and note take.

Knife crime numbers fall

Let's just hope it can stay this way. I've never thought government were that successful in dropping the numbers of knife criminals, however a fall of 8% of hospital admissions for knife crime is the newest statistic from the National Health Service - with a 14% fall in teenage knife crime victims.
Being a young person living in London, this is more than a relief to hear.
Original report can be found here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7939166.stm

Social Networking or Personal Invasion?

I remember only a year or two ago, when Facebook was on the way to becoming what it is today, when everyone I knew was changing from MySpace to Facebook, leaving the profile-obsessive, bulletin-posting culture of social networking behind.
The one reason I didn't leave MySpace was because I liked to know what my friends were up to - which I could quite easily do by looking at a bulletin, which most people posted a few times a day basically telling others what they got up to that day. Interesting stuff.

Skip forward a year, and I find myself constantly and shamefully checking my Facebook in hope that there's a new 'notification' waiting for me to click; a wall post, picture comment, video comment, status update, anything.
What I've overlooked however is the sheer amount of information available to anyone, Anyone, just on the home page.

Today alone, on my homepage there are 3 status updates, 3 changed profile pictures (one of the people I don't even know), 4 tagged picture albums, multiple friend requests from other people to other people, video posts, wall posts, picture uploads, new events, old events, birthdays, and the extremely intrusive relationship change status.

All of this happens without the user's permission about whom the 'post' may be about.
I remember when I changed my status from Single to In a Relationship, several people commented on my Facebook - close friends and nosey strangers mostly. Yet the amount of people that approached me the next day in college to tell me they had found out - through Facebook - that me and my girlfriend were an item was overwhelming.

In a magazine article for Observer Sport Monthly, there was an article about a then Crystal Palace footballer, Ashley-Paul Robinson, changing his status to 'Travling 2 Bath With Fulham Fingers Crossed'. Needless to say, fellow players of Crystal Palace, managing staff, and the press all found this. Fulham didn't offer him a contract. The player got fined by Crystal Palace for revealing this information. The player now plays for a below-par football team battling in the Blue Square Premier South Division - put into context, about 5 leagues below that of Crystal Palace.

Upon signing up to Facebook and other social networking sites, I am aware of the Terms and Conditions of Use, but it still scares me how much sites like this can reveal about people, whether intended or not to be revealed by the user.
Just when will Facebook stop? When does it become a breach of contract? How is this allowed?