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Creating a fairer Britain
On the evening of Monday 17 January 2011 the Commission held a special workshop for media practitioners to discuss the findings of the Not just another statistic research and to consider the role of the media in forming public opinion.
The aims of the event were:
The workshop was chaired by Andy Collinson from ITV Wales and featured journalist speakers with lived experience. Jake Bowers is Britain’s only Romany journalist and he spoke of his experiences as a journalist and a Gypsy. He also spoke of violence he had witnessed as a result of biased reporting about Gypsy communities. Juliet Jacques is a trans woman who writes about her experiences of gender realignment in the Guardian. She spoke about the importance of consulting with communities or individuals before writing about them.
Committee member Siân Gale gave an overview of the research findings focussing on the findings relating to media portrayal. Local representatives from the voluntary sector facilitated the discussion with delegates, and gave them a Welsh perspective on the issues raised.
We were delighted with the number of delegates with twenty-five journalists, writers and programme makers attending, representing S4C, BBC Wales, ITV Wales, the Western Mail along with freelance professionals.
The delegates discussed barriers to accurate portrayal what they will do differently as a result of attending the event. Feedback from the event was entirely positive, and we are considering several ideas to take this work forward.
Andy Collinson has spent 20 years working in Wales as an on screen journalist and programme maker before moving into management in his current role as programme editor of Wales Tonight. Formerly he was the chief reporter and features editor of ITV Wales News, series editor of Wales This Week and launch Producer/Director of Fishlock's Wales. He was also the former National Executive Council member of the NUJ for Wales, a trained senior lay negotiator and founding chair of the union's Wales Council.
Andy is diversity champion for ITV Wales and helped to set up a panel bringing together ITV Wales staff and senior representatives of the diverse communities of Wales. Recently he has become an ITV group-wide Talent Champion covering issues of sexuality.
Outside work, he is also working on new ways of linking diverse communities with the media of Wales.
Juliet Jacques is a Brighton-based freelance journalist, best known for documenting her gender reassignment in her Transgender Journey column for The Guardian.
Born in Redhill, Surrey in 1981, Juliet realised that she was transgendered at the age of ten, although she did not decide to transition until she was 27. Meanwhile, she studied History at the University of Manchester and then Literature & Visual Culture at the University of Sussex, before branching into journalism and publishing books and articles on experimental film and literature, music and gender.
A sometime musician and footballer (who played in the 2008 Gay & Lesbian World Cup and co-founded the Justin Campaign against homophobia in football), Juliet is also an occasional performance artist, appearing in London recently in a revue of transgender and queer storytellers. She has close links with charities such as the Gender Trust and the Clare Project support group for transsexual people, and helps to organise events for the city’s queer and transgender communities.
Juliet’s column, on the Life & Style section of the Guardian website, represents the first time that the gender reassignment process has been serialised for a major British publication. Her articles detail her experiences in coming out to her family, friends and colleagues, and managing the changes to her body, as well as the challenges faced in modifying her appearance and voice, and dealing with transphobia in wider society.
Jake Bowers is Britain's only Romani journalist and broadcaster. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian, Independent, BBC Radio and Television, the Big Issue, Travellers Times and the Ecologist on environmental and minority rights issues. He trained as a staff journalist with the BBC and one of Britain's biggest regional publishers Johnson Publishing.
He combines a journalist’s respect for the truth, with a Gypsies access and insight into his own community to conduct research and programme making for central and local government, statutory agencies, voluntary groups and the media. He is also the editor of Travellers Times Online and Gypsy, Roma Traveller History Month magazine.
Browse the 'Not just another statistic' web pages for the research report, supporting documents and real life digital stories.