As the Olympic ticketing process starts coming to an end, the final round of sales finishes on the 17th of this month, I feel it is time to vent a little frustration at reaction of the British public towards what has in reality been a fantastically successful campaign.
The whole issue has, in a rather British fashion, been described variously as a ‘debacle’, a ‘shambles’ and ‘crazy’ by both journalists and the baying hordes of the British public.
But has the whole thing been blown out of proportion? To my mind yes, it has, a rather simple bit of maths and an understanding of the ways in which people deal with ‘losing’ at anything tells us pretty that pretty quickly. In the first round alone 1.8 million people in the U.K applied for a total of 20 million tickets between them, no real surprise then that a few people are a bit miffed, there were only 6.6 million on sale in the first place.
So that’s the maths out the way, now an even simpler part, human nature. Humans hate losing, obviously, this combined with the nature of the British media and its desire to find the ordinary man on the streets’ view on pretty much every news topic regardless of expertise has led to an inflation of the story and also a very lazy bit of journalism. Whack a camera or microphone on and head out on to the street, select the first twenty people you see, plonk them infront of your selected recording device and next thing you know you’ve got yourself a story! “Yeah I got all the tickets I applied for” is frankly a pretty mundane sound byte. Angry people on the other hand makes for a news story which appeals to the public because frankly they didn’t get any tickets either and that’s what the assembled editors behind the desks at pretty much every news outlet have decided will make the cut.
Of course a large percentage of the tickets have gone towards corporate sponsors and of course that doesn’t sit particularly well with me either but, LOCOG aren’t the people who you should be getting angry at. In fact you shouldn’t be getting angry at anyone apart from whoever it was that created modern western capitalist society and I hear he or she is relatively difficult to pin down nowadays, since the financial crisis anyway.
Yes that’s right, until we have a communist Olympics, entirely funded by government with taxes drawn from some sort of big imaginary pot of money which none of us have payed into and therefore can’t get angry about the use of, until every games is held in international waters and has a capacity for the entire worlds population to attend free of charge, until there are no longer any nations competing, just a bunch on identical athletes and until it is ‘just the taking part that counts’ someone is going to be unhappy with some aspect of the Olympics. So you know what, stop complaining and embrace the beautiful diversity; the hodge podge of different cultures, ideas and sports; successes and failures, because that is what the Olympics is all about it is an event which represents the human race at its best and worst all at the same time. That sinking feeling you felt when you didn’t get any tickets and the anger you feel at all those corporate sponsers giving their employees tickets for free is in fact a gift from LOCOG to you because they’re just the feelings that those athletes you’re going to be watching on the other side of the television screen will be experiencing.The ticketing process was the first real event of the London Olympics and you didn’t just get a seat, you were a competitor.
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Guardian Newspaper Tour: Journalism Sure Isn’t Easy
December 7, 2011 in Headstart2012, Journalism | Tags: A New Direction, Benji Lanyado, blogging, Comment is Free, David Shariatmadari, digital media, guardian, Headstart, Ian Prior, Joanna Geary, journalism, kings cross, sports, The Guardian, Tour | Leave a comment
On the 22nd of November Benji Lanyado who works as a travel writer at The Guardian was kind enough to take us on a tour of the paper’s headquarters near Kings Cross in central London.
During the tour we spoke with three editors; Joanna Geary, Digital Developments Editor; Ian Prior, Sports Editor; and David Shariatmadari, Deputy Editor of Comment is Free . They gave us some very informative advice and I was inspired but if I’m honest I also left the building a little scared.
Becoming a journalist is going to be hard. Really hard.
I can hear the voices of an assembled crowd of beleaguered working men and women ringing out across the internet even now “what did you expect you fool? Of course it’s going to be hard. Life is hard.” But blissful ignorance is a wonderful state to be in and as a 17 year old boy I have something of a monopoly on the market for it. So, despite the fact that it was a little immature, I was rather enjoying holding an aspiration to write based mainly on the end goals as opposed to the means, without taking my thoughts very far beyond “I’ll do a bit of blogging” and “I’ll do something with lots of writing in at University”. Clearly I was in serious need of some frank advice.
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