At Up To Speed, we pride ourselves in keeping our students on top of all the latest changes and developments in the industry.

Back in February, we set all of our students up with Wordpress blogs and twitter accounts and encouraged them to integrate their output and to use their Facebook pages for the same purpose.

At first, some of our students struggled to see the point, but many realized that this could be an excellent way of spreading the word about their work and themselves.

The results for the group were immediate. The number of unique users visiting our news site Poole People increased by 400% in a matter of weeks, mirroring the experience of other publications. The Daily Telegraph has reported that 8% of traffic to www.telegraph.co.uk comes from social media.

Laura Allard was one of our most devoted tweeters and now it has paid off. Just check out these emails from Laura over the past few days:

Laura Allard, Up To Speed

Laura Quotes

“Sept 9th

I have to thank you for all of this, for all your help, and for getting us to sign up to Wordpress and Twitter all those months ago. My mum was sceptical about Twitter, but it has really helped. I’m really pleased you showed the new group my blog. It has obviously helped me, so I hope it helps them too.

Sept 16th:

How exciting, I am an F1 columnist! I got practically no sleep last night I was so excited after this got published I’ll be writing for the site every Wednesday, and I may be doing some podcasts as well!

http://www.formula1blog.com/2009/09/15/marbles-laura-marieee-09-16-2009-f1-formula1/

Also writing a feature on Lotus for the end of the week for another site as well. ”

So, the proof of the pudding is in the tweeting!

State of Play is like an onion. It makes a politician cry in public, prompting a seasoned reporter to ask whether he’s seeing an old friend’s genuine grief or crocodile tears. As the plot peels gradually away that reporter Cal McCaffrey(Russell Crowe) is forced to face some bitter truths about his life, his friendships and allegiances, and the nature of his work.

McCaffrey is a reporter’s reporter unashamedly of the old school. He’s a scruff, a misfit, an uninvited guest at political functions, a pre-digital dinosaur, but someone with an uncompromising and unquenchable determination to keep asking awkward questions.

This film invites its viewers to confront some awkward questions too about democracy, corruption and the role of journalists in modern society.

But these questions aren’t posed in a ponderous way, because the audience is also expected to keep up with every intricate twist in the story.

When the Congressman(Ben Affleck) says, “you’re a truth-seeker, a seeker after the truth” you might imagine he would be heaping praise on the reporter’s professional integrity, but this film isn’t as simple as that.

State of Play asks us to consider if in our society law and justice, politics and democracy and journalism and truth are each still happily married or separated and confronting irreconcilable differences?

It also harks back to a mythical golden age of journalism in which print reporters always worked thoroughly through trusted sources to produce copper-bottomed stories to reasonable deadlines.

Beware “the bloggers and blood-suckers”, McCaffrey warns as his feisty British Editor(Helen Mirren) fights to please greedy proprietors while heaping praise on digital Della(Rachel McAdam), the paper’s young star blogger.

It’s a notion to warm the cockles of the heart of any old gentleman of the press, but it does rather ignore the fact that for many years press barons enjoyed a licence to print money while advertisers had nowhere else to turn. Not to mention the fact that much of the breaking news in the last sex-scandal to embroil Capitol Hill came not from the fictitious Washington Globe, but from a blogger writing for the Drudge Report.

Still, as all good journalists and screenwriters know, there are times when it isn’t always wise to let the facts get in the way of a good story. Without the odd onion like State of Play, old sages like me would feel completely stuffed.