I spent five packed days in Weymouth over the opening of the Olympics with a group of Bristol students who were there for a media camp I’d organised with Weymouth College and the b-side project as part of my Watershed work. The students were using citizen journalism techniques to report on the impact the Olympic Games was having on this small seaside town, using smartphones to post images, text, videos and audio interviews live to a blog.

Up until I spent the evening of 27th July on the beach with our students and 15,000 other people to watch the London 2012 opening ceremony on the huge Live Site screen, I’d been fairly cynical about The Games, especially after reading Ghost Milk by Iain Sinclair – a sustained rant about the development of East London, but I was converted that evening!

The media camp was part of ‘the #media2012 Olympic and Paralympic newswire’ – I’ve been a contributor to this site for Watershed/south west of England for the last year. The camp worked really well with students contributing to a local radio station and a 48 hour print newspaper as well as the blog which has had over 5,000 views. Since our Bristol crew left it’s being updated by students from the Weymouth area until the end of the Paralympics.

Too busy project-managing to take many photographs but did capture a breathtaking moment on mobile  (photo above) when 2012 people waded into the sea with flaming torches – a spectacular sight. There’s a post about the media camp on my citizen journalism work blog here.