Journos in surf victory

A piece on the Nokia Trends Lab competition which was used virtually verbatim on http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/. To see it click here.

Two trainee journalists won an all-expenses-paid trip to South Africa after taking their surfboards and a state-of-the-art mobile phone into a Cardiff river.

Chris Cousens, 22, of St David's, Pembrokeshire and Andy Sloan, 28, of Horsham, West Sussex dived into the freezing waters of the River Taff in Cardiff with a new mobile phone strapped to their boards to win a weekend’s sunshine in South Africa and all in the name of mobile journalism.

The pair are undertaking a Post Graduate Diploma in newspaper journalism at Cardiff Journalism School, but it was their skills as mobile film-makers which earned them the free trip of a lifetime.



The Cardiff school teamed up with Nokia to test out Nokia’s latest mobile offering, the N95. The collaboration was part of Cardiff’s expanding online journalism module and Nokia’s “Trends Lab” experiments. It was designed to explore the possibilities for mobile journalism.

As an incentive to the trainees Nokia ran a competition with the winners being flown out to South Africa to make a film on Nokia’s first Trends Lab experiment in Africa.

Both avid surfers, Andy and Chris wrapped Nokia’s latest mobile in freezer bags and filmed their adventures surfing down Cardiff’s River Taff in search of an imaginary surf spot, Cardiff Reef. Their film was chosen by Nokia and four days later they were on a plane to Cape Town.

Andy said: “I was absolutely delighted. You can’t really argue against a long weekend in Cape Town in December. We only had a few days to get everything ready and it was all a bit of a whirlwind, but what an experience.

“Nokia started out making wellies and the company was named after a river so we decided to splash around in some water to win the prize. It was great fun and a little bit out of the ordinary so I think that’s what sealed it for us. We got a different perspective on Cardiff thanks to the size of the phones and by taking a bit of a risk with them.”

Chris said: “Everything about the trip was fantastic. Cape Town is a breath-taking place, the sun is shining, the locals are friendly and the scenery is stunning. We only had a short trip, but we saw so much; we even made time to go surfing.

“We are so grateful to Nokia and the Cardiff Journalism School for giving us this opportunity. We both learnt so much. Bring on the next competition.”

Matthew Yeomans, lecturer in online journalism at Cardiff, said this was the first time the department had worked with Nokia and it was designed to show how online stories can easily contain more multi-media elements due to the quality of film and sound that can be captured on the latest mobiles.

“The idea was to create a piece of mobile journalism that would tell a story of film, design or music in Cardiff,” he said. “The winners were sent to South Africa for the weekend, which was a great coup for the journalism school and for the trainees.”