Dancing About Architecture

Dancing About Architecture – Free Music Journalism Course

Dancing About ArchitectureGood news – Dancing About Architecture, a new, free music journalism course has just been announced.  Bad news – It’s already oversubscribed… 

Good news – Dancing About Architecture, a new, free music journalism course has just been announced.  Bad news – It’s already oversubscribed…

Dancing About Architecture is a brand new, totally free music journalism course that will try to teach you all you need to know about working as a music journalist in Ireland and elsewhere.

See, you don’t have to pay €900 to learn how to be a music hack. You don’t even have to come to a course like Dancing About Architecture but, if you do, we promise you will enjoy yourself.

The course will take place upstairs in McGrattan’s (76 Fitzwilliam Lane, off Lower Baggot Street, Dublin 2) on the four Tuesdays in November. We kick off on November 2 at 6pm and there will be three one hour lectures each night.

We’ve rounded up some of the best music journalists in the country to pass on their experience, information and guidance to budding music journalists.

Once, they were wannabes too – now, they write about and talk about music for a living.

The Dancing About Architecture course will be open to 30 people on a first-come-first-served basis. You don’t have to come along every week if you don’t want to or can’t make it. You don’t even have to stay for the entire three hours if you have pressing engagements elsewhere. There will be an extensive reading list which you may or may not want to read. We’ll also give you some music journalism assignments if you want to do them, but it’s not mandatory. It’s up to you.

This course is entirely free. You won’t be paying a bean for this. Not a cent. Not even payment in kind.

You see, jobs in Irish music journalism (paid ones at least) are almost non-existant at the moment. It’s also hard to get worthwhile work experience or internships, save the kind of work experience or internships where you’re just the skivvy. Dancing About Architecture is happening because a few working journalists have decided to come together and give those not yet working in the sector or being paid for their work a helping hand for free.

What we’re going to try to do is give you the best advice from those working in print, broadcast and digital music journalism in Ireland. Putting that into practice is up to you.

So far the schedule looks like this:

Week 1: Start Me Up
An introduction to setting out on your possibly ill-advised career in music journalism.

Speakers:

  • Jim Carroll
    Music journalist with The Irish Times. The man behind the blog On The Record. Co-founder of the Choice Music Prize.
  • Sophie Gorman
    Editor of Day and Night at the Irish Independent.
  • Sinead Gleeson
    Freelance music/arts journalist with the Irish Times and Sunday Business Post. Frequent contributer to The View, Arena and The Last Word.
  • Una Mullally
    Journalist with the Sunday Tribune. Presenter of Ceol ar an Imeall (TG4).

Week 2: Digital Love
ZOMGcopter + music on teh Internetz

Week 3: TV On The Radio
From playlists to payola – music journalism in broadcasting.

Week 4: Weird Turn Pro
Turing a hobby into a ‘real’ gig. And getting paid for it.

More details on the Dancing About Architecture blog at http://irishmusicjournalism.wordpress.com

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