Assignment 2

Tom Lawrenson

The Digital Newsroom

Assignment Two

Story 1

Current world football freestyle champion John Farnworth has found himself in the Guinness book of world records for his amazing 83 ‘around the worlds’. The trick is for the foot to pass completely around the ball without letting it touch the ground in one minute.

John, 22, from Longridge broke his own world record in order to find his way into the newly published edition of the book. His amazing tricks and skills have brought him worldwide praise after performing his special talents across the globe.

Now John, whose family are all Blackburn Rovers fans, has teemed up with football manufacturer Mitre to design a ball that will help make it easier for other freestylers to copy and emulate his tricks.

He said, ‘I have designed this ball alongside top ball technicians to make the ultimate football freestyle ball.

‘If anyone wants to take up football freestyle, this is the ball to use’.

John who has performed and judged this year in Dubai, Spain, Switzerland, France, Thailand, Denmark, Holland, Germany, Turkey and china is keen to use his position as a role model to inspire youngsters to follow his lead and achieve their goals in life through commitment and endeavour.

A former pupil at St Cecilia’s High School, Longridge, John showed great promise as a footballer when he was a boy and was on the books of Preston North End and also played for Preston Town and Preston College as a youngster.

Although one of the most skilful performers on the football pitch, John was frustrated on the pitch as a youngster settling for roles on the bench rather than in the starting eleven. John’s size held him back from starting roles as a youngster but it was this that sparked his amazing venture into the world of freestyle football. After reading ‘learn to play the Brazilian way’ by Simon Clifford John was on his way to stardom, determined to prove people wrong about his football ability and has since been crowned World Freestyle champion. Not bad for a lad from Longridge.

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=110212674116841624483.00045d7769838493e1185&ll=46.073231,42.363281&spn=54.341349,112.5&z=3

Story 2

The cold windswept sodden pitches of the north of England, the bruising, crunching tackles, the scrappy local derby’s, this is what football used to be like in the north. Now a new style of football is developing across the county, football freestyle and trick competitions are every youngsters favourite game as they try to emulate their hero Cristiano Ronaldo and other high profile footballing wizards. This introduction of skilful foreign flair players is changing the way young English footballers now see the game, every youngster now wants to have the Cristiano Ronaldo step overs and the Kaka flicks rather than the gritty hard tackling background of the players from the 70s and 80s.

Three young players from the Lancashire area have all made the headlines recently for their tricks and flicks and special football talent. The three boys in question are John Farnworth (world freestyle champion), Alex Marrow (Trafford centre skills winner) and Jordan Macquarrie (Sky One’s street striker), all these young football fanatics have found fame and fortune from tricks and showboating in the local Blackburn area.

World freestyle champion John Farnworth, of longridge, found fame and fortune by becoming World Freestyle champion and also made his way into the Guinness book of world records by producing some outstanding moves and tricks across the globe to gain world wide recognition.

Alex Marrow, of Manchester, signed professional contracts with Blackburn Rovers last season after being spotted in the Trafford Centre shopping mall. He wasn’t there for the shopping though, he was taking part in a tricks competition and was spotted by a watching scout. After impressing the scout he was approached and was offered a weeks trial at Rovers Brockhall training ground and after a successful week was offered a professional contract with the premier league club. Not bad for doing a few keepy ups at a shopping centre.

And finally Jordan MacQuarrie, 16 years old from Blackburn, Jordan a life long Blackburn Rovers fan will be competing in sky One’s Street Striker hosted by Manchester United star Wayne Rooney, he will be competing against 24 other hopefuls across the country to win the Coke zero award. Jordan’s skills have also seen him appear on Match of the day and Sky sports.

So the old stereotypes of football in the north appears to be changing as an exciting new breed of young footballers appears from this hotbed of English football. This is certainly a story of young hopefuls living the dream.

Tom Lawrenson

Sports Journalism

Digital Newsroom

Assignment 2

In this part of the assignment I will be discussing the strengths and weaknesses in my work, I will also be giving my reasons as to why I chose to do what I have done in this piece.

In this assignment we were asked to create two stories that are relevant to the Lancashire area and create a digital piece that would go with the writing to create a suitable story for online journalism.

The two stories that I chose to write on where John Farnworth the local World Freestyle Champion and his rise to fame and I also wrote about the rise in local lads choosing to play freestyle and turning their backs on the old stereotype of the northern footballer. I chose these articles because its something that interests me in being a sports journalist. The story of three local lads finding fame at a young age through football is a good inspiring story for the local people to be reading about, and usually northern lads from the Lancashire area are kept out of the lime light and I wanted to tell people that anything can be achieved no matter what your roots, you can be a world star. I could see this story as a good solid online piece that would interest the local area and give people an insight into what the young people across the county are achieving, I think this would give people a good insight into the lives of young people across the north west.

I got the idea after watching a clip of John Farnworth on youtube and I read somewhere that he was from Preston so I thought it would be a good idea. After reading further into the subject and reading up on the sport I found a couple of other young people from the Lancashire area who had achieved fame and success from their football ability, so I thought It all tied in together to make a really good newsworthy story. After reading about John on his website I decided to do a whole story dedicated to the rise of freestyling and also wrote about John’s success all over the world. After writing John’s story I started to think about how to write the second, as freestyling is seen as a modern sport and something new and exciting I decided to compare it to the old stereotype of the north with its cold, dark wet winters and gritty mentality and I thought I could make a bit of a good contrast to the two styles. One style raised in Brazil and South America creating something beautiful and very technical to something very different in the way northerners perceive fancy footballers like Cristiano Ronaldo added to the northern mentality. The two other players where Alex Marrow the keepy uppy champion of the Trafford Centre who earned a contract with Blackburn Rovers and the other Jordan MacQuarrie a local college lad appearing on the show ‘Street Striker’ hosted by Wayne Rooney.

After coming up with two suitable linking stories I needed to come up with a digital aspect to put in with the story. After playing around with the idea of what to use for the piece I decided to include an online map. I wanted to use something visual and attractive to the eye that would look good in the story and something that the reader would find interesting and learn from. I felt that a video clip might have been good but tracking down John Farnworth was mission impossible and also I felt that an audio clip wouldn’t be suitable on the subject matter, the reader wouldn’t really be interested in something. I looked into what could be used for the piece and when reading all about John’s travelling across the globe I thought it would be a good idea to put a map on where he’s been and what he’s achieved in the different countries he’s visited. Using the text format in the box I could include the achievements and events that had taken place in each country that John had visited. This would give people an idea into what John has achieved in the freestyling world and what he has done to get there.

Creating the map on my google account seemed like an easy task but it was very time consuming and quite difficult to get to grips with the system. But after hours of tinkering around with the programme I became more confident with how to use the place sites and pictures. Getting my own pictures onto the map however proved to be a difficult task. And overall the map does its job in telling people about John’s life and travels across the globe, the local lad from Preston achieving his dream across the world.

The strong points in my assignment I think are the choice of stories that I chose to cover. I think that both are current and still in the publics eye and would interest them when reading it and also the local factor will interest people and hit my target audience. The articles are also about something that rarely gets covered, little is known about freestyle football and the current world champion happens to be from Preston but the press and public would barely recognise him in the street, so its good to get peoples attention on the subject and inform them that the north west is pretty good at it and that these people need a bit of recognition.

I also think the map works well in the piece as a good visual to the contrast of the text in the story. The image of the map breaks up the text and gives the reader something to visualise rather than an audio clip that would leave them needing to use their imagination.

I think that my assignment went well because I believe that I chose an interesting topic which I enjoyed writing about as it was a local sporting feature. If I were to start the project again I would make a couple of changes to the piece. I would have liked to include another digital link in the story with a video clip showing off some of the skills that won John the World title, as this would have shown people the talent and dedication that is needed to succeed in freestyle football. Some of John’s clips need to be seen to be believed, as his tricks are simply unbelievable. This would have given the reader a good perspective into his chosen sport.