Radio 1’s Academy, Norwich: Day 2

After an amazing first day at Radio 1’s Academy, I was back in Norwich for another bunch of workshops and Q&A’s and I couldn’t have been more excited!

Tuesday 12th May:

12pm – 2pm: My first workshop of the day was the one I was most looking forward to whilst at the academy. It was a Journalism Workshop: How To Be A Music Journalist. As this is what I aspire to be in the future, this session was right up my street. The workshop was run by Lizz Page, Editor of Outline Magazine, a monthly entertainment magazine distributed around Norwich. There were various tasks that we could pick to do over the two hours, such as writing a 500-700 word feature on how to survive Radio 1’s Big Weekend, review various unreleased songs, learn to take professional photos at concerts and interviewing some surprise guests.

I was interested in this because I had never done an interview before so I thought it would be a great experience for me. As you can imagine, being told you are going to interview a famous band or artist made me slightly excited to say the least. This excitement only grew when we were told that our group would be interviewing number one selling, X Factor winner Leona Lewis. (The other group got to interview Nothing But Thieves, so I’m glad I was with Leona!) We had to research her and find out what she had been up to recently, alongside writing questions to ask her. When we got in the room to talk to her, she was really lovely and very understanding and patient due to it being our first ever interview. We then wrote up our our questions and her answers and it got published on the Outline website – have a read of it here.

Radio 1’s Academy, Norwich : Day 1

For a budding music journalist, the thought of being at Radio 1’s Academy couldn’t be anymore exciting. Who wouldn’t love mingling with Radio 1 DJ’s, famous bands and well known artists, whilst learning the skills to get to your dream job? If you’re going to create an ideal couple of days, the line-up of Radio 1’s Academy would be just that. It was certainly an event that I was not prepared to miss, and thank goodness I didn’t because it went above and beyond my expectations.

For those who haven’t heard of this fantastic event, let me explain. Each year BBC Radio 1 holds ‘Radio 1’s Big Weekend’ in a different location across the UK; it is spread across two days and is the biggest free festival in Europe with around 50,000 people attending each year. Since 2012, ‘Radio 1’s Academy’ has arrived at the same place as the festival, usually around two weeks before the Big Weekend. The Academy aims to inspire young people to turn their passions into a reality and they put on various workshops and Q&A’s to help with this.

I spent two days at the academy attending invaluable workshops and Q&A’s that were truly inspirational.

Monday 11th May:

11am: I arrived at Open, Norwich and explored the Hangout area, which was full of industry experts, a photo booth and instruments to play around and jam with. Attached to this area were the studios that were being used by the Radio 1 DJ’s to broadcast their shows.