Imperial War Museum North: War Correspondent – Reporting Under Fire Since 1914

The Lowry shopping centre, restaurants and apartments surrounding it always have an eerie quality to them – it’s so quiet in comparison to Manchester city centre that it’s easy to imagine there’s been a zombie outbreak somewhere. Maybe this will change when the BBC finally completes its move to Media City, but nevertheless the Imperial War Museum North continues to pull in the tourists, and it’s easy to see why when you visit their latest exhibition: War Correspondent – Reporting Under Fire Since 1914.

The exhibition is open until January 2012 and showcases the best of British war correspondents from the last century, focusing on journalists such as Clare Hollingworth, Kate Adie, Maggie O’Kane, Michael Nicholson, Martin Bell, Richard Dimbleby and Jon Simpson. Located on the first floor, the exhibition area is packed floor-to-ceiling with war journalism artefacts including photographs, notebooks and videos.

War correspondents arguably have the most important role in journalism as they are chroniclers of the world’s most important, life-changing events. This exhibition challenges every visitor’s opinion about war and holds their attention throughout – the first exhibit you will meet is a video wall of the now infamous war report in Iraq by Jon Simpson, which showed the cameraman’s own blood trickling over the lens. You cannot look away from these images and the exhibition is designed with precisely that theme in mind.

The Poplar Tree meets award-winning Manchester fashion journalist

Emma Campbell is a freelance fashion journalist and award-winning blog writer based in Manchester. Earlier this year her blog What Emma Did.com was created as a new year’s resolution, but little did she realise just what it would lead to; within nine months she had won Cosmopolitan Magazine’s award for Best New Blog. So how did it all come about?

I meet Emma at a bar in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, well wrapped up in a chic winter coat and with her hair and makeup flawless, she looks every bit the fashion journalist. I catch her just before she is about to attend an event for Mulberry in Manchester’s Spinningfields, and as we begin the interview over a couple of drinks, it quickly becomes clear that she is very passionate about her journalism work.

Charlie Brooker – The Hell Of It All

(Faber & Faber, London, 2009)

The Hell of It All is a new anthology of articles, reviews and observations by the acid-tongued Guardian columnist and TV critic, Charlie Brooker. In his previous collection, Dawn of the Dumb, Brooker was exposed as a highly-strung misanthrope who had an aversion to pretty much everything, and in this new collection compiled from his weekly contributions to the Guardian Guide and Guardian G2, his views remain equally unsullied and uncensored. The book spans two years of cultural observations with the credit crunch in the midst of it all, but Brooker has far nastier things to concern himself with, such as emetophobia, Heat magazine and the return of Gladiators.

The Man is a Genius…

"Carly Zucker freaks me out because her name sounds like a baby trying to say my name."

Screenburn by Charlie Brooker

(Faber & Faber: London, 2005)

Screenburn is a witty anthology of TV commentary from the dawn of the new millennium (circa 2000-2004) and is well worth a visit if you’d like to find out what has changed in broadcasting since then.  During these early years we eagerly awaited holographic screens and smell-O-vision, but these dreams never came to pass, instead we got ONDIGITAL, BBC Choice and a strong dose of reality, a word that terrified T.S.Eliot and one which also terrifies Charlie Brooker, not in the reality of the here and now, nor in a virtual sense, but in the growing obsession with Reality TV.