Introducing….a portal
It’s been nearly half a million hours since I first emerged into life, half choked on a strangling umbilical chord, skin a fetching shade of blue. I survived that brief battle and have had it pretty easy ever since.
From an early age I was marked out as a storyteller. My happy life as a middle child on a working class housing estate in Shrewsbury seemed exceptionally dull, so I variously reinvented myself as the lost daughter of an Indian kingdom, a child of gypsies who’d been accidentally left by the roadside, and the niece of TV entertainer Russ Abbot.
My name then was Jane Abbott — now it’s Jane Haynes, and I try to tell a different type of story; about real people, places, events and issues happening in the world around me.
Over the course of the next year I will be studying for a Master’s degree in multiplatform and mobile journalism at Birmingham City University.
I want to use this amazing opportunity to focus on telling stories using a range of media but particularly visual and audio. I love writing but want to explore how to best capture and share people’s words and experiences. My ambition is to become less a storyteller and more a ‘portal’ for other people’s stories.
Whose stories do I want to give voice and vision to? Well, not the usual suspects…so if you’re like me I’m not likely to be that interested.
I am a white British woman, and have just discovered I am what the BBC Lab’s Great Class Survey of 2011–13 described as ‘technical middle class’.
There has been plenty of opportunity for women like me to make their voices heard…as politicians, business leaders, influencers, board members and in the media; and through blogs and social media. Not enough opportunities when measured against the cacophony of noise from white middle class men in the UK, but plenty all the same.
To be honest, I’m sick of hearing the sound of my own voice and my own experiences.
I’m way more interested in the stories of people who’ve not had a life like mine. People who are ‘outside’ or ‘other’ than me both intrigue and inspire me in equal measure. People who have something to say but think nobody wants to listen or have spoken and been shut down.
I think one role of journalists is to seek out the quiet ones, the ignored ones, the ones that people talk over, and help them tell their stories in ways that will make people listen. At least, that’s the kind of journalist I want to be.
But let’s not talk about me. I want to hear about you.
