Put through their paces turning many heads, the twenty members of the University’s Rugby team were stripped off to their shorts, and escorted around the City Centre made to do sit ups, before finally being auctioned off to the highest bidders.

The fun-filled event helped to raise money and awareness for the Raising and Giving (RAG) week – a charity set up and ran by the University.

Dan Hatjiosif, a final year Business management student, and chairman of the rugby club, expressed: “The University’s Rugby team take part in ‘the annual rugby fundraisers event’ every year, we normally raise a whopping £1,000! Half of the money is going to RAG, the other half goes towards the Rugby club for training facilities.”

For more information on the RAG charity visit http://www.cusu.org/.

By: Gemma-Louise Johnson

It was announced at the begining of last year, that the Govenment had given both the music and film industries a year, to arrange a voluntary agreement with internet service providers on how to over come the fast growing problem of illegal file sharing.

It is estimated that six million people download files illegally each year, costing the music industry a whooping loss of 1 Billion pounds.

One suggestion put forward by the music industry, was to adopt the french model, whee a warning message is sent to users who frequently download music and film material illegally. Should this message be ignored, users could face instant suspention or closure altogether. Alternative methods included a filtering based system which could inicially block illegal file sharing altogether.

According to the Times newspaper, “Govement proposals under consideraton suggests that internet service providers would be required to take action over users who access pirated material through their via account.”

By: Gemma-Louise Johnson

Sat in the very room she studied in, having been up since 3AM (current time 1PM), Madeline told of how she successfully completed 2 weeks work experience at the Bear, in Stratford during 2001 – the exact week 9/11 hit the headlines. She said, “We were pulling 24 hour shifts trying to find out how it was affecting people locally, so we had to find people who had family out their.”

Pulling off her work experience with much enthusiasm, she was offered back to work as a freelancer 2 days a week. When asked by lecturer John Mair why they kept her on, she replied, “Once you show your willing to do it, your only the dogs body for a short amount of time, they’ll pick up on it and fast track you through.”

Madeline bigged up commercial radio some what, by stating that it’s a great place to start when graduating because “all Touch FM reporters are straight out of Uni.” Commercial radio isn’t all boring reporting, “its light hearted stuff too,” so much so that ‘Touch’ Stratford journalist Adam Westbrook, recently generated a story about the Worcester and Warwickshire areas becoming popular amongst the celebrities to relocate to, from London with Football sensation Germaine Defoe being amongst the favourites.

Conversing of how her skills learnt at University have benefited her career, Madeline finished off by expressing, “The Media Law still helps me today when I’m covering court cases. Not just that but the advertising too, you can’t sit their and say I’m studying journalism and that’s all I need. You have to be the jack of all trades – it doesn’t just involve that.” Jotting down contact details, students went away from this lecture with a positive outlook for a commercial future.

By: Gemma-Louise Johnson

After watching FPS Doug on Pure Pwnage, who had a hard time comprehending the difference between gaming and reality, I was all set to go and test the respawn times and lag in real life. From the beginning to the end of proceedings, it was a dangerous affair with what can only be described as a menagerie of vicious characters who would continue to shoot you when you were trying to get off the map.

Firstly, getting your friends altogether and organised is much more difficult in real life than in games, especially games with a decent party system such as Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3. Our group took a whole hour to finally get together. Moreover, getting to the indoor arena took a solid fifteen minutes, which is a massive difference to the quick loading games we experience on our consoles. So far, I was not impressed, and this mood did not improve when I discovered that it would cost me £31 of my own money for the pleasure, and a miniscule amount of ammo that I would normally use in the first five minutes of any FPS.

The worst was yet to come, as we were all handed Killzone-esque masks, a big boiler suit, and was forced to stuff my poor coat into a locker and wear some incredibly muddy shoes. How anyone could fight in this attire, I do not know. When I play FPS, I just wear whatever I want and sit down in front of my glorious TV; I don’t have to dress up. However, I’m reliably informed that some fanboys and cosplayers wish to dress up in the attire associated with their favourite games when they play them, which I can assure you is not my bag.

Then, just as I thought we would be going to lay the smackdown in the arena, the “Marshall” took us into a bizarre little classroom to teach us how it all works. The controls are actually pretty good in real life actually, a lot of the stuff such as jumping and getting into cover are done automatically, and there’s only a trigger when firing a gun, and now pesky grenades to worry about. However, reloading is completely flawed, you had to actually open each canister and open the cartridge to fill it up. When I discovered this, I was suitably outraged, but carried on in the name of good journalism regardless. This “Marshall” business was not what I was expecting though, if a game tried to bark orders at me during a multiplayer showdown, I would just ignore it and dish out my own brand of justice.

Going on to talk about the respawning system, I did enquire about this to the aforementioned “Marshall”, and was informed that there are no respawns, at least not in his religion. Moreover, there was not a lot of lag during the games, but we were only playing with 10 players, and we were all interfacing over real-life connections. Also, the rumble and force feedback seemed to be much more pronounced in real life, and you could actually tell where you have been shot, which proved to be a vocal point of discussion. “That one in the head hurt” said one person, “I’m sore after that one” proclaimed another. Is this really a good thing? Surely us gamers enjoy games because they don’t kill us.

Furthermore, there were yet more differences between FPS and real life. Did you realise that you don’t get a HUD when playing paintballing? You have no indication of ammo, no on-screen reticules, and your helmet gets incredibly dirty and fogged up. However, the difference in graphics and definition was so pronounced that it proved gaming has a long way to go to match their real-life equivalents. I’ve heard that real-life runs even better than the 1080p 24 Frames Per Second pinnacle of technology, and the screen size is simply incredible, offering a maddeningly expansive panoramic format. The sound was also pretty good as well, going beyond that 7.1 barrier and achieving full 3D sound. All this contributed to the amazing atmosphere, which was much more involving, scarier, and fun than that of Team Fortress 2, for example.

So what did my hundreds of hours of gaming teach me about fighting in the real world? According to the media, I should have been a fully-trained one man army, having powers akin to that of Rambo. In actuality, I was scared, tired, bruised, and actually terrible at shooting my enemies. I was so bad that other people had to humour me after my pitiful performance. I used up all my ammo over the course of one round, I couldn’t hold the gun right, I couldn’t take cover properly, and I was shot. Jack Thompson would probably be better at Paintball than me. The media has lied to me once more, and I am quite disappointed actually, and I guess we have to look in different places for something to blame.

The first movie in the series, Bender’s Big Score, is a delightful return to Futurama’s witty and fast-paced sci-fi comedy, which has been painfully missing for a long while. The film clocks in at a respectable 90 minute length, with some great extras in the form of a full episode of “Everybody Loves Hypnotoad” and “A Terrifying Message From Al Gore”.

The plot of the main feature sees the return of the Planet Express Crew after their firing by the “brainless morons” at the BOX Network, and quickly evolves into complicated paradoxical adventures in time, handled with some brilliant humour and one liners coupled with the bizarre melodrama of Earth being taken over by Scammer Aliens, which is funny enough in itself to make anyone laugh.

Furthermore, the creators of the show have let FOX know their feelings in-show, with them being the highlight of a running gag regarding the aforementioned BOX Network being ground up into a fine pink powder that has miraculous powers, entitled “Torgo’s Executive Powder”. This is used to alleviate pain, assist surgeries, provide seasoning, and feed heads in a jar, amongst other uses. With such a diverse range of applications, the powder makes numerous appearances.

Overall, Bender’s Big Score is a wonderful feature by itself, which is a return to form for the franchise and a precedent set for the other movies to follow in the coming year. While other cartoon franchises like The Simpsons and Family Guy are stagnating due to constantly pumping out episodes, the long break has really benefited Futurama. However, the DVD is lacking the all important visual quality due to the transfer of the content to the DVD. There is artifacting, blurring, and lack of colour in some scenes, which is rather disappointing for fans, and bewildering to people new to the franchise. Regardless, this is the best cartoon film of the year, beating The Simpsons Movie amongst others. At the time of writing, the DVD is only available in the US, with no release dates announced for the rest of the world.

Following this unveiling, a challenged Alan Kirby confirmed that the Coventry Telegraph is also evolving in the online space, with a brand new website and ultra-local sites divided by postcodes. The focus of these sites will be user-created content that is relevant to more local people. Kirby also had a dubious view that “video is less popular than text for news”, but later made it clear that he is fully behind the “digital revolution” of which he is spear-heading in Coventry with the Coventry Telegraph, and wants users to start submitting all kinds of content when the new sites are launched. Griffee, sensing that Kirby was a little disturbed by the BBC’s plans, offered some words of reassurance, stating that the service is not designed to “compete with newspapers”, and later broke it down to the fact there are only 5 radio stations but there is 66 newspapers in the West Midlands.

A much more upbeat Kirby went on to talk about how the current website, IC Coventry, is doing roughly a million a month “page impressions”, and showed that newspaper sales are definitely going down, and websites are continuing to improve and grab larger numbers. However, the Coventry Telegraph is still the highest priority, and apparently exclusives that appear in the newspapers are embargoed for web use until a preset time later on during the day. Griffee took this opportunity to reiterate the BBC’s policy of featuring a story as soon as it breaks across all of the forms of media it covers, but one can imagine that with enhanced budget constraints, such a luxury would be rare.

Numbers for both the Coventry Telegraph and the BBC Local Radio Station stand at roughly 50k each at the moment, which isn’t that good in the grand scheme of things, and a definite sign that online is the way forward. The visitors both went on to explain that nearly all of their journalists are being trained in more skills, highlighting the importance of online as a catalyst for obtaining larger audience coverage. Despite being nervous, Kirby felt the need to show his reserve in the face of such stiff competition, and said that this is “one of the most exciting times for newspapers”, but looking at the figures, it’s hard to agree with him.

Kevin Marsh, Editor for the BBC College of Journalism, and former Editor of Today on Radio 4, visited our wondrous department this week in one of John Mair’s extremely exclusive Wednesday Coventry Conversations. The turnout wasn’t great, which didn’t do much to sway Marsh’s increasingly erratic mood, but he did have some interesting things to say to prospective students. Firstly, he expressed that “you’re there to report the story, not to get involved”, whilst referencing gullible Gilligan’s tenacious ways. Moving on, he made his opinions strongly known on audiences, stating that “more people get news from radio than TV”, which is a pretty bizarre statement when you take into account audience figures for TV news. By this time, it was evidently clear that he was defending a medium that is under a huge amount of pressure from competing media.

Going back to the hot topic of the day, he let slip that “editors don’t usually ask who or what sources are in case of leaks”, which evidently later became a huge downfall for him when Gilligan got it wrong. Furthermore, he was of the opinion that there is “nothing special about Downing Street complaining” about an item or what was said in the programme. This kind of erratic, mad behaviour shouldn’t be a point of contention though, as he clearly can get the job done and knows the journalism industry like the back of his hands, but what should be a point of contention was that his attitude didn’t engage the audience into the subject matter, and actually made them feel belittled. One student stated that he was “put off journalism altogether now”. If figureheads like this are invited back to Coventry University, they should offer a much more balanced outlook with a positive attitude, as well as being a figurehead for which students can aspire to imitate in the future.