Prince Laryea: Navigating Journalism, Data, and Dreams at Birmingham City University
Prince Laryea aspires to work for an organisation like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) or The Guardian, and the 21-year-old from Quinton, Birmingham, believes that the MA Data Journalism course at Birmingham City University (BCU) will help him achieve that incredible feat. Prince is no stranger to BCU since he completed his undergraduate in Media and Communications at the very institution in 2023. In recent years, the 21-year-old has developed a keen interest in working on stories highlighting how minorities and the black community are affected by issues. Marvel’s Black Panther (2018), a major hit, starring Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o and Letitia Wright among others acted as a source of inspiration for Prince’s dissertation. “I used the representations from Black Panther as a source for my dissertation. I enjoyed the presentation of a black community unaffected by colonialism,” he said. “I looked at an area of subjects such as the portrayal of black women and men. The role of heroes and villains,” Prince continued and added that he used textual analysis for the methodology.Furthermore, Prince examined the basic issues of representation and stereotypes of black people in the media on a basic level, “On a deeper level, I explored ideas about the various black identities that there are. And even two that seem similar have significant differences. These differences are other areas of media study such as class and social environment,” he said. Prince hopes to build on what he began in his dissertation, “But I do think that I’ll work on stories more about real-world events rather than movies. Just because I think journalism is based on news rather than films,” he revealed. The 21-year-old believes that the MA Data Journalism programme will equip him with journal writing skills and enable him to obtain a better understanding of data utilisation.
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