A quick debrief..

Monday morning = Debrief morning

We had quite a good bulletin on Wednesday, we're definitely getting better and better. Considering we are continuing to try on new roles within the media team, it feels more safe and secure now with s knowing more what is expected from us. 

The stories are getting better as well as the news team seems to focus more on what the actual story is and how to put this forward in the most interesting way to the audience. Chris gave us some good and interesting tips on how to write links and voice overs, and also how to get the crucial quotes from the interviewees that are needed to create a strong news story. As a journalist, your job is to tell the story with your words and your voice to give the background information - we don't want to hear any background, facts or figures from the interviewee, they are our object for quotes. We want them to give life to the less interesting facts and liven it up with views and opinions, what they think and want to do about the subject being reported on.

Wednesday's stories covered a seasonal bug's outburst in Winchester's Hospital, a court report, students and their parking problems, Trinity Winchester and a lighter story about a one woman band performing at the University of Winchester. There was also a few sports reports covering rugby and non-league football. An alright mixture, but a few too many heavy, hard stories that might not concern our main audience as much as it could.

As always, when covering court reports, legal issues are a big part of it and it must be handled with extreme care, so that no one can accidentally get identified when not supposed to. This weeks court case met all these standards, and was meeting all the legal requirements for being broadcasted live.

Technical issues will always exist, and every week there's something new that decides to mess up in the last minute. This time the green screen caused a lot of hassle before we finally got it to work, and  the auto cue did once again stop working on us. But with issues like these we learn to work under pressure and cooperate as a team to explore new ways of coping with the difficulties - just as we will have to do in real life. 

Traffic was better this time, almost twice as many hits, which is very good news as it inspires us all to work harder to gain an even bigger audience for this week. I think a big part of this has to do with us keeping the website up to date all the time even when it is not Wednesday's and live bulletin days, cause the people interesting in our news would most likely visit our site more often and rely on us more if news, sports and small features would pop in all the time to keep a consistent flow of new material coming in.

Overall we are growing stronger as a team, and I am convinced this week's bulletin will be even better!