Scripting and Counting - naah

We got through another week of Winol. We were 20 seconds under the golden 10 minute limit though. Not brilliant. But not bad. We're on a medium middle kind of standard. But I know we can do better. We need to get more original stories, and not only depend on finding them in the newspapers on Monday or Tuesday -or on the University's Portal page on the Wednesday. This week we kind of ended up with, as Brian said, a top story and lots of 'and finally' stories after that.. Like I said, not brilliant - but we've seen worse.



My role this week consisted of scripting the entire thing together. Quite a slow work as nothing seems to happen for days - and then all of a sudden a million things get thrown at you and you don't really even know where to start. It's not too hard, you put the stories, their links and other vital information into the scripting program, ENPS, and woop it counts out the time for you and tells you whether you're spot on (which never seems to happen at the moment) over or under the 10 minute golden limit. I think I have discovered that my dream would not be to end up as a script writer, but who knows what the future may bring.

As well as scripting this week, I kept my fantastic job - keeping track of the time during the live production in the studio (see previous blog). It is good fun and a little bit nerve wrecking every week as 1 second can screw everything and everyone up - badly! But I think we got through without any difficulties in the end, and even though we were 20 seconds under the 10 minute limit, it worked out much better than we thought it would do an hour before we went live - when we thought we might even had been 1 minute under the limit as a package got cut out of the bulletin with short notice.

In the short debrief after the live broadcast, we got told that we are doing well, but that we can do better. That we still need to think both twice and three times when it comes to legal problems so that we don't end up in dangerous water with news concerning crime and such. Also, all reporters were told that they have to bring their own stories, preferably three each, on Monday mornings so that we have something to play with when we're creating our bulletin, otherwise we will get stressed out every week if one story collapses, and we cannot afford that as we are not that experienced yet. We also need to think a bit more about the hard news vs the softer fluffier news so that there is a nice balance between these two that the audience will appreciate, and return to the following week.

I think that we are doing a great job and I could never have thought that I myself would be working in a TV studio during my Uni time, applying my skills to real life situations and experience what it takes to be a journalist 'out there'. I thought it would be more of a theoretical course where you sit reading your literature everyday, all day, but luckily it isn't! I really do appreciate all the experience we get every week through Winol, and hopefully this will make us more confident once graduated and out there looking for the future job- which hopefully won't be 100% script and counting based...