When the live bulletin went on air, we discovered that the BJTC weren't around and we all breathed with a bit of relief cause I think we all kind of knew that this week was not as good, content wise, as the week before. We got through the bulletin and everything went quite smooth. The production team pulled it off well, and everyone seem much more calm now and I think part of that is the fact that we've had quite a lot of practice and we've taken the opportunities to run through old scripts just to get the feel and the flow of producing the bulletin and knowing what to do when and how.
Story wise this week was a bit slow. Added to that, the news team was short on staff so once stories started coming in, there was not enough reporters covering the stories. This left the production team, which went out to help covering the stories the news team didn't have enough personnel to cover on their own. Me and Veronica ended up in a spam email drama that took place at the University of Winchester, and we had to tackle different legal issues, such as privacy, and with this learn extra bits and pieces about the law and the different rights you have as a journalist, or 'simply' as a human being in the English society.
On Monday I spent a good few hours trying to sort out the web page once again, tidying it up a bit, making it look a bit more professional and easier accessible. Chris showed me briefly how to work with Fireworks, a problem where you can build different images to look the way you want them on your website. It's brilliant! Apart from the fact that you cannot link different web pages on here, that is using html language to make a direct link to whatever that picture is telling you to read more about. To do this we have to upload the picture we made in Fireworks into Flash to insert the html language from here and eventually upload to the web via another web domain and FINALLY use it from everywhere to access the finalised piece... Sigh... Quite complicated, and taking forever!
Tuesday and half Wednesday was spent trying to get the images, the right people and right information about this spam email going out via the Universities email system due to two members of staff 'ignoring the rules of not giving out their personal details' and therefore indirectly inviting these spam emails to our servers and them being able to access our data bases to multiply themselves to thousands and thousands other email addresses being stored in the University's web base. We managed to turn it into a package in the last minute and it went on the bulletin, which was quite a relief seeing we had spent so much time trying to build it in the first place.
This week I kept my role, which means keeping track of the time all the time within the gallery, making sure everything runs smoothly and no black holes appear on the screen. When I first heard about this role I thought it sounded as quite an easy job, seeing as counting down from 10 can't be too hard. Mistake. It is very intense and time consuming as you have to be absolutely 110% focused all the way through the running time of the bulletin, if you don't give the right timings and keep everyone up to date with what's going on there will definitely be black holes everywhere in your bulletin and it will look absolutely crap! I quite enjoy doing this but I have done it for three weeks now and I feel as if it's time for a new challenge.
Overall, good week. Not great. But on the other hand not bad at all. We've still got things to work on, and my main issue is the fact that we haven't got very many text stories coming through, and therefore not enough material to publish on the website which makes it look out of date from time to time. But we will get there, sooner or later. I'm sure, it just takes its time, like everything else.
1 comment:
I think the bulletin was pretty good
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