Student demonstration in London - short version

This is the shorter version of the student demonstration that took place in London on 10/11/10. This package was produced for Wichester News Online (WINOL) and broadcasted with the weekly news bulletin on 17/11/10.

TV Masterclass - the do's and don'ts...

So, just a few important points made at the TV Masterclass

Overall:

contact book - contacts, relations - not only phone calls, face to face contact will give you more information and more detail straight away

targeted audience - think WINOL land - 500 viewers would be the golden target

be more ambitious than last year since were a bigger team - team work absolute vital!

Generally: sport - men, feature - women (balance)

Bulletins:

put work in before monday morning - always bring at least two stories - it's about people not an issue

press officers will not help you and call you back and won't be helpful

talk to the affected people first - for example the Union if job cuts - then council

hit problems and overcome them = success

no need to explain how we've done things or haven't been able to do something

we are journalists

persistance!

right place right time!

you need to write text stories and have photo to go with it this semester and publish on the site alongside with the VT

Harry Evans book! to get the style right

take still photos when you're out and about

fight for your stories to get them in the bulletin and justify why you want it in there

prep before output - watch and scrutinise daily TV bulletins - half hour every day

running order - why to put which story in what order - think of your audience (1,2,3 story)

organisation of bulletin

balance

reporters - hero reporter/presenter that you respect, story crafter

deconstruct, interpret and use in your own work

listen to links (!) - worst aspect at minute - ours are being overlooked at minute - not least important - explain it in link prior to it

*start piece with natural sound - not through reporter

*conflict = story = angle

*develop a story

*soften things - it makes things more natural

*humanise/personalise the story

*change camera around to get different angles for same shot (sequence)

*framing - we shoot in thirds

*best picture first to engage people in your story

*don't start with PTC (piece to camera)

*no guilty signs

Phrases to ban:

I couldn't find a story/feature (- lots of stories going all the time)

I want to do a story about the ... recession (worse than 1)

you have to talk to actual real people, most read papers - especially local ones, listen to radio stations, bulletins

I couldn't do the story cause they didn't ring me back - you can't be passive as a journalist

too little too late - don't use

remains to be seen - don't use

I spoke to (name)... / I'm at (place)... - don't do - use captions

Targets:

women sport and other sports (not only football) better mix

not rely on highlight packages every week

one featured team from campus in bulletin each week

cultivate sport

Production:

a bit more ambitious with production - especially since we've got the tricaster now so use it more from outside the studio (OB's preferably 1 a week etc)

work on projects, not only the bulletin, such as updating the intro, the look at the show, green screen

team has to get trained in using Joomla (CMS - content management system)

and also some Flash training to be able to make headers and such on website

Features:

a lot more pictures, photography, think visually!

feature program to go on back of WINOL bulletin

booker - someone to book guests etc - maybe a first year student?

need to be more fun and eye catching

cross pollination between departments to promote each other

WINOL Debrief - May 12th

Last weeks live edition of WINOL was probably one of the slickest, best looking and most news worthy bulletin we have managed to put on air so far. The stories were all in on time, luckily there was not many technical problems in the studio, or out on the field, and everybody knew what they were doing and everyone gave 100% in doing so. I think mostly this was thanks to the live general election coverage we hosted the week previous to last, when we all worked producing live television for hours and hours, and thanks to everything we learnt this evening, it was easier to put together the 10 minute WINOL bulletin than it has been before. Overall, the bulletin ran over with 10 seconds, which is the best running time so far - and I am sure it would have been spot on if the VT-computer had not frozen at the start of a package. Sound is still a hard nut to crack, and it seems we might need to focus on this issue in our practice run on Wednesday to perfect this, and as director it might be worth shouting even louder for the sound guy to hear what is going on.

The traffic was unfortunately not very high, only just under one hundred people watched it on LiveStream, and as Chris pointed out that we need to promote ourselves better with leaflets, social networking and other ways to promote what we are doing. One thing that might help is bringing back 'Date of Fate' which attracted quite a big audience every week, and maybe develop other similar type of shows that can attract an audience which might stay around our website to not only watch this, but also read our text stories and familiarise themselves with who we are and what we are doing every week, and hopefully want to keep coming back to our news service.

"Symmetry is boring"

Chris Horrie

Some technical details... Chris mentioned that we should not keep the presenter in the center of the camera, as this is very symmetrical ... and boring. Play around with the angles and get a more interesting and asymmetrical shot so that the audience can be a bit more entertained... Also, we should zoom in tighter on the presenter to give a feeling of him/her telling the news in your face, like a friend would. Additionally we have to get better at writing the scripts. At the moment they are alright, but they need some polishing and we definitely need to simplify them. We are telling the news. Simple. Not features. Complicated. So we need to keep the language structure simple so that everyone can digest what has been said first time around, cause you will not hear it twice. A more factual, less poetic script!

First package on air this week was Stuart's which, as always, delivered an excellent piece - this week about Winchester's own Conservative candidate Steve Brine and his first day in Westminster after the coalition had been made official. Potentially, there could be some juxtaposition going on in the piece when speaking about a former member of Parliament as the same time as the Cromwell statue is being shown - Cromwell former member of Parliament? Throughout the package the scripting improved and towards the end it was excellent, and the piece the camera was spot on perfect.

Secondly Grant provided a very well balanced package with an almost perfect script. As a pay off we all have to improve though, and cannot keep saying "wait and see" and such, it needs to be more concrete and definite! Like Chris said, a "near perfect package"!

Following these two political packages, Joey contributed with a well balanced piece about a race row that broke out at the University of Winchester during one of the BOP nights. Even though the angle was good, it might have been possible to have made it even more distinct. It was technically not excellent, but the script was simple and very good for a news package.

Last one of the more heavy news packages on the agenda for the bulletin was Claire's report on teenage pregnancy in Hampshire, and how it's risen throughout the last years. Unfortunately this was more of a featury package than news one, but a very good one. There was also quite a lot of comment going on, which tends to lean towards feature as well, since you are not allowed to comment in news.

At this point sports should have made an entrance, but this week we didn't have very much at all, except for Josh talking for a minute about rugby and what will happen later on this year. This basically due to the football season being over, and the sports team not being able to find very much else going on in and around Winchester.

Finally, Paul added some flavour to quite a heavy bulletin with his story about award winning tea - even though it was good it missed a bit of balance, and also that sting that makes people more interested in it. A nice puff piece to finish off one our best bulletins so far, which we all were very pleased with.

Hopefully, with BJTC coming around for an inspection this week, we can produce just as a good bulletin again!

___

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Election Night goes LIVE Gonzo Style

Question Time at the University of Winchester

SUCCESS!!

This weeks edition of Winol was a great success! Everything got puzzled together in time, and we all had a few spare hours to practice the live edition and to change bits and pieces that didn't work and needed slight changes.

The week overall was quite busy. Monday was spent, as usual, for the news team with them focusing on their news stories, interviews, GV's and such, and it seemed they managed to work very well as a team this week, cause almost all the stories met the deadline - which hasn't been the case previous weeks! Monday on the production front was spent to redesigning our webpage, and I learnt a great deal about how to do these things, how to work the different modules around and import audio and/or video from other URL's and being able to use them on our site to make it a bit more alive. Chris guided me through Joomla, and even though I have always seen these technical IT things as very complicated, I think I understood way more than I thought I could learn about URL's and html in my life.

Tuesday was a quiet day in the newsroom as team News were out and about sorting their stories out, sports more or less done with theirs - as always, they've been spot on time every week so far (I think!) - and we, production team could focus on the few written stories that had been submitted over night and publish them on the website.

Wednesday is always the most stressful day when being in the production team, since this is the day we are going live, but even though most Wednesdays so far has been stressier than anything else, this Wednesday brought a bit of a calm atmosphere and we were able to focus on minor details such as scripting, sound, minor glitches in packages and such, thanks to most of the things supposed to be submitted at a certain time, were submitted on time, with headlines and everything else that's required.

This helped us a LOT as we could go into the studio and practice, practice, practice over and over and over again! This made all of us more comfortable, knowing that we could do it! I think most important when going live, whether it is for two minutes or two hours is that you know exactly what is going on around you all the time during that time. If you, and everyone else know, confusion won't happen and everything can be handled in a more relaxed, yet professional way.

It sounds close to perfection! But of course there are things to work on still. We need to create sexier head lines, a more inviting and engaging script and not rely on the viewer to know everything already - we need to provide all the information in our package for them to watch it without any knowledge and still understand what message we are trying to deliver to them. Production team, which did the best job so far, must start providing the entire team with in and out words from the packages so that everyone knows when we're going from a package back to live in the studio and the other way around, so that sound for example knows when to change the output sound to avoid glitches in sound, so that vision mixer knows when to change back to studio camera to avoid black holes and so on.

Overall, we are very happy with this week and what it has given to us. Everyone seemed to cooperate more and thanks to everyone being aware of the time and deadlines this week, the final product is close to perfect.

That deserves a pint or two tonight!

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!

Journalism 2010 - or Multimediaism in the Twens

We are now moving into a new decade, the 2o1o's (which by the way I don't know what to call ... the twens?) and this puts me and my class mates back to action at the University again where we will continue our second year towards the journalism degree we are longing for.

Why I do enjoy this course so much is due to the fact that we are not only focusing on writing articles regulated by a fatal error system, just like it works in the real world - we do also focus on the different types of journalism that exist in our multimedia society today. Like I've mentioned earlier (see previous blogs) we run Winol (Winchester News Online) every week, which is 100% student run, and with this we get excellent training in the everyday work that a journalist does once out on the field. This covers everything from finding stories and contacts, get to the place where the action is, interview and record it on your own with the equipment we have been trained to use before finally putting it all together to a news package that will be seen every Wednesday at 5pm on our website.

Thanks to all this training and a lot of opportunities that have come up during the time we have been working with this I have managed to get lots of new contacts and a very useful insight in how it actually works out being a journalist in the UK - which is extremely stressful and hard work, but a great lot of fun!! I am very happy with my choices for this course, and journalism definitely is my cup of tea.

I think 2o1o is gonna be the best decade so far for journalism. Basically due to all the different ways in which multimedia moves, and thanks to all the new chances and opportunities that open up for us, the younger journalism generation, over the Internet, through blogs and other public bodies online, which enables us to stretch out and reach more people now already, even before we are graduated. I think this decade is gonna rock multimedia journalism!

Caught in the middle

Half drifting of to sleep, as usual, on the bus to Winchester this morning, a huge amount of police cars and ambulances woke me up - and finally me and the bus were caught in the middle of a massive traffic accident. In front of us emergency services were piling up to take care of a female who was caught in a car after a crash. A couple of years ago, when I wasn't introduced to the journalistic way of thinking in life, I would probably have stayed in my seat, curiously leaned over trying to get an idea of what was going on outside, leaning back and sighing because of me being delayed to wherever I was going. This was not the case today. As soon as I heard the sirens and saw the flashing blue light my mind thought - hang on a minute, this must be news! So, I contacted my news editor James and told him what was going on. At the same time I was running around in the bus, asking students - who couldn't care less - if someone had a video camera, a still camera, anything! No luck there.. Eventually I managed to find out what road the accident took place on, and we were able to send out a Colin and Stu to battle for some facts and pictures. Turned out to be harder than I could imagine due to police press officer, no press pass and so on...

It is weird how things can change. And what is even weirder is the way I felt when I realised something was going on. I mean, it is absolutely terrible, the worst thing basically that can happen to another human being. Still, my adrenaline was buzzing around in my body, my mind were trying to think of what to do next to be able to get information from the situation and how to get any further with the little bits of knowledge of real time, breaking news kind of situations. It was an experience, and I do not know if we will be able to use the material for our bulletin tomorrow at 5pm, but hopefully we can.

It was a strange kind of cool feeling - very hard to explain - to be the one with the information, to actually being the one letting someone else know what's going on that very second and actually feeling like what I did was the right thing. Anyway, very strange day, compared to my usual news/interviews/editing days, but oh so exciting.

News happens, and WINOL is here to report - the buzz of life

Over and out
Buzz buzz