Radio Broadcasting Week 4

This weeks session saw the continuation of last weeks work come to fruition when we stepped into the radio studio to write and record our five-story news bulletins. This included the previous weeks audio capture and editing, plus another 4 stories from this weeks news and one or more new audio captures of a different style from what we captured last week.

Personally, I began to struggle to find a relative interview with someone that I could legitimately tie into the current news, but after a stroke of luck a fellow member of the class let me interview them in a true form relative to the story of Government Spending cuts currently being undertaken.

The other stories that I decided to use as part of the whole bulletin I would work on with another member of the course (sometimes, pooling efforts together does get a better outcome than struggling by yourself and coming up with sub-standard material!) were:

* The story of Mary Bale, the lady who was caught on CCTV throwing a cat into a wheelie bin, being fined £250 for her actions, and the following actions that were taken as well. The Sun obviously took a pretty pun-tastic approach to this subject, in the sense that they were mostly pretty much poking fun at the situation and how infamous it was on YouTube in amongst bringing the facts and numbers of the situation, whereas The Guardian saw it in the light of a very much more serious court case and how this links back to animal rights. Both managed to bring the facts to light though, and that was necessary for what I needed for the bulletin.

* The study of how children now account for one third of the overall admissions to the NHS for eating disorders, which has now increased 11% since the last year. This is one story I managed to go out and get vox pops for, despite not being allowed to interview an actual pediatrician at the local hospital instead. However, this story turned out very well in the end, and I'm happy with the audio I did manage to capture for this. The story itself stems from a study into the NHS about how many people were being admitted to hospital for eating disorders, in which it was found that out of two and a half thousand admissions, nearly 900 were under 18, of which 367 were children under 14 and 31 were children under 10.

* My colleagues story about the heritage of Winchester, and how the UK has been voted into the Top 4 in the list of countries with the most interesting heritage and history. This also had an audio cut of an interview with a lady who works at the Winchester Cathedral and what makes it so unique.

* And lastly, another story from my colleague about how The X Factor has now been granted funding for another three seasons after it was alleged to be axed after this years season.

Editing the bulletins together was very interesting, as it was another excuse to get to grips with Audition, except the task today was more about editing multiple audio segments together to create a full news bulletin, ready for broadcast.

Using the radio studio was a change from the norm, as it was very interesting to see how you would broadcast these kinds of bulletins from a live setting as opposed to a pre-recorded situation where it can be polished slightly more, and edited ahead of going on air.

Hopefully, and it would be nice if we could, we will get the chance to do more work in the radio studio as it would be interesting to compare the difference in working with pre-recorded bulletins and how we would function when put on the spot to broadcast live and to mix and fade in music around our bulletins or packages.