Radio Broadcast Week 8

This week we were working on an assessed piece for our overall portfolio by making a full news bulletin from scratch for the days news.

Although this seemed a bit daunting to begin with, the idea of forming a full 2 minute long news bulletin with accompanying audio in a matter of hours, it was actually very straight forward. We decided as a group to write out the news stories we wanted to use and capture and edit the audio we wanted, and instead of forming it all together using Audition software we would instead get some practise using the Radio Suite and record our bulletins in there instead.

So now, the task at hand became very straightforward - gather together enough news stories in your own style to create a news bulletin for any demographic and make it relevant and appealing to that particular demographic.With this in mind, we all set about finding the news stories that would make up our final bulletin.

The stories I chose for my particular bulletin consisted of:

*The engagement announcement from Prince William and Kate Middleton - this was relevant to the entire British nation, and is the main news story of the day throughout most of the papers anyway, so it would not be good to overlook a news story with such coverage. Also, this obviously had to be the first story in the headlines as it is the widest affecting story, so it's pretty safe to say that a lot of people would have covered this story too!

*The amount of students missing out on University places this year - I thought that with the protests in Millbank last week, this would make an interesting story. I also managed to use this story to capture some audio in the form of an interview with Faculty Administrator Lisa Simpkin, so it was useful to have that audio to go along with the story.

*The 18 year old student that has been charged with violence and disorder - again, this is going back to the protests that turned violent last week. This is also a local story, so it's putting a spin on a smaller, local story into something a bit more widespread that was in the news last week.

*The body being discovered in a ditch - another local sotry, this time involving a body discovered in a ditch in the local area of Dunkirk road, with an "unexplained" cause of death.

*A farm in Romsey breeding turkeys - this, I thought, would be a nice twist to end on as it is light hearted but still somewhat informative, as it is about a farm in Romsey letting members of the public in to see the free-range environment they allow their turkeys to live and breed in before the Christmas rush.

After all of the stories had been written up, the hard task proved to be editing the audio to fit within the timescale of your report. When you have a really great interview, but it's way too long to use in its entirity, the hardest part is sometimes "trimming the fat" from it and only getting what you need out of it. As you go along, you realise that you have to be increasingly brutal with what you have to cut out of your interview tape in order to make it fit well into the quick bulletin. Normally, around 20 to 30 seconds is about right for an audio piece for the bulletin, as anything longer than that will eat into the time you have for other stories, but anything too much less than that won't really give enough information to warrant having it as part of the piece. So, getting just the right amount of audio cut and information from it is a tricky technique to grasp sometimes unless you manage to capture something close to exactly what you need on your first try!

The only other task that proved to be a little difficult was reading the script without any mistakes, and at a rate where you remember your phrasing and tone and everything. It's hard to get it right first time, as you are always likely to trip over your words or maybe read it a little quickly, which is why we all took some time to read them to ourselves first and have a couple of takes at recording the script before we got it right.

After everything was recorded and put together correctly, all that was left was to finalise the document and save it, ready for marking! So, with any luck, mine will turn out alright after all the work that has gone into it!