Work Attachment at Newbury Sound

My second work attachment for the course was at the community radio station Newbury Sound. Covering all of the West Berkshire area, Newbury Sound is the top local radio station for music and community news. Even though I had to commute from Southampton each day for the week of work experience, which took me around an hour each day depending on traffic, I was eager to see the differences between working as part of a regional station (as I did on Wave 105) and a smaller community-based station.

On the first day, I immediately noticed differences in the way the station operated. Firstly, there were a lot less people coming and going in the station, including presenters as some shows are syndicated from Newbury Sounds sister station Andover Sound, and the news was partly syndicated from an outside news provider. The editing systems used at Newbury Sound were very different as well, considering that Wave 105 used a software that organised all the news projects together to make them easier to compile together for each bulletin. Since Newbury Sound use the same bulletins for some of the day and then change them in the afternoon, they don't need to change the copy for the bulletin each hour and therefore don't require the same system. This meant that the copy for each of the news stories was written in a word document and then compiled together before being read out on air, and they used a separate software for editing the sound clips which, to my joy, turned out to be Adobe Audition 3.0 which I am already well versed in.

Already having a knowledge of the editing software and the techniques used in Radio proved very useful, at it meant I could get out and capturing news stories right away. Just some of the stories I covered through the week were: a local school taking part in a nationwide Cookathon competition with help from a celebrity chef, the re-launch of the Newbury Carnival over the summer, two local women doing a climbing expedition for charity and a teacher at a secondary school having a competition for her students to design her wedding dress for her.

Covering these kinds of news stories was an interesting change from more regional news stories that would hit higher areas, as they had a smaller focus on the local community which meant I had to change the way I approached the news stories. Since they were more community-based, I could approach them in a more relaxed way, which meant that editing the stories afterwards became easier as well as it meant I remembered the best bits of the interview more.

I'd like to extend my thanks to Chris Wright for the opportunity to work among his team at Newbury Sound, and Faye Marsh (News Editor) for all her help and advice throughout the week, and not simply asking me to make teas all day either. Working at Newbury Sound was a valuable addition to my work experiences and showed me a different side of radio work.