Coming back into the final semester of the year, there was no time for slowly getting back into things as with the Spring came many different things to prepare for - not to mention the Royal Wedding!
WEEK 8:
The first week back was almost a bit of a non-week as far as work on WINOL went, as the Monday brought a bank holiday, and the Friday brought the Royal Wedding which meant a public holiday for many. So, in light of this, there was to be no WINOL in the first week back. BUT, this was by no means an end to the work, as we were on a mission to to complete one of two different projects - the first, to set up and film a political debate on the Alternative Vote debate, and the second to create a short film for the Royal Wedding taking in a lot of the local communities and how they are celebrating the day to be used on Sky TV!
WEEK 9:
Entering into the first week of the semester back on WINOL, and losing another Monday to another bank holiday, we first discussed the success of the projects from the previous week. While the AV debate didn't go ahead, the short film for Sky was very successful. While the project didn't win the top prize of being shown on Sky TV, it was reported that Sky were very impressed by the work that was done and was enough to get us noticed and to get Sky interested in doing work with us in the future. So, in that sense, the Royal Wedding Short Film was a flying success.
Since Sportsweek is no longer being broadcast for this semester (since it is the end of football season), it was just the filming of WINOL for the week that had our focus. Even though getting everything in order took a bit of time since it was everyones first week back, so getting the packages and headlines on time hit some delays, when it came to filming the actual bulletin everything went off without a problem. The headlines of the week focussed on many community issues and local sport, but as we become more adventurous with our broadcasting capabilities it also means we can spread our focus to some more international stories. Through the use of Skype, we can now call in interviews from different countries and as such we managed to speak to a "correspondant" in Chicago about the death of Osama Bin Laden and how the US were keeping up with the Royal Wedding. This meant that we could cover some more hard-hitting international news as well, but only after our primary focus of local news was complete.
Overall, the first WINOL of the last semester went off mostly without any mistakes. In the de-brief, it was suggested that the use of too many OOV's in one story can get confusing for ques and scripting purposes, so it makes things easier if there aren't too many OOV's in the same news package. As well as this, it was mentioned that Headlines should be at the forefront of reporters thoughts for creating headline pictures and good links, starting with the best pictures from the package and thinking carefully about interview locations.
WEEK 10:
In the de-brief on the previous week's bulletin, we were given the information that we have over-taken the Hampshire Chronicle on page ranking on the Alexa Page Rank system, based on regular viewers and subscribers to the WINOL site. This now means that WINOL is ranked 22,000 on the internet according to Alexa, with around 600 different regular viewers. Obviously, this was very well received by the different teams, as it meant we were currently getting better internet ratings and views than a local, professional journalism competitor.
Filming on the Tuesday went very smoothly, considering that as well as the Polish version of the WINOL bulletin, we are now going to be regularly putting out a French version as well. Both of these were filmed before lunch on the Tuesday, meaning a very successful morning all round.
Our guest editor for the week was Jeff Hill from CNN and previously ITN. After filming the weekly bulletin with only one minimal set-back with a package not playing out live, we had a de-brief on the weeks news stories and packages and how we worked as a team from Jeff. He seemed very impressed overall with how each team operated and communicated with each other.
Firstly, Jeff mentioned that this week there was a good mix of news stories in the whole bulletin (some light and some heavy), and how impressed he was that everyone immediately knew what to do in a problematic situation where it arises that there is a breaking news story, or if one package doesn't play out, or if one package might incurr legal or identification issues. Another thing that impressed was how we cover relevant, hard hitting news stories directed at people in a similar age range (in regards to the news item about a murdered student in Bournemouth this week).
It was suggested that perhaps for some bulletins, after the final package we could pull the camera back to show both presenters in a final shot at the end. Jeff also suggested that there should be more writing around the pictures that are used, and not letting the headline shots give away the majority of the story before there has been a chance to tell it.
Since one of the news stories was about a recent visit to the University campus by Alan Titchmarsh, it was suggested by Jeff that there could potentially have been more done over what actually happened when he visited and what the purpose of his visit was.
Finally, it was discussed that there should potentially be a graphics department, or that the Journalism course should work in conjunction with a graphics course in order to incorporate visuals into news packages and stories to show different statistics or cut screens for quotes, etc. That way, the news team would be able to incorporate better visuals into their packages and we on the production team could come up with better visuals and backgrounds for the bulletins in the future.
