1. Practise Days

Prior to our assessment, we were given two practice days in which we could refine our bulletin-producing skills and become more familiar with the other members of the team. During these days, we all attempted different roles in order to evaluate our personal strengths and help establish who should handle what role come the assessment days. This involved taking on the role in which we felt least comfortable, in order to expand our experience in the field of radio and to ensure that any one of us could adopt a role if someone were to be absent. We also experimented with different news sources – including the BBC website, the Dorset Echo website and even social networking website Twitter – to discover which ones provided the most up-to-date and comprehensive news. Additionally, we used these practice days to accustom ourselves with the Burli and ENPS software to avoid running into unnecessary hindrances upon assessment. On each day, we were given a different station to work for, and therefore a different audience to target – as a result, our writing style, story choice, running order and presenter tone needed to be adjusted to cater for the audience we were aiming for.

One of our main discoveries on the practice days was that a producer was not really necessary. None of the team had a particularly encyclopedic knowledge of radio production, and we didn’t feel that the amount of production work that needed to be done justified the existence of a producer position. Therefore, on the assessment days, we decided to abolish the producer role and simply disperse the work amongst ourselves. We thought that this worked well – we had one more person available for general reporting and story-writing.

We also became aware that leaving ourselves time to rehearse the bulletin was very important. It allowed the presenter to familiarize his/herself with the script (including any unusual pronunciations or grammatical structures), and permitted time for any last-minute changes which might be needed – either to prevent over/under-running, or to include a major news story that might have just surfaced. On the first practice day, the presenter didn’t have any spare time to read through the script prior to the actual bulletin, and was unprepared for the various ambiguous pronunciations and hand-written story altercations that occurred throughout the script.