2. First Assessment

On the first assessed news day, we worked for “South Coast Radio”, which was aimed towards a middle-aged audience and covered not only Dorset, but also Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. We tried to ensure that our story choice reflected the tone and target audience of this station, by focusing on issues that were of interest to the intended audience, and also including a sufficient amount of local content to make our bulletin directly relevant and interesting to those in within the broadcast area.

I was assigned as presenter, having taken the role the week before and been well received by the rest of my team. As I was only needed as presenter just prior to the bulletin for rehearsal and for the on-air bulletin itself, I spent the rest of my time accomplishing other tasks.

Firstly, I created stings for the intro, outro and sport. For the intro and outro, I used “Beautiful Day” by U2, which I felt was dramatic enough to attract listener attention and to indicate the excitement and urgency of the news. Twenty seconds of the intro was to be used under the headlines, so I ensured that the music dipped in volume and intensity for this duration, before rising up again slightly to round off the introduction. The outro consisted of the same song to bring consistency of tone to the bulletin. The sports sting was a short burst of orchestra, which I felt implied the emotion and drama involved in sport. I decided to use another team member to provide the voiceover for these stings, after initially using my own voice. I realized that voicing both the stings and presenting the news would sound slightly ridiculous and even arrogant. By creating these stings myself, I was able to familiarize myself with their durations, which helped during pacing my headlines and coming in quickly at the end of the sting. This contributed to our requirement to use primarily user-generated material, too.

I also aided in finding stories and deciding on the running order. Keeping in touch with the progress of the stories and the running order meant that I was already well acquainted with the material by the time I had to rehearse it, which boosted my confidence during reading and minimized faltering.

Additionally, I helped with the production of the bulletin by adding clips to the bulletin in-queue. Preparing the clips myself ensured that no one would forget to do so prior to the bulletin going on air.

The other members of my team took roles which, after the practice days, they discovered themselves to be most comfortable in. As a result, the team itself worked efficiently and coherently, with the editor providing good instruction and communication between all of the members. Two reporters were sent out during the day to obtain interviews and vox pops relating to major local stories. This helped us flesh out our stories with interesting angles and opinions, and also emphasized the “local” nature of the station by getting feedback from people likely to be listening, and implying that the station considers the opinions and welfare of its audience. It also meant we could avoid resorting to second-hand vox pops from Burli, which would have looked lazy and amateur to the listener. We also were required to perform a live two-way, which would help to elaborate on a news story with additional information from an “expert”. Both the questions and answers were prepared beforehand.
The bulletins themselves ran smoothly, with only a few small falters in my script reading, including a couple of minor issues with the two-way in the 1 o’clock bulletin due to a number of difficult words in the script.

For the three o’clock bulletin, we wrote several new stories that had emerged since the one o’clock bulletin. Any stories we retained from the first bulletin were either trimmed and pushed down the running order, or fleshed out with a story update or new audio clip. We tried to ensure that this bulletin had more of an “afternoon vibe”, in both story content and presentation style, by making it more of a relaxed news summary, in contrast to the urgent atmosphere of the one o’clock bulletin. I feel our second bulletin was an improvement on the first, as we were able to assess what improvements and adjustments we could make to our approach based on how the first bulletin turned out.