WINOL week 8

On this week's WINOL the headlines were much better and are starting to contain much better quotes which are needed to hook the viewers onto our programme and individual stories. There was however a lack of stories this week and not enough stories on the spike. These are essential as if a story in the bulletin collapses then we need a back up story to fill the space. The reporters need to make sure that they have more than one story ready to go incase a story falls through. After this bulletin the decision was taken to leave out sync in the headlines to make it easier for the presenter to fit in the headline before the music cuts then off; only if there is an amazing quote or natural sound will there be sync in the headlines from now on.

As for the website it self, our alexa ranking is improving very quickly; making us look better and better as a team. The website is improving week on week with our new template helping us to take up a broadsheet style to our stories and the way they are set out. However if we want our alexa ranking to keep going up we need to update stories every day; this sint happening with sport even though we are making lots of features and news updates in the bulletin on a Wednesday; these are not being re-versioned as written stories and therefore even though we have up to date stories they are not being updated on the site.

My knowledge of how the bulletin went throughout the week is very limited however as I missed both debriefs and the production of the bulletin itself as I was creating two different features which I will talk about a bit later. However from watching the bulletin I felt that the production of the bulletin was very good and showed a lack of mistakes or technical errors which has improved week on week as reporters  and production have become very comfortable and more confident with the roles as the term has progressed. Overall I felt that it was our best bulletin so far which is very good as it shows out progression.

The first of my features that I was creating this week was an interview with Edgar Feuchtwagner who was Hitler's neighbour in Munich in 1933 and now lives in Winchester. Edgar gave a fascinating 25 minute interview and since it has been on the website it has been a big hit and is currently the third most read sttory on the website. I feel this feature is on a subject area we have never covered before and shows that features on WINOL are not only about fashion and trivial matters. We managed to get this interview after reading a BBC interview with Edgar; proving that watching the news and reading the papers is helpful in finding out information. This story is perfect because it is a local matter and relevant and interesting to our audience.

The second major interview that we managed to get was with Paul Blackburn who was wrongfully imprisoned for 25 year for murder. We went to a talk with Paul in Southampton and secured him for an interview in Winchester. He was fantastic to listen to and this hard confessional interview that we have planned will be a big hit on the website. It is also relevant to the innocence project which we are working on.  These two stories are fantastic for the website and will increase views.

As well as this WINOL is also taking over the airwaves of sound radio on Tuesday with regular news bulletins and radio shows. This sounds very professional and gives WINOL another medium to promote all of its content across the TV bulletin and the website. It is also a fantastic way to help us learn how radio works and gives us the practice we need. This is good because we have done a large amount of TV news but not much radio; this should help us get up to speed with the differences between TV news and radio news.

Next week we are looking at producing a different type of news output in the form of a 1 minute news bulletin which just has the presenter in view; possibly with a few clips from each news story as well. This will be done daily and therefore we will become a daily news output rather than just once a week. It will also be another news output in the style of visual radio news.