During our first newsday each discussion of the podcast was backed up with a vast array of facts and clips that we had gathered throughout the day. It could have varied more from bulletins, with the use of longer or different clips, but a lack of expertise with Burli meant we were no longer able to access some of the original interviews. The stories chosen suited our target audience, although were maybe a little too focused on Dorset with both the recession and speed camera stories taking examples in the area.
Talbot FM has a smaller geographical area, focusing on Dorset, and a younger audience18-30 so students, young professionals and young parents. For this bulletin we were looking more at the news that would be expected on Heart FM.
Stories such as the aftermath of the Brits, and Alexander McQueen's inquest were particularly strong stories for younger audiences. Teaming this with a local quote it localized the second story.
Other stories, although not necessarily focused for younger audiences, would be of interest to those in the area. Firstly council tax rises would be important. We tried to give broad information from across the region, including Poole, Bournemouth, Christchurch and the County Council. This story could, however, have been stronger if we could have linked it to our specific age range. The Vox Pops used in the first bulletin would have been more appropriate if they had been with younger people.
11 o'clock bulletin
Another important story was Ray Gosling’s arrested. This has huge public interest, due to the current debates going on about euthanasia.
I felt we kept a clear in and outro to our bulletins offering consistency, referring them to later bulletins. However, there could have been more. Two big stories of the day were the latest unemployment figures, and council tax rises. Both stories were dealt with in the first and third bulletins, but should have also been placed into the second. Although the unemployment story in the third bulletin did have strong clips with local people just back from traveling.
12 o'clock bulletin
Having sport, with a sport correspondent, throughout each bulletin added consistency, however, during the shorter bulletins this could have been a little confusing to hear, and maybe did not need the second correspondant.
I felt once again we were ambitious with our bulletin, trying to update them every-time with new stories and new clips. This was somewhat more successful than our first week as although our final bulletin ran over 30 seconds too long, we did get all scripts and clips ready on time. Forward planning at the beginning of the day, helped this, trying to keep stories going, knowing what needed to be updated and having stories that could be held back for later bulletins.
For our second television bulletin, we were very ambitious for the short time period we had. There were some strong aspects to the bulletin and also some weaknesses. We hoped to use a variety of techniques to put together the bulletin within the time given, including using some national headlines, some sport headlines and a variety of filming techniques from full packages to oov's and upsots.
We attempted a range of stories from national ones with a local angle, such as Alzheimer's funding and the Skipton Building Society to local stories with a strong public interest, such as pre-school funding in Dorset and a anti-smoking campaign in the south-west and more light hearted stories such as Journey's End's preview at the Lighthouse.
With the Journey's End preview, we were lucky to go and interview the cast on the opening night, who were able to give us an insight into the play and how this could relate to modern wars, turning a simple notification about an event into a much more interesting segment.
As we were nearing the deadline for the bulletin we were increasingly worried that we would not be able to fill the time we had been given, and so we decided to include some national and sport headlines. We did not want them to take prominence over the other packages we put together, so we chose to place it lower down in our running order.
We hoped to localize a national story about Alzheimer's needing more funding, by talking to a local society. It was onlypossible to get through to an official source over the telephone. We would also not be able to capture any relevant footage prior to the bulletin. We decided to do it as if it were a studio to telephone interview. However, it could have been misleading to the public, as the screen we filmed in front of said 'live' in the corner, and in fact the interview had been pre-recorded and questions made out for the presenters afterwards. It is important that if we were to do this again the presenters would need to stress that the telephone call was in fact recorded earlier in the day so the bulletin was not accused of deceiving the public.
For this story we also had a third presenter into the studio to do a segment explaining the complex story, which made the set up in the studio a little more complicated. We once again made it to the studio with plenty of time to upload everything and have a run through of the bulletin, checking for any changes to be made to the scripts. However, when we had a breaking news story dropped into our headlines, due to the way we had saved the auto-cue, we lost any changes, which led to the presenters having trouble with their scripts during the live broadcast. In future it is important to make sure that all changes are properly saved.
Two important areas to examine for South Coast Radio bulletins is the mix between national and local news and working towards the target audience. The target audience for this station was aged 40 plus and had a wide geographical range covering Hampshire, Dorset and the Isle of Wight. For this audience, we were looking into a bulletin that would fit a similar audience to BBC Solent.
One important thing for this bulletin was the mix of national and local stories, and our ability to give national stories a local angle. We had two major national stories that ran through the whole day. The first was the latest news coming out the Chilcot inquiry, which was important as a national story, despite having no local angle. The second was Holocaust Memorial Day, which we attempted to give a local angle by focusing on events within the area.
For our first newsday, we were able to produce several very visual stories. First thing in the morning, there were reports of a major fire which had begun during the early hours of the morning, and a number of fire officers still available at Dorset Reclaim for interviews. This story would have been of significant interest, not only due to it's size, but also because it was the base of a local charity.
One of our strongest areas in our bulletin was our use of images. For all stories, we had some form of image, whether it came in general veiws, vox pops or upsots of interviews.
There were certain stories we felt were important to cover such as the BHS in Bournemouth town turning into a Primark, Bournemouth Tesco erecting wind-turbines, and the IMAX being brought by the council. We felt these were stories which were in the interest of people within the area, and also were interesting for them.Tesco turbines was obviously of interest as there has been a surge of green interests recently, and the BHS story not only involved a much loved store in Bournemouth closing down, but has added implications for the Primark in Boscombe.
We covered a range of stories from a local fundraising event, to speed limits on roads, to the fire service training with new equipment. This final package made a nice light hearted peice, something which had interesting pictures, and would also provided viewers an inside view of the local fire service.
One thing we wanted as a team was enough time to really practice the bulletin and iron out any technical problems that may arise in the studio. Originally we hoped to head to the studio an hour before the broadcast to also pre-record a weather seqment, which we had put together with screne grabs from online weather forecasts. However, we had to drop this segment, as we only had 45 minutes once all packages were exported and we felt it was more important to iron out other problems. I felt this allowed us plenty of time to deal with autocue problems which arose, and we had several run throughs of the show to make sure all segments flowed and to give our presenter time to become at ease. I felt this was one of our teams real strengths, as we were organised enough to come together with plenty of time to spare, and we were all able to keep each other informed of what each member was doing as they were doing it.
