Radio Newsday One - South Coast Radio (27.01.10)

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.


11.30 bulletin

One of the areas that we could have improved on was our audience area. With the Holocaust Memorial Day story for examplewe focused mainly on events taking place within Dorset, where we should also have looked further into Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Again with our other national stories, including a story about recession and Haiti the clips localising the story were both taken from Dorset, and any of our local stories also focused upon the area. Other than one story within our third bulletin about a car crash on the Isle of Wight, our stories tended to focus on Bournemouth and Dorset. When listening to a station such as radio Solent, they would cover stories from all the areas in their broadcast region, and this is something we should have put more thought into with our broadcast.


12.30 bulletin

One area where this did happen was within our sports stories for each bulletin, which looked at results from across the region, including Portsmouth and Southampton.

We were maybe too ambitious throughout the day about how much we wanted to change between the different bulletins. Whenit came to putting together the longer, final bulletin, we still had a lot of stories to put together in a short space of time. We ran out of time, and did not give ourselves practice in the studio. Although being on-time to produce the bulletin, a few of our clips were missing, with no clips stored for the sports news at all. For the next bulletin it is important to plan ahead, and work throughout the day to get stories together for later bulletins, while still attempting to change or update as many of the stories as possible.


1.30 bulletin

Television Newsday One (20.01.10)

iNews 20th January 2010 from Adam Parker on Vimeo.

Final Bulletin.

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.

Untitled from Tierney Smith on Vimeo.

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.