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