Story 5, Semester week 10 (30th November)
My ideas for this week were not so strong but I still managed to bring fresh mind to the newsroom this week. There was a Crafted Contemporary exhibition and Merry Exhibition by local artists and craftspeople at the Winchester Discovery Centre which I was planning to film as an informative “and finally” artistic stories but I didn’t get a go ahead with it as they were too weak. And also reopening of a Portchester Library on Tuesday 1st December, which was still within Hampshire area but as we looked it up it was a little bit too far and so it felt not so relevant for our WINOL. I also kept chasing one of my ideas from beginning of November when I found out from one of the press releases that there was a proposal on reduction in Mileage Allowance for Council Workers in Hampshire and I wanted to take an angle on it researching on how would it influence performance of council workers especially in delivering important frontline services and looking after needs of the county’s residents. Unfortunately, the proposal has still not progresses.I kept in contact with the press officer Suzie Southgate, Media Communications Manager for Cabinet (Policy and Resources and Environment) who issued the release, and she kept me updated, so I knew that I wouldn’t be able to make a story of that issue this week.
Having no strong ideas for story for this week James, our news editior, suggested I investigated the case of University chaplains facing axe from two of the Southampton Universities because of the budget cuts due to recession. I had to find out if our chaplain was likely to loose his position and how was it decided that those particular Universities were chosen. I video- interviewed Winchester Universities chaplain and went to Southampton University with Colin. Colin, our deputy News Editor knew the chaplain whose post was cut and on the place we found out that the students from Southampton University were leading a campaign against the decision of cutting the chaplain’s post.
While doing the research trying to get to the right people to talk to I managed to get in touch with the Bishop of Winchester, Rev Michael Scott-Joynt, chairman of Bishop’s Council and Standing Committee, responsible for making the decision about cutting the two posts, who wrote me an email confirming the decision and informing that the Winchester University’s chaplain is employed by University not but Church if England and that was why his post is not involved in the Diocese’s decisions.
Because of technical difficulties with editing I was worried that I wouldn’t make a deadline and also on the day of our bulletin going live we found out that our studio guest that was connected with the story I was covering could not come and so we had to call our university’s chaplain to come and replace our guest what meant that I had to cut his interview out of my package and re-edit it all. With Colin’s help we managed to construct new package with Southampton’s chaplain and couple of vox-pops that we filmed at Southampton University. We made the deadline and our University’s chaplain could be our studio guest for this week’s bulletin. The story made the TOP STORY OF THE BULLETIN.From the technical side, we managed to organise a new front page and new way of displaying features. Our next push was concentrated on the visual side of the magazine and features working in which Catherine took a big part in having a great talent in photography.
This week’s Guest Editor was Chris Ship, ITV Political Correspondent who is also covering Westminster, and presents the main ITV News. He was generally impressed by the interaction between the internet and TV bulletin we are putting out and that we are actually tracking who was logging on to our website and what stories we were doing. He also liked the way we focused on the stories and the way we have worked out our targeted audience. He said that having to practice week in week out is invaluable.
In overall, WINOL's circulation has now overtaken both the Hampshire Chronicle and the Basingstoke Gazette which means that we continue to improve.
