Story 6, Semester week 11 (7th December)
This week was not only my personal big success but also the best so far edition of WINOL. I brought quite a few ideas to the newsroom this Monday. I chased papers over the weekend and I found that at Southampton University there was a sex offender, University’s stalker, I searched into it and I received an email confirming that he has stalked one person in Southampton University’s area and is of no danger for Winchester University for now, the investigation only just started and I was advised that it would not be resolved as of this week yet. Another story that I researched was a Winchester Community’s Choir concert that was going to take place on Tuesday evening. I got permission for filming, behind the stage entrance and arranged interviews with producer and was allowed to interview singers. I thought of it as a good 'and finally story'.
Our editor suggested I investigated the outcomes of The Silent students Happy Homes campaign. I researched it and interviewed the SU president Jimmy who took part in the campaign and tried arranging video interview with Tommy Geddes, deputy v-ce councillor of the University of Winchester but he was not available for interview in the next few days. I also tried reaching PC Emma Port, who is part of the Safer Neighbourhood Team, which was also involved in the campaign to reach opinion from police side and was awaiting the reply from her. I decided to film “backs of the heads, out of focus images of drunk students going back from clubbing at 2am. I was determined to stay up and film it for my cut-a-ways and fillers for the story.
While I was waiting for 2am to come I received a phone call around 11pm from one of my colleagues that there was a fire in Stanmore next to his house. I took my camera and managed to get to the place and filmed a burnt house and found out that our university student helped in saving life of his neighbour pensioner. I spoke to a police officer on the place and he said that the cause of fire was still under investigation and no one from the fire brigade wanted to give me video interview so I managed to get visual footage and name of our hero student. I still filmed the images of drunk students just in case my footage of the burnt house didn’t come out well. Next morning one of the fellow reporters, Kaileigh managed to arrange an interview with our hero Edward Herbert from year 3, heritage management course. My footage was fairly good I was missing and active shots, opening shots of our hero as I only had time to film his interview.
After I had filmed the interview with Edward I went to film Maddeline’s story with her. We attended a memorial for our international student who died in a car accident just a week earlier. It was one of the worst experiences I have ever had. An hour of filming a chaplaincy full of grieving people after a young and talented Chinese students. Her parents came over all the way from China to pick up her body. As my family does not live in this country it was even worse imagining that if something like that happened to me my parents wouldn’t even be here but could only pick up my body. Mixture of strong emotions was going through our minds and while our eyes were full of tears we were still trying to remember that we were there to fulfil a duty as reporters. It was incredibly hard for me to focus on filming, thinking about angles, colours and framing while tears were flooding my eyes, sadness and pain of reality of being foreign and not being able to see my family. And empathy with the parents of the dead girl… all that was going through my mind but then a cold reserved determination came, desire to achieve goals in my life and realise how far I have gone, made me stay there and deliver a story that was in fact very personal and brought up my biggest weaknesses and thoughts of dying in foreign country and not being able to say the last words to my beloved … or not being there for them when they die…I knew what I was going for when applying for journalism and experiences like that will be a big part of the profession; I will have to learn how to build an emotional barrier when death or cruelty is involved in the story. Keeping cold blood and not letting emotions to take over, despite how personal or emotional things will get- I will need to remember that it is my job and I am fulfilling my duty as journalist no matter how hard it will get. I would like to do it with passion and perfection to fulfil my ambition.
After the memorial I decided to cancel filming of the concert, James allowed for dropping that idea and told me to focus on my hero-fire story, also as I have not heard from the police officer so even though I had a footage of drunk students I stopped working on that one too.
My student story became a hit and made a front page of the Winol website. Memorial story was olso in the package, with which Maddline did an excellent job with editing and received a fantastic feedback.I have not felt so rewarded and proud of myself during the course. Our team given ourselves plenty rounds of applause and it surely deserved it. We had top stories, we tried our best and gave 100% as always and that’s what made us proud and happy.
The bulletin was lead by equally great story and was by far the best we have done. We received 300 unique user sessions overnight (WINOL 459) so we were once again almost certainly the single most read media source on the campus. Rob Kirk of Sky was genuinely impressed and I announced that that we were in the 'Premier League' of BJTC journalism courses is sincere considering that that the majority of BJTC courses he deals with are at the MA level. We can be proud of our bulletin and development of features also thanks to Catherine's 'behind the scenes' short film.
