Winchester News Online Bulletin 24/02/10
In this week I was put not only in front of the challenge of directing but also vision-mixing and additionally, with our editor’s help, covered the “And finally story” for the bulletin. It all came out as an intense and complexed experience but enjoyable.
Once again we could not pre-record the headlines and we could only go through the whole script once because of the missed deadlines. Despite the tight schedule, the gallery felt calmer and more disciplined than last week, I felt more confident as a director as I practiced the News-Sports handover and I was able to go through the script before the recording. Having done the directing already once before I had an overlook on what I should be focused more and what to practice before going live.
Introduction was executed better than last week. During the recordingthe VT computer froze once, so we had a slip on timing but we recovered well, Stuart did not panic and stayed focused, it was also well edited in post production to make it look smoother. Stuart and Lucy did incredibly well with presenting.
In Nib-s and OOV-s the timing and in- and out- words should be displayed in the script. The OOV this week was quite complicated in vision-mixing and actually it could have been dropped of the script, as it became an unnecessary confusion.
Content wise, as we heard from the feedback, our story telling as reporters came across as still quite confusing but we certainly had stronger interviews this week. News is meant to be about people and we reached the right people. We were advised to do our voice-overs in the sound rooms instead of using the Gun-microphone, for better quality of the audio. Links for worked well within the bulletin, and dramatic headlines made the bulletin more attention grabbing. The only slip was that the headlines were giving away too much detail about the stories.
We were advised that we should stick to the golden rule [First Para- SUBJECT+ VERB+ OBJECT]: WHO (subject, with the function), WHAT (verb, has done what), OBJECT, and [Second Para- WHY].
In News reporting, each sentence matters, as journalists, we should be crafting words and sentences.
We should be always taking notepads with us to the interviews to take notes of the relevant quotes. We have to remember that the first minutes of our interviews are usually a waste, a worm up. Also, always remember to ask open questions and get the interviewee to explain the story (get them talking and keep them talking) and don’t forget about the ‘nod-dies’.
To the other useful interviewing techniques also belong:
- Good planning of the story, pre-planned angle and idea of quotes
- Finding out in detail what is the story (understanding the story)
- Executing the filming, cutaways, nod-dies and relevant interviews
- Avoiding the “cutting room journalism”, when we try to leave everything to be finalised in editing, as we should already have an idea of how the package will look like before filming it.
- The story should be told in our own words and the interviews are only for opinion in quotes. We mustn’t treat the quotes as facts and use interviewee to tell the story.
The forst story was quite a good piece, well scripted but was lacking in cutaways. It began with a powerful quote from the interviewee, as that is exactly what we should be looking for while interviewing- good quotes.
Tom’s story was a well scripted court report supported with a really impressive interview. Tom also did well on not identifying his interviewee for legal reasons. He also told the viewer about the legal restrictions before he applied it in the package, it looked professional. Tom should have been a little bit more careful with juxtaposition libel of number-plates of passing cars in his package. He only managed to make then blur. The case was protected as it was no longer active (no jury, after the verdict had been announced we are protected as hournalists).
In third story, about parking issue, there was a comment in the link to the story, which shouldn’t have been there; even though it was quite a reasonable comment we should have kept it out of the script. Instead of saying “There is a big parking issue” we could have used, “many say that there is a big parking problem” for example what would be a fact. In this package we cover section 8 of Privacy Act about person performing public duty which makes the shot without consent.
The following story was well scripted and had quite strong quotes but listening further through the package the interviewees went into too much detail about the story (the story should have been told by the reporter instead). In his PTC, Jon has commented, where he could have summarised what the doctors said.
In Sports, there were still some sound problems, especially in the interview with the manager where the wing got picked up by the Gun-mic and was quite disturbing for the interview.
In the ‘And finally story’ there were also some sound issues that came out during editing. The story was interesting and catchy, but it was more of a feature story rather than a news story.
In overall, we put out a lot better bulletin than last week and our traffic doubled comparing to last week (120/130), we should be still aiming to reach at least 400.
Winchester News Online Bulletin 24/02/10
Multimedia Production: WINCHESTER NEWS ONLINE, Semester II
