WINOL Week 6 Critical Reflection...

Another week brings another WINOL bulletin and I'm happy to report that this week was the strongest one we have produced so far. This was especially good for myself as this is the last bulletin that I will be running as Sports Editor, the third years we now hand over the editorial roles to the second years to take on in the second semester.

Once again I have to say I was extremely pleased with what my sports team and I produced in terms of the bulletin and the website. Editorially the bulletin was strong this week as the news packages were the strongest they've been so far.

This week we were well prepared for sports and by Tuesday afternoon our content was ready for the bulletin, which was a fantastic position to put ourselves in as it left us with a relatively stress free Wednesday. We used the Wednesday to tweak and perfect things which came through in the bulletin and in the impressive comments from our lecturers during the debrief. I spent the week again writing content for the website as I had allocated the packages to my reporters once again. I think used my time to help my reporters with their stories, suggesting changes and helping whenever needed. We got some fantastic shots in the Winchester FC match of two of the players doing a rehearsed dance for a celebration. This proved vital for Tom Otrebski and I as we used it as a platform for our links and it enabled us to have some fun and produce some well scripted work.

Winol Week 5 Critical Reflection...

www.winol.co.uk

So we had another week of WINOL last week and I have to say I think the overall bulletin this week took a step back as there were more errors than the previous week, however many of these were down to technical difficulties.

Once again I was very pleased with the Sport section that my team and I produced, I feel that it is perhaps the strongest part of the bulletin. Mainly because we always meet our deadlines and week on week the quality in terms of picture, sound and script quality has improved. The main reasons for these improvements is the feedback from the debriefs from our lecturers and the guest editors, as we have tried to work on the errors they have picked up on. For example, Brian asked me to work on Grant's voiceovers this week and we spent a long time (and probably a quite frustrating time for Grant) making him re-do his voice-overs until they sounded much better. I was very pleased when Brian picked up on the improvements during his debrief and I hope that I have helped Grant with his future voice-overs.

Unfortunately this bulletin was savaged by technical difficulties which affected the overall quality. We had problems with the auto cue again as well as the MAC which is used to play the VTs. So hopefully this coming week we can eradicate these problems and produce a seamless bulletin.

I feel that as a newsroom we need to make sure we are hitting 10 minutes (or under) for the bulletin as when we go over it cannot be uploaded to YouTube to go out at five. The other problem that comes with this is that a sports item is usually cut to make it go under 10 minutes, which I understand as the news is the more important section as we are a news bulletin, but I am disappointed that this has happened a few times now and hope that we can work to make it under 10 minutes so we can keep all the sports items that we have produced.

I spent the week writing news stories with the other members of my team before compiling a running order and then helping the rest of my team with their packages and suggesting improvements before we handed over to production. Unfortunately this week I wasn't available for the editor's meeting, so my deputy sports editor Tom Otrebski went in my place and I feel that Tom and I are working very well together on the editorial side of the Sport section. This week we sat down and rescripted the Sports script and links to improve them and found advice from Andy Steggall last week again helped us to produce better links.

Here are my other WINOL reflections:

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

WINOL Week 4 Critical Reflection

Another week of WINOL brings another reflection blog! On the whole I feel that this week's bulletin was better than last week's.

The newsroom has a very calm and collected feel to it now, even when packages are late or things are going quite right there are a few of us that keep things calm and keep things ticking along which is a credit to how we work as a team.

As for the sport section this week, we were lucky enough that the guest editor was a sports broadcaster. Andy Steggall joined us and was a great help to myself. I found I learnt a lot more about how a the sports section should operate within in a bulletin.

This week we were again a man short when it came to producing content for the website and for the bulletin. We had a good pool of stories and I think our two minute section was a strong part of the bulletin as it incorporated a variety of sports and also some university sport. This is the first time we have managed to use university sport in our bulletin. It was a bit tight to get the university basketball footage ready in time for the bulletin as they tipped off at 12pm but we managed to get it in the bulletin which I was pleased about.

I am most pleased about the quality of sound in the sports packages this week as this is something I have wanted to fix for the last few weeks. My team really nailed it this week as the quality of the sounds on voiceovers, interviews and crowd noise were much much improved.

Next week I will look to improve on some of the points Andy Steggall made, especially with regards to links and really having a bit more fun with some of the stories and making the links much more interesting and making sure they reflect why that story has made the bulletin. So for example making sure there is a news angle on match highlights so that there is a reason to have the highlights in the bulletin.

I look forward to trying to improve on this week in a week's time!

WINOL Week 2 Critical Reflection

We had the second (and final) dummy run of WINOL this week and I think, overall, it was a much better production.

I feel that as a group of editors we ran our editorial conferences and production meetings much better. We didn't discuss the stories at length in the editorial conferences, just let the reporter sell his or her story and then we set deadlines and time limits etc which I found to be a much more efficient method.

As far as the sports side goes, I was fairly happy with what we put out but was disappointed to have only had football content. The reason for this was that our rugby story was cut due to the bulletin being too long, for next week, my team and I have arranged to cover a wider variety of sports. This is something I will look to continue to do when possible.

Another aspect I will work on with my team is sound quality of packages for the remaining productions as I want our bulletins to tick all the boxes in terms of production quality.

Once we had uploaded all of our sports content onto the hard drive I started to make myself available to help other members of the WINOL team, for example with editing packages that were getting close to deadlines.

We are in a fortunate position on Sports in the respect that the majority of our events are scheduled so filling our section of the bulletin should be easier than news. I have found in the first two weeks that it has been so this should allow us to work towards better quality packages for the rest of our WINOL bulletins.

We have also continued adding content to the Winchester Journalism website which can be found under the sports section.

This week's bulletin was much better as we managed to fill the 15 minutes and had full content, but there is still room for improvement which is something we will continue to work towards.

Points for improvement:

1) Sound quality of packages

2) Voice overs on highlights packages (so my reporters and I aren't just saying what we can see)

3) Cover a wider variety of sports

4) Improve the shots used for headlines

WINOL Week 1 Critical Reflection...

So, we had the first week of WINOL(Winchester News Online) last week, the first dummy run I should say before we get going properly.

WINOL is a news programme that is being run by second and third year journalism students at The University of Winchester. We cover news and sports in Winchester and the surrounding areas. Third Year students have taken on the editorial positions whilst second years have taken on the staff positions.

As I have taken on the role of Sports Editor, my main tasks include organising my sports team, deciding which stories we are going to run and ensuring that these stories are produced on time and to the required broadcasting standard.

I think as a whole the sports section of the news bulletin this week was good as we included a good variety of packages which included different sports. We had two highlights packages (one football and one ice hockey), one NIB (news in brief) about the local rugby team and a graphic used as a NIB to preview the local sides involved in the FA Cup first round this weekend.

As a sports team we are required to produce content for the sports section of the news bulletin and also produce content for the news website (http://www.winchesterjournalism.co.uk/). We managed to fulfill our duties on both parts and I am very proud to say that the first published content on the WINOL website was from the sports team. This week I will be looking to get more content published on the website and will be aiming to have more content written regularly.

I think that my sports team worked very hard to produce the content they did. One thing I will make sure of next time is that all of the content is produced on Final Cut Pro instead of Premiere Pro as this caused some problems when it came to stacking the VT's ready for the bulletin. I have also told my reporters for this coming week to have content ready earlier, not because they were late last time (in fact they were all near enough on time...ish!) but because it all became a bit of a rush when we were nearing live time so it made sense to ensure that our deadline was earlier so that the run up to live time was smoother and more relaxed.

I will also try to ensure that all of my sports reporters are made available to other teams once they have completed their sports requirements as WINOL is a team effort and it is important that once individual team tasks have been completed that we work as a team to produce the best bulletin possible.

I think the main points to improve are perhaps the commentary on sports highlights packages, ensure my reporters write their own links, make sure we have standby packages in case some fall through and also to make sure I give the production team the precise timings for each story including the in and out words to make VT operation smoother.

Ian Anderson Comes to Town...

Yesterday at University we had the pleasure of a guest lecture from Ian Anderson, recently the editor of the BBC 10 o'clock news. It was a very interesting couple of hours in which Ian analysed some news packages we had prepared earlier in the week. This seemed a terrifying prospect when we were told this and we put a lot of work into trying to make sure our package was perfect!!

All in all it went pretty well for our whole class, we got some good comments but I think the most useful thing for me was the improvement tips he gave us as a group.

There were a lot of tips on how to improve so I have just explained the one I found particularly useful. I found Ian's tips on the importance of a Piece to Camera (PTC) and how it can be used to turn a standard story towards the angle you are aiming for, most useful. For example, we did our package about University of Winchester students graduating and the possible problems they may have finding a job due to the current economic climate. Our PTC was pretty short and we didn't use it well enough to emphasise the angle of our story, and Ian recommended that we aim for longer PTC's, around 20-30 seconds long, to improve this.

I also found it very interesting to look into his career as a journalist and his rise from The Reading Evening Post, where he started, to eventually being the editor of the BBC 10 o'clock news.

I didn't take any photo's on the day so if you would like to see some of Ian looking around the TV studio at the University of Winchester and talking to students please see my friend's blog who did take some photos: http://mattcliff.blogspot.com/2009/10/university-of-winchester-welcomes-ian.html

Final Cut Pro...

Today we got going with a Final Cut Pro tutorial and I was very impressed with the programme as a whole. I was particularly pleased with the fact that it is very similar to Premiere Pro as I have become quite confident with Premiere Pro so hopefully the transition to this new programme shouldn't be too much of an issue.


The main principles of Final Cut Pro are very similar to what we've been taught previously and key recommendation that I am always keen to remember is where you save you're work.

All aspects of projects need to be saved to the same place, the same folder on the same drive as it's pretty vital for it to work properly. This goes along with making sure all the settings are correct, If you go to Final Cut Pro (menu) - Audio/Video Settings then the settings should be set to DV PAL 48 Khz for the first two lines and the third should be set to Firewire PAL.

Once that is set it is pretty important to save your work to a specific folder on the particularly drive, so if you are using an external hard drive make sure you select that when going to save. Then if you check your scratch disks in File - System Settings you can check that all aspects of your work are going into the same folder.

Now you can start, either by placing your tape into one of the tape decks or if there aren't any available it is possible to edit your package straight from the camera by using a firewire (I expect these are available at the Loan Counter at Uni?!).

You're now ready to get editing and producing your package/film/documentary or whatever it is you're editing. I think the best way to get used to this programme is to use it, play around with it and discover things for yourself, but here are a few hot keys that might make progress faster:

Hot Keys:

Apple Key + 8 = Capture Mode - Where you can capture the sections of filmed material you want to use.

Shift + L = Link Selection - Can be used separates your audio and video sections when in the timeline so that you delete the audio if you just want to use the video for example.

A = Arrow - Gives you back the arrow which can be used to drag clips, shorten them and is generally the tool you will probably need most.

B = Razor - Very useful tool which can be used to chop clips to delete parts or separate etc.

Below is a pretty useful video of the basics of Final Cut Pro which I found on YouTube, there are loads of videos for the programme on YouTube and there are some excellent tutorials on there.