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 Goes Live! Week 3 Reflection

So this week was the week that WINOL went live for real and I have to say I think overall it was a great success! We've had an excellent response in terms of traffic to the site and to watch the news bulletin as well. I also think this news bulletin was the best we have produced so far which was great timing!!

As a sports team we decided to select stories we would cover at the end of last week so that we would be prepared and we had a really good selection of stories lined up, covering a variety of teams, sports and types. However, three of our stories fell through over the weekend due a number of reasons and come Monday it seemed like we would be short, but Tom Otrebski (deputy sports editor) and I managed to come up with a pretty decent running order in the end as we fulfilled our two minute slot pretty well which included two different sports. One thing I was disappointed about was the sound quality of our packages, this was something that I wanted to improve on from the week before but is still something we need to work on as a team and hopefully we can get it right this week.

I am very happy with the way we are working as a team due to the fact that we have been a man down for the majority of the time due to illness and we are still producing a good sports section for our bulletin. The same goes for our section of the website which I feel is a very strong part of http://www.winol.co.uk/ as a whole as the sport section contains the most amount of stories and is drawing in a good number of hits, for example we get a good number of hits for our non league football coverage.

I spent most of my time this week organising my reporters and sorting out which stories we could run (especially on Monday due to losing the three over the weekend.) Once we had decided and I had sent reporters for each story I began writing more copy for the website. On the Tuesday I attended the Winchester match for which I produced the match report and then helped Grant and Arnold with their packages on the Wednesday. Tom and I wrote the sports script and links which I think were pretty strong.

Due to problems with uploading last week the bulletin was shortened to 10 minutes so had we still had the good pool of stories we started with it would've left me with some tough decisions over which stories to run as we only had 2 minutes to fill instead of 3-4! This is a challenge I look forward to over the next few weeks. We filled our sports section with a variety of sports and a variety of story types by using NIBs, a VT and a graphic which I was happy with.

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.