Holy mother of Moses this week was a stressful one. And alright, it may have actually been a week of relatively little stress followed by a pocket, a pouch maybe, of pure stress but that doesn't make me feel better about the whole debacle. It all started on our first week back, a debrief without a WINOL to either de or brief and a chance to vaguely meet the MAs who would be working with us for the next month and a bit. I'm WINOLs latest attempt at a transport and environment reporter, so of course my first story was about a university lecturer who also writes films. Seems logical. Well either way I was going to do this story justice and I think I did. Sadly whilst the film was shortlisted for an Oscar and a Bafta, it wasn't actually nominated and so the big story I totally unearthed and didn't just use a university press release became a slightly smaller story. Still, I was able to borrow the film from him, (pre any DVD release) and give it a watch. I'd give it a solid 86 popcorns. The interview went really well and I was pleased with what I did but I still had another week to get a story so more on my patch, I went for a story about housing in Cromwell Road in Stanmore which almost didn't work. I struggled on the monday for a story but managed on the Tuesday to organise two interviews with people relevant to the story that would give the story balance. I managed to get an interview with Councillor Ian Tait and Labour representative and former candidate Patrick Davies. The day was an exercise though in how difficult it is to secure interviews with people as they are almost all very busy and often not able to work to our deadlines.
The most difficult part was the organisation of the interviews for me because on Wednesday morning I went to the road to get some GVs of the road and also do my piece to camera. The shot on the piece to camera wasn't perfect and in the end I had what can only be called a guilty lampost shot. All in all, I was very happy with my first week on WINOL as a reporter but my work on housing set me up as essentially a housing reporter because my second week on WINOL ended with a housing story too. I learnt a lot from the Monday as my story I had prepared completely fell through. I intended to do a story on the Wi-Fi that was being added to the Blue Star bus that took commuters to Southampton unfortunately, Tom our news editor informed me that another reporter already had an interview and permission to film on the buses so that story went out the window. This meant I then had about an hour to try and set up another story which I'll be the first to admit I couldn't do. It meant I crashed and burned in the news conference even though Tom knew I didn't really have anything because he'd been trying to help me find stories and knew it was getting desperate. I went in on Tuesday then assuming I was just filming a lot of OOVs but this wasn't the case as another housing story broke and I was instructed to pretty much put it together in a few hours. Fortunately I managed to get in touch with a relevant local councillor and the interview was very easy to do but I struggled long into the night to get balance. Eventually on the Wednesday I spoke on the phone to someone who would give me balance, but they couldn't be interviewed as they weren't in Winchester and I had no way and no time to get to him, I instead quoted him in quite a long piece to camera as I didn't want my story to be dropped. It is a good example though of how important balance is to a story, without it, the story makes no sense, is legally suspect and really should be dropped.
I'd like to write more but with WINOL being what it is my mind is really focused on the next one so maybe I'll come back to this, but more likely I'll be distracted by the grind of what does feel like a job at times.
Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.
P.S. The first WINOL was removed due to unforseen technical issues but you can watch the second one right here on this very blog. Aren't I good to you?
No comments:
Post a Comment