It’s my final year on Winchester News Online (WINOL), the
student journalism behemoth which has taken over my life for the last year and
a half. This semester I took on the role of production editor, a role that I
had wanted since my first semester when I was a lowly production lackey, sub
editing things and sitting on the sound desk. As a whole I am proud of how the
bulletin has run and how it has looked. It was pointed out to me the other day
that it is rare to have a team on production at the start of a new year that
only has one third year student. When I started on production we had Domonique,
Justina and Jack all on production overseeing me, George and Dan, so to take a
group of complete novices to a fairly well oiled machine I think I have done
well.
I wish I had been able to innovate more as production
editor; the website has moved forward so much but the bulletin is much the same
as it always has been. Together with Dan as news editor we have implemented the
‘Coming Up’ feature most weeks, which broke the show up well, and we also tried
a new credits style which threw to the website for the packages that didn’t
make it into the bulletin. Only the coming up survived but the first semester
with a new team is difficult; you have more chance for innovation in your
second semester on WINOL so I hope the
second years will carry our solid foundations forward to really do some
innovative things with the bulletin, now that the website has settled down. I
feel I was slightly restricted by the studio but we have developed a system
which allows us to light presenters better by recording Sport in advance, as
the packages are often done on the Monday or Tuesday. If you look at the last
bulletin, both Henry and Ali are well lit, not ghostly or even particularly
shiny as presenters have been in the past. We tried having the presenter stand
up during the headlines, in a similar way to ITV, but with the way our green
screen works you don’t get the sense of perspective so that idea was ditched.
We have changed our headlines, simplifying them with a new music bed that is easier
to edit. We have retained the old Garage Band WINOL theme but the different bed
means we can more easily drop stories from the bulletin, even if they aren’t
originally in the headlines, by dragging and dropping any story we want into
the timeline. In the final bulletin we our presenter sat with a laptop,
something we couldn’t have done before as the sports presenter would have been
sitting there. The laptop performs no real function but it looks professional and
it also gives the presenter something to look up from when moving from VT to
the next part of the script.
Aside from WINOL we had quite a few large scale projects
which we hoped would really show what we’ve learnt and how big WINOL has
become. We started with the BJTC awards. Henry organised us into a team before
we had even started on WINOL and despite some people having never worked with
the equipment before, we put on a show that impressed the BJTC and hopefully worried
our rivals. On the subject of rivals we had never really had a true rival that
we could hold our work up against before; we talk about Westminster and
occasionally Southampton but this year we took the success of Goldsmith’s and
their East London Lines website as a direct challenge to us, causing us to
really put work in to gaining a higher Alexa ranking on our website in both the
UK and Worldwide. We were a long way behind them at the beginning of the
semester but with the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner Debate, the
American Election and our week of daily 99 second news we were able to direct a
lot of traffic to our site. Also, when plugging the bulletin on Facebook,
Twitter and other social media we used to send our viewers to YouTube rather
than the site, meaning we got a lot of views but the site suffered. This year though
I was part of the decision to send people to the site for the bulletin, which
meant a slight drop in viewers as it is a different system but increased the traffic
for the site. At the end of my time as production editor WINOL was the top student journalism site in
the country as shown in the Alexa rankings where we were 479,411[1]
in our global rank and 10,333[1]
in our UK rank; over 10,000 places ahead in the UK rank of our nearest rivals
in this country, the aforementioned East London Lines. This is to be commended
and I think everyone on the team should be proud of this achievement now that
we can confidently call ourselves the best student journalism and definitely
the most widely viewed in the country. Special mention goes to Sam, website
editor, who has overseen the change and Jason who has helped engineer it by
taking us through the transition to the seemingly simpler WordPress system.
Another project we undertook was the
Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner Debate (HPCC), planned by our main
politics reporter Louis O’Brien. In the weeks building up to it we had a lot of
planning sessions; details changed, venues changed, and the university got
involved but we were fairly confident that we could pull it off. All the third
years involved were veterans of November 30th and me, Henry, Ewan,
Flick and Sam were involved in the memorial service last year at a school, a
job given to us by a professional production company so we knew we could do it.
The scale of the event though was much larger as we had six candidates to look
after and host, BBC South’s Alex Forsyth. We also had an audience of around 300
packed into the Stripe auditorium; add this to the online audience, streaming
the event live on UStream and it was one of our most successful events. My role
on the night was as a sort of director or perhaps a floor manager; there’s not
much we could do about talkback and the like and Henry was running the camera
output from the tricaster, although he had to rely on his camera people to give
him good shots to choose from. It fell to me to time answers and try to keep
Alex Forsyth informed as to whether she needed to hurry someone along or
whether a candidate had longer for their opening statements. This was a big
responsibility but fortunately Alex was a fantastic host and I hope that she
appreciated my help.
The American elections saw us attempt
to cover another big event, evolving from when WINOL covered the General Election
in 2010 and attempting to do the same but on a much larger scale. It became
obvious that this wouldn’t be possible, the programme would need to be a
different kind of show and after changes and confusion from an organisational
point of view we had a programme that would be two hours long, streamed live
like the HPCC debate and that took the form of a discussion show with guests
and experts, trying to argue over who would win the elections. The show was to
be broadcast from nine o’clock but not in the contingency plan was the prospect
of Obama winning before we went to air. This showed a real lack of planning but
cannot be solely blamed on Ali as the head of the project. We should have
encouraged Ali to involve other people in the plans sooner but other projects
got in the way. On the day we came in and Ali was asking if we could take the
show down to a 15 minute bulletin, the same length as a normal WINOL but I knew
this wouldn’t be possible. A two hour long show had been promised and that was
what we were going to put out. I was director for the whole two hours and it
was a very steep learning curve. I volunteered to direct the show since no one
else seemed like they wanted the job, despite having only directed one WINOL
before; that gave me more experience
than some but it was still a lot of pressure. I think if you compare my
directing style during the two hours (which was frantic at best) to my
directing during the bulletin that afternoon where it was decided I would also
take the helm, I was a much more accomplished director, keeping everyone in the
gallery informed as well as the presenter who often feels a little bit lost and
alone in the studio. I think the whole experience taught me a lot about
directing and has shown me that it is something I would really like to pursue;
nothing on WINOL, except perhaps occasionally turning my hand to presenting,
has given me a greater buzz than being in control of that gallery.
In our final week of WINOL we decided
we would have a daily news update in the style of BBC Three’s 60 seconds. It
was to be called 99 news and a unit was put together to produce the bulletins,
whilst I stayed focused on putting out our final bulletin of the semester and
my final bulletin altogether. The show was very polished and made its one
o’clock deadline every day bar the Monday. It gives us the distinction of being
the only student run organisation to boast daily news broadcasts, most
journalism courses only do one news day a term, and not only do we do WINOL
weekly but we now have a pretty viable plan for daily news updates which I
personally think could be carried forward into next semester. I also got
involved with the radio, being a regular newsreader during WINOL’s Tuesday
takeover as it was called. I really like radio as a medium and was quite glad
to get some experience, no matter how small, on my CV before I left.
I would have liked to direct the final
week of WINOL but it is no longer about us, the third years, it is about
passing the torch so to speak to another team of hopefully bright young things
who will continue to build upon the solid foundation I think we have laid out.
I worry a little about production because although I encouraged members of my
production team to get training on lighting, made sure they were officially
studio trained and to learn things like the tricaster, I’m not sure this ever
happened. And with many of them wanting to try their hand at news or sport next
semester before deciding where they really want to be on WINOL, I worry that
not many people will have the production skills I taught to my group, who have
been a superb help and very good at following instructions. The main worry for
me at the start of the semester was how I would cope with the added pressure of
having a team of people working under me, and I think I was able to cope a lot
better because of the quality of the team. They all had a chance to direct
except Nicole who would have been director in the last week if she hadn’t had
to disappear due to a problem at home. However I am pleased to say that Ben did
a great job, learning a lot over the intervening weeks between that and the
first WINOL which he also directed. It was criticised by some that I let a second
year direct the first couple of weeks but I think throwing them in at the deep
end was necessary to give them the fear that all journalists should live by. I
am therefore extremely happy with how this term has gone and how my time as
production editor has come to a close. Long may WINOL’s dominance continue.
