Media Theorist, Stuart Hall, suggests there are three ways my audience will be able to analyse and interpret my media text. These are:
Preferred Reading
Negotiated Reading
Oppositional Reading
Preferred Reading is when the audience agrees with my piece and shares its views. It is the most dominant reading and would be expected of my target audience who enjoy my mix of serious and light-hearted stories, while taking something away from the text after listening.
Negotiated Reading is when the audience partly agrees with me but sometimes resists and modifies. These readers may still enjoy listening to my radio piece but could think of ways to improve it.
Oppositional Reading is when the media consumer understands my text but does not agree. They may not think my stories fit the mise en scene or just not enjoy the flow of my work at all. It is this audience I will take the most feedback from as I try to improve my work.
I think it is important to understand how my audience will analyse my work as I then have a good idea on how to present it to them.
I think most of my audience will read my work though 'Negotiated Reading' as it is news based and topical. They are likely to have their own strong views on what should be presented on the news and how. There are many different ways to present the news and this is why there are newspapers aimed at many different target audiences such as 'The Sun' for the working class who want a light-hearted and over dramatised approach and 'The Observer' for factual middle-class reads.
David Morley on the other hand wrote: 'audiences, like producers of messages, must also undertake a specific kind of "work" in order to read meaningfully what is transmitted' in his 1980 text 'The Nationwide Audience'. Morley suggests that the audience will not just initially analyse a media text in one of three ways as Stuart Hall suggests, but "work" through it to make their own decision. They may listen to a media text such as my radio work, go away and talk to friends via the 'Two Step Flow' theory and reach a new point of view.
I believe how a media consumer analyses a text depends on the individual- but I will take all varieties of feedback, as I did with my questionnaires, and try and improve my work accordingly.
Sunday 5 December 2010
Sunday 21 November 2010
Tuesday 30 March 2010
How I Contributed To The Task
I contributed to the task in numerous ways during our group project. I think it was very important that we all put in individual effort as well as productive team-work to come away with the best results.
This begins by doing a wide range of individual planning and research, then bringing this solo work to the team to discuss and improve. We all participated well with this, for example I would go away and make notes on a local radio station such as ‘96.5 Bolton FM’ and compare my findings to what Liam had discovered about a national station such as ‘Heart FM’ so we can analyse key differences and which aspects we want to use for our own station. I would say how 'local radio presenters connect with their audience better, as they deal with local topics and in this normally have presenters from the local area' and Liam would come back with 'but national stations have more advanced software for a sharper editing process' and we'd take the positives from both situations to enhance our own work.
With our preliminary task we all took on major roles to master individual skills to bring to the team. I focused on presenting skills with microphone work. As we were still learning, there was lots of room for improving after our preliminary, but as a learning curve this greatly helped us. I learnt I needed to speak softer into the mike and stop static sounds and ‘dead air’ moments.
As me moved onto the final piece I wanted a more all-round approach to the work so began focusing on editing as well as the recording. We used Audacity, which I spent time practising on and learning how to cut and move sound segments. Again we all put in individual work, but by bringing these ideas to the team meetings we had a lot of group input and evolution of our ideas.
During our research for news stories I frequently watched the news and checked stories online for inspiration. I decided we wanted a mix of light-hearted and serious, powerful stories that would interest our target audience of teenagers to young adults, who are at the stage of enjoying ‘fun’ stories while having moral obligations to care about the world. I suggested to my group we cover the John Terry affair and Hati stories, as the juxtaposition of stories was exactly what we were looking for.
From here we moved onto the recording stages of our final piece, as I stated, I wanted to much more involved with the editing and technical stages of this and so I was. I became a more confident user of Audacity and introduced snippets of jingle in-between headlines. I also kept presenting, and felt my voice was more professional to a news show. I studied the presenting skills of professionals such as Trevor McDonald and spoke softer, yet with authority, into the mike. I think tone was very important as we needed the balance between ‘jokey’ attitudes enjoyed by our young target audience and serious and respectful voices to justify our serious stories.
I believe I contributed well to the task and was part of an effective team that pulled all our ideas together to create our radio segment.
This begins by doing a wide range of individual planning and research, then bringing this solo work to the team to discuss and improve. We all participated well with this, for example I would go away and make notes on a local radio station such as ‘96.5 Bolton FM’ and compare my findings to what Liam had discovered about a national station such as ‘Heart FM’ so we can analyse key differences and which aspects we want to use for our own station. I would say how 'local radio presenters connect with their audience better, as they deal with local topics and in this normally have presenters from the local area' and Liam would come back with 'but national stations have more advanced software for a sharper editing process' and we'd take the positives from both situations to enhance our own work.
With our preliminary task we all took on major roles to master individual skills to bring to the team. I focused on presenting skills with microphone work. As we were still learning, there was lots of room for improving after our preliminary, but as a learning curve this greatly helped us. I learnt I needed to speak softer into the mike and stop static sounds and ‘dead air’ moments.
As me moved onto the final piece I wanted a more all-round approach to the work so began focusing on editing as well as the recording. We used Audacity, which I spent time practising on and learning how to cut and move sound segments. Again we all put in individual work, but by bringing these ideas to the team meetings we had a lot of group input and evolution of our ideas.
During our research for news stories I frequently watched the news and checked stories online for inspiration. I decided we wanted a mix of light-hearted and serious, powerful stories that would interest our target audience of teenagers to young adults, who are at the stage of enjoying ‘fun’ stories while having moral obligations to care about the world. I suggested to my group we cover the John Terry affair and Hati stories, as the juxtaposition of stories was exactly what we were looking for.
From here we moved onto the recording stages of our final piece, as I stated, I wanted to much more involved with the editing and technical stages of this and so I was. I became a more confident user of Audacity and introduced snippets of jingle in-between headlines. I also kept presenting, and felt my voice was more professional to a news show. I studied the presenting skills of professionals such as Trevor McDonald and spoke softer, yet with authority, into the mike. I think tone was very important as we needed the balance between ‘jokey’ attitudes enjoyed by our young target audience and serious and respectful voices to justify our serious stories.
I believe I contributed well to the task and was part of an effective team that pulled all our ideas together to create our radio segment.
Tuesday 16 March 2010
Evaluation
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
After much research of many media institutions and the radio shows they play, I have concluded that a local light-hearted radio station such as BBC Oxford or Jack FM would distribute our radio show. It is common for local stations to broadcast local dialects (and we are all native to Oxfordshire) This became apparent during my research into 95.6 Bolton FM. And we mix local and national stories, such as our coverage of the local mans crocodile farm contrasted with our coverage of Haiti.
http://www.jackfm.co.uk/
This link to Jack FM will allow you to listen to the similarities of our broadcast and theirs. These local stations build better relationships with their listeners as they present to a smaller number of people who get more input via phone-ins and competitions.
Who would be the audience for your media product? And how does it represent particular social groups?
Our target audience will be teenagers to young adults, 15 to 24. Most who I assume will be local to Oxfordshire. We represent young Oxfordians by being them ourselves. A lot of our stories, such as the John Terry affair are light hearted and relevant to popular culture. This is entwined with serious stories that interest and challenge our audience’s views. Despite this, as a news segment we would hope to have a large variety of audience to address due to most people wanting the news to keep up to date with the world. This is proven by ‘The news at Ten’ being one of the most viewed programs in history and that news has spread to more niche markets such as children with ‘News Round’ and music lovers with ‘Kerrang News’. The Cultivation Theory tells us how the media is such an important source of information that consumers find it ultimately impossible to escape it's gradual encroachment on their everyday lives- this again will increase our viewing figures.
How did you attract/address your audience?
If our radio segment was a daily show, we would attract our audience through local mediated advertisement. There is no point spending millions of pounds on national advertisement for a local radio show, so I would focus on Poster and possible local TV/Radio Adverts in the Oxfordshire area.
Our Jingle will also attract our audiences. It has been theorised that a person can become attracted to a jingle if they hear it enough time though the mediated Syringe Theory. An example of this would be an individual recognising the theme music to Eastender and feeling an urge to go watch. Our jingle would work in a similar way for our audience, if they are browsing through radio stations and get a blast of our jingle, they will stop and listen in. This will fundamentally raise our profile.
Furthermore I would attract audience through advertising, especially through the Syringe Theory of playing our adverts locally over and over and the Two Step Flow Theory of allowing our media consumers to discuss our show amongst themselves and hopefully attract new consumers to tune in.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Through the construction of our radio piece we came into contact with many new technologies and media instruments.
The key program we used was the computer program ‘Audacity’. Created by Dominic Mazzoni, this simple yet effective program recorded our voices through microphones and then allowed us to edit. The editing process consisted to cutting and lengthening voice segments and overlapping them with backing sounds such as quieter music or ‘buzzing and disjointed' effect used in our Haiti story to represent technical problems that would occur while broadcasting a piece of news from another country.
Over the course of our project I have learnt to master Audacity as well as other instruments such as the microphones, handheld voice recorders and even video cameras when filming an evaluation video.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
I and my group have come a long way since our preliminary. In our preliminary we were still learning how to use programs such as Audacity and had technical difficulties in the editing phases. While speaking into the mike we were too loud and didn’t do enough to stop disturbances. I think as a learning curve the preliminary can still be seen as a success as it did teach us the basics and pushed us to achieve and do better for our final piece.
Our final piece is much better flowing with many more technical skills such as an improved jingle, sound effects between headlines and our ‘buzzing’ effect in our Haiti voxpop. Our presenting skills are also much improved, with our voice tones suited to a News environment.
As a group our time management excelled from our preliminary, as we met up frequently in own free time to record and edit.
I think the progress we made can be put down to our excelled effort and understanding of preparation as we shared ideas, researched stories and scripted; our recording as we were more experienced and progressed through trial and error and finally our postproduction, spending a lot of time editing on Audacity to achieve our final piece.
After much research of many media institutions and the radio shows they play, I have concluded that a local light-hearted radio station such as BBC Oxford or Jack FM would distribute our radio show. It is common for local stations to broadcast local dialects (and we are all native to Oxfordshire) This became apparent during my research into 95.6 Bolton FM. And we mix local and national stories, such as our coverage of the local mans crocodile farm contrasted with our coverage of Haiti.
http://www.jackfm.co.uk/
This link to Jack FM will allow you to listen to the similarities of our broadcast and theirs. These local stations build better relationships with their listeners as they present to a smaller number of people who get more input via phone-ins and competitions.
Who would be the audience for your media product? And how does it represent particular social groups?
Our target audience will be teenagers to young adults, 15 to 24. Most who I assume will be local to Oxfordshire. We represent young Oxfordians by being them ourselves. A lot of our stories, such as the John Terry affair are light hearted and relevant to popular culture. This is entwined with serious stories that interest and challenge our audience’s views. Despite this, as a news segment we would hope to have a large variety of audience to address due to most people wanting the news to keep up to date with the world. This is proven by ‘The news at Ten’ being one of the most viewed programs in history and that news has spread to more niche markets such as children with ‘News Round’ and music lovers with ‘Kerrang News’. The Cultivation Theory tells us how the media is such an important source of information that consumers find it ultimately impossible to escape it's gradual encroachment on their everyday lives- this again will increase our viewing figures.
How did you attract/address your audience?
If our radio segment was a daily show, we would attract our audience through local mediated advertisement. There is no point spending millions of pounds on national advertisement for a local radio show, so I would focus on Poster and possible local TV/Radio Adverts in the Oxfordshire area.
Our Jingle will also attract our audiences. It has been theorised that a person can become attracted to a jingle if they hear it enough time though the mediated Syringe Theory. An example of this would be an individual recognising the theme music to Eastender and feeling an urge to go watch. Our jingle would work in a similar way for our audience, if they are browsing through radio stations and get a blast of our jingle, they will stop and listen in. This will fundamentally raise our profile.
Furthermore I would attract audience through advertising, especially through the Syringe Theory of playing our adverts locally over and over and the Two Step Flow Theory of allowing our media consumers to discuss our show amongst themselves and hopefully attract new consumers to tune in.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Through the construction of our radio piece we came into contact with many new technologies and media instruments.
The key program we used was the computer program ‘Audacity’. Created by Dominic Mazzoni, this simple yet effective program recorded our voices through microphones and then allowed us to edit. The editing process consisted to cutting and lengthening voice segments and overlapping them with backing sounds such as quieter music or ‘buzzing and disjointed' effect used in our Haiti story to represent technical problems that would occur while broadcasting a piece of news from another country.
Over the course of our project I have learnt to master Audacity as well as other instruments such as the microphones, handheld voice recorders and even video cameras when filming an evaluation video.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
I and my group have come a long way since our preliminary. In our preliminary we were still learning how to use programs such as Audacity and had technical difficulties in the editing phases. While speaking into the mike we were too loud and didn’t do enough to stop disturbances. I think as a learning curve the preliminary can still be seen as a success as it did teach us the basics and pushed us to achieve and do better for our final piece.
Our final piece is much better flowing with many more technical skills such as an improved jingle, sound effects between headlines and our ‘buzzing’ effect in our Haiti voxpop. Our presenting skills are also much improved, with our voice tones suited to a News environment.
As a group our time management excelled from our preliminary, as we met up frequently in own free time to record and edit.
I think the progress we made can be put down to our excelled effort and understanding of preparation as we shared ideas, researched stories and scripted; our recording as we were more experienced and progressed through trial and error and finally our postproduction, spending a lot of time editing on Audacity to achieve our final piece.
Audience Review
I created this questionnaire so we could get feedback from our audience. It is very helpful to see how people react to our show and to hear their opinions. Here is an example of an original questionnaire that I have put online, emailed to people and handed out hard copies at school, and one that is filled out, I had emailed to me by Ryan Banks who listened to our show.
Saturday 20 February 2010
Recording + Editing
After our initial recording sessions we continued to record on a regular basis, this took several sessions to do a good job, but we found the time useful and rewarding. In our group we all picked certain jobs for recording, me and Liam became main News Readers while Ruhul took charge of vox-pops and editing. As well as this I took a key interest in the recording as I wanted to learn the new skill and be as involved in the final piece as I possibly could. The Editing system on Audacity was simple yet effective and involved cutting and moving sound-bites as we worked to make the piece flow as well as possible.
As a key news reader I felt I needed to take inspiration from professional news readers in the same way we initially took inspiration from professional radio shows. The most experienced and well practised one I could think of was Sir Trevor McDonald, so I researched him:
‘He was promoted in 1992 as the sole presenter of News at Ten, where he became one of the best known faces on British television screens. A year later in 1993, he was awarded an OBE in the Queen's honours list. McDonald stayed with ITN when News at Ten was axed in 1999, moving to present the new ITV Evening News. News at Ten was briefly re-launched in 2001, to which McDonald returned to presenting. He presented the ITV News at 10.30 following News at Ten's second axing. Since 1999, he has also hosted ITV's flagship current affairs program ‘Tonight with Trevor McDonald.’
I noticed he always sat up straight when delivering the news and spoke slowly and clearly. These are techniques that inspired me during my recording; I spoke softly yet clearly into the microphone to get the best possible sound and made sure there was no 'dead-air' time.
We overcame illness and time-table problems to meet up regularly to record our show and practised a lot in our own free time. Once we were perfectly happy we were practised enough and ready to perform we recorded a section. Many of the sections were recorded more than once and drastically changed to get the best results in the end.
Editing consisted of cutting and moving sound bites on Audacity to make our radio piece flow and improve the listening experience. This was relatively easy on Audacity as it is a basic program, but this also made it hard to do more complex editing- such as creating our disjointed effect for the Haiti story. During the editing process we had to import in our jingle and backing music, and create variations in volume- for example- making it slightly louder between headlines to indicate the next one was coming up.
I enjoyed editing as I got to be part of making what we’d recorded a final radio segment. It was extremely interesting to learn how it all fit together and created a piece of work I’m very proud of.
As a key news reader I felt I needed to take inspiration from professional news readers in the same way we initially took inspiration from professional radio shows. The most experienced and well practised one I could think of was Sir Trevor McDonald, so I researched him:
‘He was promoted in 1992 as the sole presenter of News at Ten, where he became one of the best known faces on British television screens. A year later in 1993, he was awarded an OBE in the Queen's honours list. McDonald stayed with ITN when News at Ten was axed in 1999, moving to present the new ITV Evening News. News at Ten was briefly re-launched in 2001, to which McDonald returned to presenting. He presented the ITV News at 10.30 following News at Ten's second axing. Since 1999, he has also hosted ITV's flagship current affairs program ‘Tonight with Trevor McDonald.’
I noticed he always sat up straight when delivering the news and spoke slowly and clearly. These are techniques that inspired me during my recording; I spoke softly yet clearly into the microphone to get the best possible sound and made sure there was no 'dead-air' time.
We overcame illness and time-table problems to meet up regularly to record our show and practised a lot in our own free time. Once we were perfectly happy we were practised enough and ready to perform we recorded a section. Many of the sections were recorded more than once and drastically changed to get the best results in the end.
Editing consisted of cutting and moving sound bites on Audacity to make our radio piece flow and improve the listening experience. This was relatively easy on Audacity as it is a basic program, but this also made it hard to do more complex editing- such as creating our disjointed effect for the Haiti story. During the editing process we had to import in our jingle and backing music, and create variations in volume- for example- making it slightly louder between headlines to indicate the next one was coming up.
I enjoyed editing as I got to be part of making what we’d recorded a final radio segment. It was extremely interesting to learn how it all fit together and created a piece of work I’m very proud of.
Research and Planning
Due to lots of research and planning being put onto my blog during the working process, I have decided to have a final review of it all to tidy it up:
As a group our task was to produce a short News piece for the radio, we had previously used the radio equipment during our preliminary task and so were used to the equipment such as the mike and knew the computer program: Audacity.
For our initial research we listened too and analysed some established radio stations se we could see how they performed. I wanted diversity in the stations I listened too so that I could get ideas from all areas of radio, because of this I looked at two national stations: Heart and BBC Radio 1, and a local station: 96.5 Bolton FM. Another good thing about this was that one was from the opposite end of the UK and I could see if different regions performed differently.
I already have sections on both these stations on my blog, so rather than repeating all that I shall give a quick overview:
Heart is the local station for London but also goes national; this made it very interesting to research. It played popular music and has a memorable jingle ‘This is Heart’ which I recognised even though I hadn’t really tuned in beforehand; this argues that the 2-Step Flow theory is effective as I must have heard it from others and once tuning into Heart, made my own decision. The news segment was sharp and included all the top headlines, but also featured a section of local news to the capital. As a listener I enjoyed Heart and found it easy to listen too although locally I thought it could have been more in-depth.
BBC Radio 1 is a national station and one I had listened too before. They play chart music and have celebrity presenters such as Chris Moyles, Veron Kay and Fearne Cotton. Although many of the presenters on Radio 1 are very good it became apparent that being a television celebrity does not make you a natural at radio, and many would trail off with uninteresting tales of their own lives. The news section covered the main stories but the shows were generally centred on music and light hearted ‘banter’.
96.5 Bolton FM is the local station for Bolton in Lancashire. The initial sound-bite sounded less professional then the previous two shows but understandably they’d have a cheaper recording system. This station was very local and the news consisted of information about the local market and what the people of Bolton were up too. We needed to learn from this for when we presented our local news section.
For a more in depth look please look at my earlier blog posts.
From this point on me and the group had a brain storm about our radio news segment. We targeted it to be around 4 – 6 minutes long and include both local and nation stories, also including weather and sports, possibly ending with a light hearted story. In our preliminary piece we had branded ourselves as a light hearted team; this was backed up by our name ‘The Coconut Lounge’, and through our presenting we joked around and gave each other silly nicknames. All though there was nothing wrong with this in the right context, we felt as news presenters our final piece needed to be more serious and constructive to meet the mise en scene of the news. We ditched the nicknames and decided upon our first basic timeline which was as followed:
Jingle -30 seconds
Headlines – 1 minute
Main Story – 2 minutes
Vox-Pop (weather) – 30 seconds
Sports – 1 minute
Light Story to end on (interview) – 1 minute
This basic plan gave us bones to work on so that we could build our piece. The idea behind this was that we wanted to include as much as possible such as vox-pops and a jingle without overdoing it and rushing the reports. We were definitely in the planning stage of our final piece.
We began to choose the news stories we wished to present, we chose the stories to represent our mise en scene of a serious news show but with the light-hearted stories common to national news shows such as 'The News at Ten'. I have an earlier more in depth section about this already on my blog, so again a quick over view:
Headlines were to be up to date and researched on the day as we didn’t need to practise talking about them, this was also to be true of weather, we would report on how it was at the time of recording to keep our show relevant and interesting.
Our Main Story was to be the earthquake in Haiti and the aftermath of that.
Sports would include the John Terry affair and up to date football scores.
The light hearted story would be a man with a large crocodile collection in the local area.
We chose real life stories because we wanted to relate to our audience and allow them to feel emotion for the news. We also chose the stories we did because they interested us and so any excitement or sorrow in our voices would be real and therefore a better performance. We began to script sections:
Alex: A massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake has struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti.
The extent of the devastation is still unclear but there are fears thousands of people may have died.
Haiti's worst quake in two centuries hit south of the capital Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, wrecking the presidential palace, UN HQ and other buildings.
Liam: A "large number" of UN personnel were reported missing by the organisation. Many people have spent the night outside amid fears of more aftershocks
Please see an earlier post for full script.
Once we had planned and scripted it all our Time Line changed and looked more like this:
Jingle 20-30 seconds
News headlines 20-30 seconds
Main story in depth 1 minute
Vox pop 30 seconds to be carried out on location
Funny news stories 20-30 seconds
Football news 20-30 seconds
Weather 20-30 seconds
Local weather
Vox pop 30 seconds on location
Jingle 20-30 seconds
This change showed our piece was progressing all the time and we knew we were moving forwards.
To improve this script-work we used brain-storms to decide exactly what we wanted to present and how. Using the influence we had gained from our researched radio stations we decided to present a vast mix of both light-hearted and serious news stories that can juxtapose and give something to everyone, improving our fan-base.
From here we began recording...
As a group our task was to produce a short News piece for the radio, we had previously used the radio equipment during our preliminary task and so were used to the equipment such as the mike and knew the computer program: Audacity.
For our initial research we listened too and analysed some established radio stations se we could see how they performed. I wanted diversity in the stations I listened too so that I could get ideas from all areas of radio, because of this I looked at two national stations: Heart and BBC Radio 1, and a local station: 96.5 Bolton FM. Another good thing about this was that one was from the opposite end of the UK and I could see if different regions performed differently.
I already have sections on both these stations on my blog, so rather than repeating all that I shall give a quick overview:
Heart is the local station for London but also goes national; this made it very interesting to research. It played popular music and has a memorable jingle ‘This is Heart’ which I recognised even though I hadn’t really tuned in beforehand; this argues that the 2-Step Flow theory is effective as I must have heard it from others and once tuning into Heart, made my own decision. The news segment was sharp and included all the top headlines, but also featured a section of local news to the capital. As a listener I enjoyed Heart and found it easy to listen too although locally I thought it could have been more in-depth.
BBC Radio 1 is a national station and one I had listened too before. They play chart music and have celebrity presenters such as Chris Moyles, Veron Kay and Fearne Cotton. Although many of the presenters on Radio 1 are very good it became apparent that being a television celebrity does not make you a natural at radio, and many would trail off with uninteresting tales of their own lives. The news section covered the main stories but the shows were generally centred on music and light hearted ‘banter’.
96.5 Bolton FM is the local station for Bolton in Lancashire. The initial sound-bite sounded less professional then the previous two shows but understandably they’d have a cheaper recording system. This station was very local and the news consisted of information about the local market and what the people of Bolton were up too. We needed to learn from this for when we presented our local news section.
For a more in depth look please look at my earlier blog posts.
From this point on me and the group had a brain storm about our radio news segment. We targeted it to be around 4 – 6 minutes long and include both local and nation stories, also including weather and sports, possibly ending with a light hearted story. In our preliminary piece we had branded ourselves as a light hearted team; this was backed up by our name ‘The Coconut Lounge’, and through our presenting we joked around and gave each other silly nicknames. All though there was nothing wrong with this in the right context, we felt as news presenters our final piece needed to be more serious and constructive to meet the mise en scene of the news. We ditched the nicknames and decided upon our first basic timeline which was as followed:
Jingle -30 seconds
Headlines – 1 minute
Main Story – 2 minutes
Vox-Pop (weather) – 30 seconds
Sports – 1 minute
Light Story to end on (interview) – 1 minute
This basic plan gave us bones to work on so that we could build our piece. The idea behind this was that we wanted to include as much as possible such as vox-pops and a jingle without overdoing it and rushing the reports. We were definitely in the planning stage of our final piece.
We began to choose the news stories we wished to present, we chose the stories to represent our mise en scene of a serious news show but with the light-hearted stories common to national news shows such as 'The News at Ten'. I have an earlier more in depth section about this already on my blog, so again a quick over view:
Headlines were to be up to date and researched on the day as we didn’t need to practise talking about them, this was also to be true of weather, we would report on how it was at the time of recording to keep our show relevant and interesting.
Our Main Story was to be the earthquake in Haiti and the aftermath of that.
Sports would include the John Terry affair and up to date football scores.
The light hearted story would be a man with a large crocodile collection in the local area.
We chose real life stories because we wanted to relate to our audience and allow them to feel emotion for the news. We also chose the stories we did because they interested us and so any excitement or sorrow in our voices would be real and therefore a better performance. We began to script sections:
Alex: A massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake has struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti.
The extent of the devastation is still unclear but there are fears thousands of people may have died.
Haiti's worst quake in two centuries hit south of the capital Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, wrecking the presidential palace, UN HQ and other buildings.
Liam: A "large number" of UN personnel were reported missing by the organisation. Many people have spent the night outside amid fears of more aftershocks
Please see an earlier post for full script.
Once we had planned and scripted it all our Time Line changed and looked more like this:
Jingle 20-30 seconds
News headlines 20-30 seconds
Main story in depth 1 minute
Vox pop 30 seconds to be carried out on location
Funny news stories 20-30 seconds
Football news 20-30 seconds
Weather 20-30 seconds
Local weather
Vox pop 30 seconds on location
Jingle 20-30 seconds
This change showed our piece was progressing all the time and we knew we were moving forwards.
To improve this script-work we used brain-storms to decide exactly what we wanted to present and how. Using the influence we had gained from our researched radio stations we decided to present a vast mix of both light-hearted and serious news stories that can juxtapose and give something to everyone, improving our fan-base.
From here we began recording...
Friday 19 February 2010
News Stories
For our show we wanted on main news story to be our focal point that we could discuss in detail and include a Vox Pop in, other news headlines, a sports story and a lighter story. It was important to our mise en scene to include this wide variety of news as we catered to our target audience of 15-24 year olds who will have a variety of interest.
We chose the Haiti earthquake as our main story as it was recent and topical at the time of recording and something that meant a lot to us as a team. It had caused so much destruction to an LEDC (less economically developed country) and we wanted to pay our respects by doing an accurate report on it.
‘A massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake has struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti. The extent of the devastation is still unclear but there are fears thousands of people may have died. Haiti's worst quake in two centuries hit south of the capital Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, wrecking the presidential palace, UN HQ and other buildings.’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2010/01/100113_haiti_quake.shtml
For our sports story we decided to report on the John Terry affair as it was topical to the world of sport; his England captaincy was under threat. We also intended to announce up to date football scores.
'England boss Fabio Capello will name defenders Wayne Bridge and John Terry in the squad for the friendly against Egypt on 3 March. Terry is alleged to have had an affair with Bridge's former partner but Capello has warned both defenders not to bring any personal tensions with them.'
We then decided to do a weather report that would again be up to date and relevant, making our news bulletin realistic and relatable.
Our light hearted story was to be a local report of a man with a large crocodile farm. We thought this would be interesting and fun, while giving us the chance to do an interview- this could be another Vox Pop, a pre-recorded interview or a live phone in.
We chose the Haiti earthquake as our main story as it was recent and topical at the time of recording and something that meant a lot to us as a team. It had caused so much destruction to an LEDC (less economically developed country) and we wanted to pay our respects by doing an accurate report on it.
‘A massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake has struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti. The extent of the devastation is still unclear but there are fears thousands of people may have died. Haiti's worst quake in two centuries hit south of the capital Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, wrecking the presidential palace, UN HQ and other buildings.’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2010/01/100113_haiti_quake.shtml
For our sports story we decided to report on the John Terry affair as it was topical to the world of sport; his England captaincy was under threat. We also intended to announce up to date football scores.
'England boss Fabio Capello will name defenders Wayne Bridge and John Terry in the squad for the friendly against Egypt on 3 March. Terry is alleged to have had an affair with Bridge's former partner but Capello has warned both defenders not to bring any personal tensions with them.'
We then decided to do a weather report that would again be up to date and relevant, making our news bulletin realistic and relatable.
Our light hearted story was to be a local report of a man with a large crocodile farm. We thought this would be interesting and fun, while giving us the chance to do an interview- this could be another Vox Pop, a pre-recorded interview or a live phone in.
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