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.