WINOL WEEK 9 - News Editor

This week I took the role of News Editor, and in all honesty, I was very disappointed with the level of effort that went towards this bulletin. Due to the BJTC awards and other commitments, many of the third years were unavailable as reporters this week, so this meant that the second years had to step up and produce some good content to get this bulletin off its feet.

This was the first week that the pressure was really going to be on the new reporters, and I was well aware from the start that this was going to be a sink or swim week. To try and be as involved as possible I gave everyone on the WINOL team my contact details on the Thursday and kept in touch with reporters over the weekend, so I knew what was going to happen in the news meeting on Monday. 

Zeena was my most pro-active reporter this week, she kept me in the loop every step of the way and was well prepared for her story. I think this level of knowledge and organisation really came across in her package. This was potentially an image weak story, however this did not phase her and she got on and found herself a strong case study which had a real relevance to the package and provided her with those much needed pictures. However the package was not perfect as there were serious issues with the sound on the piece to camera. 

This was a quiet news week, but these are the weeks when we need to work to generate the news. Use those contacts you've spent all semester building and find a story. You need to be flexible, look beyond your beat. If its a dry week on one beat, chances are there's a great story elsewhere. Leave the excuses at home, your boss wont care why you don't have a story, the only thing they care about is the fact that you don't. If you don't have a story, find one!

Several packages fell through this week for Harvey, however he continued searching for stories and took the gravity of the situation very seriously. Unfortunately he couldn't get a story together, but instead he saved the day by presenting sports and providing a story about the BBC sports personality of the year nominations. 

However not all reporters seem to share this level of determination. There seems to be this "meh" attitude if your package gets turned into an OOV. This should be the worst thing. You should be fighting to get in the bulletin every week, and I personally don't feel like that fight has really been there this semester. 

A perfect example of a last minute story is Liams package on the BJTC awards, where he managed to turn around a two minute package in just two hours. This was an error on my part as news editor for not considering covering the awards in advance. I was so focused on my lack of reporters that I overlooked the massive story surrounding the reason most of them were missing. Angus also stated that I shouldn't have included both Lucy and Sams packages as they were technically very similar, and highlighted the technical issues of Sam's package. Normally I would completely agree, however in this situation I felt that it was justifiable to have two technically similar packages as they concerned two entirely different subjects, and were placed very far apart in the bulletin. I felt that from an audiences position there would not be an obvious comparison between the two packages. 

The production team was also on the back foot this week as production editor Nicole was unavailable. However I felt that Megan, Katherine and Bracken stood up to the challenge as a team and were very flexible to the changes that had to be made in the hours up to the bulletin being recorded. But I do think they would have benefited if they had appointed one person specifically to be in charge. There were several instances of miss-communication which could have been avoided if there was just one person calling the shots. However I understand their hesitation to put someone in charge overall as this is a very big responsibility.