Using, developing and challenging real media products

In all of these slides, I will underline points where I have used and developed around real media

The opening and closure of the bulletin including music/ jingle/ greeting/ ident/ sign off etc

Our jingle is improved in our main task bulletin from our preliminary task. We decided to change it as in the preliminary task we mentions now station ident checks. By having a voice over behind our jingle, we could introduce the news as well as station ident of Oldham Community Radio. We thought it was important to put the news just before 9am as this is the time our strand (schools and colleges) would be beginning their day. Because of this, our main task bulletin opens with “Good Morning Oldham, it’s 8.53 and here is your morning news report”. Compared to our prelim opening “You’re not gonna guess who’s in the studio”, our main task is more formal and suits the style of the news bulletin. The closure of our main task is again more formal that the preliminary task. It is much similar to the opening making it again a formal structure. The ending is “It’s 8.58 and that was your morning news report.”

The opening jingle sounds a lot more futuristic than ours. Similarly to ours, it has a voice over that is in the background of the jingle. Although ours has a greeting of “Good Morning Oldham, it’s 8.53 and here is your morning news report”, OCR open with “from the Sky news centre at 9”. They must make sure that they reference that Sky are theirs news source.

The scripting of the bulletin including use of language/ inverted triangle/ 5 w’s etc

We began scripting by thinking about our 5ws (who, what, where, when and why) and including them in to an inverted triangle. Our scripting took a lot of cutting down which we contained within our editing and this was simply because it had to be 5 minutes long and some interviews themselves lasted longer than that. When doing this we considered the 5ws as we knew these were the most important points we wanted to contain. We also thought about interesting facts that we had been told and included them in too. The use of our language was similar to the use of our interviewees language. They spoke formally because the questions we asked them were formal to suit the style of the bulletin.

It is hard to see how OCR scripted their piece because their news came from the Sky news source. However, the way they introduced and ended their bulletin was very formal and simple. An example of this is “weekdays 3-5, for the more mature listener”. This again is an example of advertising a show.

The presenter – age/ voice type and style/ dialect/ gender etc

We chose to have a range of presenters within the main task as there was much more to cover than in the preliminary task. In the prelim task, I was the presenter as it was only 30 seconds long and would have become confusing with too many presenters. In the main task we had a news presenter, a studio presenter, an education correspondent and a specialist reporter to keep the piece from being confusing. All of us are from Greater Manchester and although we don’t portray the diversity of the area, we represent what it is to be an aspect of the Oldham Borough. We are all the same age as our audience strand and so when presenting we knew a way in which to engage them. However, I think if we could change the presenters, we should have a mixture of genders. This way we are meeting the needs of the diversity of the area.

There are two specific presenters within this piece and they are a closing the news bulletin. The other presenters are involved within the Sky source and are a various range of reporters that are reporting for different reasons. This relates to our presenters as we have a studio and news presenter with outside reporters.

The choice of top story and its structure – think about news values here

Our top story was our main story. It contained social networking and smart phone dangers with teenagers, especially in colleges. It began with formal and factual information before analysing the question that we asked our interviewee. This story contains meaningfulness and personalisation. The meaningfulness lies within the fact that the audience are teenagers and the story relates to them. The personalisation lies within the actual story – colleges are trying their best but it’s up to the students.

The top story in the OCR bulletin was a political hard news story with news values such as elite nations and negativity. Just like our bulletin, OCR open with a negative news story that is somewhat more important than the others. This is so that the audience are concentrating and that they don’t miss any information.

The length/ pace of the bulletin

In a brief, we were told that on average our preliminary bulletin should be around 30 seconds and our main task bulletin around 5 minutes. Considering this, we as a group stuck to this. The planning of our piece relied on using techniques such as the 3 second rule to make sure that we met these time lengths. The length of both of our hard and soft news interviews could be too long as they take around half of the time of the whole bulletin. If we shortened our interviews then our bulletins may be more entertaining and not as dull. Feedback from the public on Facebook commented on the confusion of the piece. This could rely on the fact that it is slow paced and so this could be changed to make it easier to understand.

The pace of the OCR bulletin is much faster than our bulletin. It is only 3 minutes in length and has around 6 more stories than our bulletin has. This is because the interviews are not as long and contain only the information needed. However, our bulletins are also quite similar in the way that the hard and soft news stories last longer in time than the off the wall stories.

The range and number of stories – hard news/ soft news/ off the wall/ sport etc

The difference in the stories relies on the fact that the content of them is very different. Although they both relate to issues surrounding youths, the hard news story is much more serious. This affects the tone of our introduction of our stories. However, because they are much more serious than the off the wall story, we decided to keep them both very formal. The off the wall story is about “random text messages” and so is taken with an informal approach.

All of the stories in the OCR news bulletin are diverse which provides the audience with a lot of information. Although our bulletin has only 3 stories, it is similar to OCR as they both include a diversity of content.

The content of the bulletin eg vox pops/ outside braodcasts/ specialist

We have a range of hard interviews and vox pops to make the piece diverse and easy to follow. Our hard news story is a formal interview only as we wanted to keep it formal. This is similar to the fact that our off the wall story is vox pops only, to keep it informal. However, the soft news story has a range of formal interview and specialist vox pops. We found that if we could use vox pops to get the opinion of youths as well as their teachers formal interview, then our piece wouldn't be bias. The diversity of content has made the bulletin formally structured.

Because the OCR news bulletin is sourced from Sky, the content is very diverse. There is a range of vox pops and outside contents. However, our bulletin is more relatable to the audience as the Sky news broadcast is a national rather than a local range of content.

The production values – sound quality/ use of sound/ editing/ mixing

The sound quality of our vox pops and soft news interview are not as good in quality as our hard news interview. This may because we were outside of college and were moving the mic around more. The sound levels in the studio are all of a good maintenance yet are ruined by the bad quality of our vox pops and soft news interview. I think the editing of our main task bulletin is exceptionally good. We normalised the tracks all the way through making the piece sound constant. I also like the editing of the new jingle. Having it play quietly with a recorded track play over the top makes the jingle more personalised.

The editing of the OCR bulletin flows very well. This is noticeable in the transition from the introduction to the Sky news source. Although they have been recorded very different in completely different places, they sound similar and so flow very well. I think the transition from our introduction to our hard news interview is similar as it flows very well due to “normalising” in editing.