Critical Reflection

This year WINOL has been extremely successful in respects to the website, the focus of the term has been switched from the bulletin towards focusing on the website and increasing the amount of content, quality of the content and number of articles being written to increase the number of viewers of the website an improve its Alexa ranking, which we achieved. The current Alexa ranking for WINOL.co.uk is 10,338 in the UK and 476,793 worldwide which is a vast improvement on previous years and months, and is constantly falling. On the 27^th of November the websites UK ranking was at 21.900 which shows a drop of over 10,000 places in two weeks. I think this is because of the push for better written stories and updating the website all week, rather than just having a mass of stories hit the website on a Wednesday and then have no more updates for the rest of the week, having recent stories makes the website more current and actually gives people a reason to check it daily.

The re-design of the website has been a massive success, the new layout is much simpler to navigate and more attractive to the eye. Sport on the website has been sparser than news, partially because of a smaller reporting team and no dedicated sports writers updating the pages throughout the week and because of inconsistency within the team, some reporters would write and upload their match reports or stories promptly when told whereas other would not.

During the final week of the term WINOL 99 news was introduced. These short 99 second long daily updates where a new project to provide a daily video update, although each of these videos was only viewed between 47 and 105 times together throughout the week they gained more views than the weekly bulletin for the week. This can also be used to help explain the very quick increase in the Alexa ranking for the website over the last 2 weeks, these videos show that at least 47 people a day viewed the website to watch the daily 99 second news update which can only be a positive thing. After a bit more practice the production of these short bulletins will become much more streamlined and it will become easier for them to be produced, but this does add another daily deadline on top of the weekly one for the bulletin and it is important these are met.

The features section of the website and the features team have been extremely good this semester. They have been consistently producing well produced features including two extremely good profile interviews, one with a elderly man who used to Hitler's neighbour and another with Paul Blackburn who spent 20 years in prison due to a miscarriage of justice. These two videos alone have gained nearly 800 views on youtube. The features sections on the website are varied and interesting ranging from fashion photo shoots to confessional interviews and sports gonzo pieces, overall the features have been well produced and have been a real credit to the website.

The bulletin itself has been good this year, in the first few weeks it was rocky because of the new reporters getting to grips with new equipment and not knowing how to properly structure packages. The first three packages are of good quality because they were produced by experienced reporters, the 4^th package and the 'and finally' have many technical issues as does the sport because of inexperienced reporters and a lack of correct equipment. Although all the reporters received basic camera training and an understanding of how to use them they lacked an understanding of controlling sound, they did not know that radio microphones were available and were still unsure about some fairly basic camera functions. The technical ability of the reporters did improve but editorially they were still weak, I believe this was because of a lack of a bulletin focused debrief. Although we did receive a debrief from the guest editors each week this does not give enough of a focused review of the work for people to really improve editorially, and myself and Dan, the news editor, also gave our teams feedback but are not as detailed as Chris and Brian. I think that having these focused sessions would have improved the quality of reporters packages faster. Overall the quality of the packages did improve by the end of the year with reporters learning to use sequences and planning how they will structure their packages.

The production team was well run and organised on Wednesday and the bulletin was uploaded promptly, before five, each week which helped the bulletin views, which although were lower than normal were not terrible, the highest number of views the bulletin reached was 246 views, and the lowest gained only 43 views. There was a lack of production help on a tuesday during the filming of Sportsweek, although myself and Graham, the production editor, were experienced enough to produce the show ourselves there was a lack of focus and urgency towards sportsweek, especially when compared to the bulletin.

We have produced several special shows this semester, which I have been heavily involved in, including the coverage of the US election results, live coverage of the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner debate and producing an awards ceremony for the yearly British Journalism Training Council Awards. For the US elections I used the tricaster, a portable vision mixer, to live stream the output from the gallery to Ustream. This was the second time I had used the tricaster for this, the first being for the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner debate. The stream was successful although it did suffer sounds issues which were either due to a poor connection between the tricaster and the sound desk or a problem with the way the tricaster was pushing the sound to youtube. Although the stream had sound issues it was active for the two hours. The special itself was successful, although the planning had to be changed at the last minute because the result was announced before the broadcast. The highlight of the output were the Skype calls from America, we have tried several of these before, not from america, and it is very rare that they work live or are good enough quality to broadcast.

The second special I mentioned was the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner debate, I was heavily involved with the production of this event, leading the production team. This event was extremely well organised by Louis O'brien and he managed to get all 6 candidates and an audience of nearly 300 people to the university for the debate. As with the US elections I set up the tricaster to live stream the debate, this time with three cameras. We also set up two separate cameras for use in the final edit as well. The stream was live for the hour and a half that the debate ran for. Throughout the debate I live mixed between the three cameras, because there was no ability to have talkback it meant that I couldn’t communicate with the camera operators, this meant that we have to designate shots for each camera. This was a simple solution but was by no means perfect because. The stream was viewed by nearly 300 people when it was active.

The third special that I mentioned was the BJTC awards. Again as with the HPCC debate I lead the production of this project which was a large undertaking. The show had been partial organised as far as a venue had been arranged and then presenter and guests were organised, but all the live and video production work was left to me to organise. The final production included 6 cameras, a vt operator, sound, lighting, Autocue and the project was directed by Angus Scott. As well as prepping the production team and working on the script with Angus I also produced close to thirty minutes of video which was to be played during the show, these videos were a big challenge because they had to be played to match the presenter, Alistair Stewart, as he announced the nominees, winners and cued several video clips of the nominated projects. I edited several versions of each video for each section before discovering a system that worked. The show was a success and nearly went off completely without a hitch, the only issue came about because some of the nominees were late and Alistair failed to cue some of the videos. After the event I also edited the footage from all 6 cameras together into a 20 minute video of the awards show, there were several challenges while editing, there were major sound issues which took 9 hours to resolve. These projects where a massive undertaking and took up a lot of time, especially the BJTC awards, but they have helped to raise the profile of the course and WINOL within the university and to future employers who were at the ceremony.

My main role within WINOL was sports editor which means that I was responsible for the sports output on the bulletin as well as producing the weekly sports show, Sportsweek. Overall I am happy with the semesters sports coverage although there are several ways in which it could have been improved. Firstly I had the challenge of gaining access to the clubs who let us film, most were extremely cooperative and happy to have us back but Eastleigh FC demanded that we get a football conference photography license. To obtain this I first had to gain a copy of the university insurance policy and send that to the conference league, I eventually obtained the license and gained access back into the club, but during the period that we could not gain access it was difficult to have enough content to fill sportsweek.

Due to a lack of home fixtures, the only ones we can film, and a shortage of reporters due to personal reasons I found that I would often have to produce packages and interviews to fill time to have enough content to fill sportsweek. The lack of fixtures also meant that reporters would often have to find news stories or produce sports based features to make sure they produced a package each week, this started of well with reporters finding stories to pitch in the sports meetings but lost momentum as the term went on for reasons I can't really place.

The quality of the sports coverage was fairly poor to begin with, as can be expected, but I tried to get the quality up as quickly as possible to provide the best service possible to the clubs. The quality did improve quickly as the reporters got used to filming sport and with my help they improved their scripting, which is a difficult skill to master in sport. One problem I encountered early on was reporters not finishing their packages early and putting pressure on me to get sport ready for the bulletin, because of this I introduced a sports board, like the news board, which set out which match the reporter would go to each week, set them times for their packages and most importantly deadlines, which were mostly met.

One change to the sports this semester was that we pre recorded the sports output for the bulletin each week, this decision was made because of the new desk which was too small for two presenters to sit at. This put a lot of pressure on me on a wednesday because while trying to finish the sportsweek production and make sure that the packages were up to a good quality and edit the sports for the bulletin.

The audience for sportsweek varied a lot and was mainly reliant on twitter and if the football clubs retweeted the links to their followers. The Basingstoke Bison videos continued to get good viewing figures with two videos getting around 500 views each, but again these figures fluctuated and I failed to get any consistency in the audience figures. I did try to gain access to several football and ice hockey forums to try to get a consistent audience but the registration was refused so I could not post the links which would have increased the number of views.