WiNOL - behind the scenes with Winchester's top news team!

What's happened so far?

Week one and two were 'dummy runs', which we were using as opportunities to become more comfortable with our assigned roles.
I am Chief reporter/ Breaking news reporter and found week one and two to be very helpful in order to become familiar with my role and my duties.
I was very apprehensive as I lacked any filming or editing experience and worried about my physical ability in order to go out at make packages.

Week one could be described as a 'minor car crash' and I do not think that anyone on the team would disagree with that; we were missing two news packages (admittedly one being mine), we forgot to press 'record' and we were generally disorganised in most areas.
I was extremely disappointed with my own work and performance as a whole. I worked hard to find stories, adding dates to the diary and bringing ideas to the table, but my package was not at the level it should have been and despite racing to meet the deadline I was unable to complete my package in time.
I did however manage to film a ptc (piece to camera) by myself which was a great experience, even though i did not use it in the final edit. It was the Vox Pops that I found the most difficult; struggling to find any students that would stop to talk to me. When I did manage to grab a couple of people however, I found it difficult to complete the technical side of filming on my own, e.g. white balance and sound.
Despite the obvious problems, I felt more confident with using the equipment even if it did go horribly wrong.

I think we know that week two had to be better than the first and in Monday's debrief everyone was able to clear up a lot of issues and problems that had arisen in the previous week.
We had Ian Anderson from BBC 10 o'cock News as guest Editor.
The energy was great and we all started to work as a team, everyone cooperating really well together; there always seemed to be someone that knew how to help someone else, so any issues that occured seemed to be resolved quickly and effectively. The help between 'desks' was also great; I was particularly greatful to Cara, Chanin and Emma who each helped me with filming at different stages during the making of my package despite them being part of the Production.

Week three went LIVE at 5 for the first time, a scary concept but in practice everything went smoothly. There was more of a relaxed atmosphere and everyone knew what they were meant to be doing and it turned out, thankfully, to be our best bulletin yet. I did not make a news package for this bulletin but submitted a news story and tried to get in contact with Hampshire Police to get an interview for our NIB (News in Brief) but unfortunately lines of communication were limited. 
I think its fantastic that every week we are improving so much, I think the de-briefs after the bulletin goes out on wednesday and monday morning are really helping to filter out the problems and people are really taking on board any 'constructive criticism' that we get back from the lecturers and guest editors.