News Broadcast Evaluation

News Broadcast Evaluations

The process to create the news bulletin I thought was relatively simple. The majority of the news stories covered in the bulletins were from various online sources, such as mainly BBC website and the Daily Mirror and the Sun, for our national news bulletin. For the local news bulletin, we used local websites such as the Gazette, Chronicle and the Northern Echo. I thought that deciding stories for the local news bulletin was easier because having done work experience in journalism at Metro, I know what stories they think would be interesting to the audience and what wouldn’t be, but finding good local stories at the time was difficult. Beth found it easier to collect exclusive news stories for both the local and national. I found collecting stories to create the national news bulletin tricky to get my head around how many of a specific news value story the national bulletin should have because the national bulletins are generally longer.

We had to make sure that there were a variety of stories that covers the news values and aims at the correct target audience. On Radio 1, the target audience would be 16-24 year olds and a local radio station would be Metro, which targets 25-44 year old women.

When creating the news bulletin, I don’t think there was any difficulties. The only concern was making the bulletin flow and that other people could understand what Beth and I were saying. It took a few goes on the Myriad System to say the bulletin without getting the words jumbled up, especially in the local news because you only have 90 seconds to two minutes. It has to be fast spoken to get all the stories in as well as the interviews but also needs to be understandable. When editing the piece, since we did not record the interviews separately, we had to split the interview up into blocks to make sure that all the volume was the same and that if any effects needed to be added, they could go on the correct block. We noticed when listening to Radio 1 bulletins and Metro’s bulletins, Metro had background music to it whereas Radio 1 did not. We decided that to make sure that the bulletins sounded different, the local news bulletin should include a repetitive beat in the background but at a lower volume than the speech. We did try on one of the interviews to make our voices sound like a man to make it more realistic, using effects, but it did not sound right so we just took the effect off the speech. Instead to make it realistic we added the intro and outro which were already made on the Myriad System.

On our Radio 1 bulletin it mainly contained a mixture of currency news value, which would be: the missing Malaysia Jet, the trial of Oscar Pistorius and Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry. Three of the stories were personality related and focused around Winter Paralympic gold medal winner Kelly Gallagher, Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry as well as the Kardashian family. Since Radio 1 broadcasts nationally, there were two stories that would come under proximity news value: Labour extends jobs guarantee for long-term unemployed and the Paralympic winter games. The stories that were exclusive came at the end. This is the same with the majority of bulletins since they get the important stories out of the way first, before ending on a high and feel-good stories. Since national news bulletins very rarely contain local news only two out of the six stories were proximity. If more stories were proximity then it is a local news bulletin.

All stories are national. If you put a story about a person from South Shields who has died in a car crash, on a national news bulletin, nobody would care. The stories which really stood out for me was the missing Malaysian flight, Oscar Pistorius and the Winter Paralympics. They target all the ages and are the most important stories. We that for these three stories they should go in order of the most important. That would mean the most current event that everyone was taking about (missing Malaysian plane) would go first. This story would be the longest as it is targeting a lot of people and contains a let of information including an interview, which I thought was important to get facts across but from someone else’s voice so that the audience do not get bored of hearing the same voice.

I felt like because all the stories interest a wide range of people and are a mixture of negativity, currency, personality and exclusivity etc, they would be good on a national bulletin because it is reaching out to not only their target audience but to people who care about an individual story but not necessarily all of them.

Our local radio bulletin was based on Metro Radio’s news bulletin and obviously involved mainly local news with the first story being the only national story, the next three being local leaving the entertainment second last and the sport being ‘and finally’.

The three local stories are a proximity value. The reason there is more local than national is because it is a local bulletin and the people who listen to it probably do not care about the national stories. If they do they will switch to another station, the most obvious channel to switch to is Radio 1. Three of them are also negativity stories: the first, second and third story. All three of them are also recency stories to make sure that the audience has not heard it before, but the third story is about a man from South Shields being airlifted to hospital is also a continuity news value, because at the end Beth says, “he is currently being treated at the RVI” meaning there is more news to be released about him and the accident. Continuity stories are good for radio stations because it keeps the audience listening and audience figures up until the next bulletin, where hopefully there will be more news released. I thought that this would be a good idea to include because it is something different and not often a value that you hear a lot on radio.

The entertainment story has a uniqueness value and it is a story to brighten up the bulletin because the majority of the stories are negative.

The “and finally” in local news bulletins often tends to be the sport. Since there was a local match on at the time we thought it wolf be right to just put that in because that is all the audience went to hear, not the national sport.

 I thought that for our local bulletin we included good local stories, that the audience will care about and create an emotional connection with some of the stories. Beth was a really good at speaking despite not really knowing the main points of how to speak during a broadcast, which I learned whilst on work experience. I think what we can do better next time is on the interviews actually get a male, female and a child to speak the interview scripts so that it sounds more realistic, for both local and national bulletins. I think that the audio quality could be better because it did not sound clear enough and there was a lot of white noise.

The majority of the feedback we got was positive and thought that both Beth and I had clear voices, although Beth W was a little hard to hear at times but that is because of technical difficulties with the levels on the microphone and a little distortion but the majority of the feedback was that there was some good stories involved but some were a little irrelevant towards the end. This was because at the time of deciding which stories to involve, there was not much happening in the news that we could talk about.