Our Final News Bulletin

Below is a copy of our final news bulletin for 'Rhythm Extra'. From research to scripting, creating, editing and evaluating. It has been a thoroughly enjoyable task in which I have learnt loads about the radio industry and producing a news bulletin through all the steps. Our whole team is really happy with our finished piece, it has required a lot of editing and tweaks, but our we have worked well together and I hope you have enjoyed reading my work and enjoy listening to the news bulletin below, thank you.

Evaluation - 7

Looking back at your preliminary task. what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

The Prezi below discusses how much we have each learnt, what we did right and wrong in the preliminary task and how we adapted as a team in order to create a news bulletin we were all proud of.

Evaluation - 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

The presentation below discusses the many forms of technology I have used during this task and my view of them. It was only when creating this it became clear how much has been used throughout the task and how much I will continue to use it.

Evaluation - 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

Our radio is aimed towards a young audience and therefore we have to make sure to appeal to them and address them in an appropriate way. I believe this was helped by the fact we are in the age bracket ourselves and therefore unlike bigger stations, we do not have to conduct as much research into finding ideal ways of presenting.

We agreed that our news bulletin would be engaging but chilled. Many news bulletins feel rushed and from our research it was found that young people want a more relaxed radio station with chilled music and informative but relaxed news reading. Our research told us that including a bed was essential as well as engaging, exciting and relevant stories. We did not include politics and had an extremely brief weather report, all the result of feedback.

We also referred to the conventions of radio news bulletins in order to create a news bulletin to wasn't too different to the norm as the news needs to stand out and follows conventions such as being 3-5 minutes. Having one main voice for the listener to avoid confusion. Including an introduction to great the audience. And including many methods of delivering the news such as through copy stories, vox pops and voicers, etc in order to keep the news exciting and varied for our audience.


Other teen based stations such as BBC Radio 1, 1Xtra and Capital FM also helped us to target a younger audience. We made sure to listen to their successful bulletins and use similar conventions ourselves, this often matched the survey results and so we were confident it would be ideal for our audience. At some points in the day, Radio 1 has very short news updates which we liked the idea of, this wasn't possible for us as it had to be 5 minutes but it taught us techniques to speed up and slow down articles and make them most appropriate for our audience. We also listened to stations targeting a completely different audience such as Radio 4 and Radio Solent. These enabled us to have a greater understanding on how different age groups and cultures liked to be addressed in different ways and are attracted to radio stations for different reasons.

Evaluation - 4

Who would be the audience for you media product?

The Google Slides attached below discusses the audience for our media product. Slide 1 is about our ideal listener already blogged about. Slide 2 is about how this was used, the issues with it and how I would now change and elaborate on our target audience. Slide 4 is a profile page for our perfect listener with details, interests and reasons why they love Rhythm Extra.

Evaluation - 3

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

In a previous research blog post titled ‘The Ownership of UK Radio’, I looked at the different types of radio stations that exist including National, Regional and Internet radio, etc. After creating our radio news bulletin considering which type ours belongs to was a difficult one and so I went back and looked at what makes each one different.

National Radio is radio that is broadcasted and can be heard nationally through the radio. I think that our news bulletin does not fit in with many BBC national stations as it is such a different style. They have established their idea of a younger aimed station with both Radio 1 and 1Xtra. I believe they try to aim younger people on a mass scale being a national station whereas our bulletin has a niche style with the bed, the stabs and the way of presenting news. And therefore our bulletin would not be used and distributed by nation radio institutions.

Our news bulletin would be more suited to regional radio institutes as these are more localised. They also are known to be owned by bigger organisations meaning finance and support. However our station is aimed specifically to a tight target audience, whereas regional stations require more money and so have to reach a bigger audience to get good returns. Therefore I think our bulletin is not ideal for regional stations.

I think that our radio news bulletin would be best suited for a station where profit isn't the main objective. Our bulletin has been the result of much research and aimed towards a small group and so would not work on a large scale. One issue with creating a niche product is that it has small appeal meaning that for radio, it is not very profitable.

This is why I think our news bulletin would be best placed in a community radio station. These have very little control and are more free to select their own articles, sometimes younger people like less mainstream stories and so this is ideal and as we have gone for a chilled out style there would be more freedom to change around the order of the bulletin to create the impression it is flexible and current. Community radios tend to have very small geographical areas and so would be perfect for the Isle of Wight.

Another type of radio institute that I believe our bulletin would be suitable for is internet radio. Our young audience are very familiar with modern technology and through the use of portable devices, our radio could have a wider reach to these teens wherever they are. One limitation of internet radio is that it can be harder to promote your station to stand out as there are already so many of them.

Evaluation - 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Here is a Prezi I have made for the second evaluation question. I've really liked using Prezi in this task and have learnt many more tools on it and will continue to use it in the future, so that's the evaluation for Prezi! But below is the evaluation for the news bulletin.

Evaluation - 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Below is a Google Slides answering the first question for the evaluation. It was created through Google because of the easiness and quickness of the programme. The slides answer the first question with examples.

Editing our News Bulletin

Chris was our main editor and once we had all the clips completed he began editing. Attached below is the first copy of our news bulletin and it is missing clips. After this was created we each listened to the recording and were very happy with it but each had suggestions to improve it, so Chris is currently in the process of making slight tweaks which should help the finished piece. Some suggestions made were to change the stab, remove some noises and shorten some interviews.

Editing and Producing our Bulletin

Now that we have completed recording for our news bulletin. It was important we began to focus on producing it. As a group we decided on the bed we would use as well as the stabs in between articles and the order in which the stories would come. We then decided we would try to use the program 'Adobe Audition' to put our audio clips together as it has a wide range of features and tools available to make our news bulletin as authentic as possible. Our preliminary task was created with audacity which has an easier to use interface but fails to provide necessary features. The downside to using Audition is that we have no previous experience with it but as it is a widely used program generally and problems should be solved with a quick Google search! (Hopefully!).

Recording - Part 2

As a group we continued with recording. We had a few difficulties finding a suitable and empty place to record but have found a recording studio in the music department within school. We have all completed our recordings and now all we have to do is gather the other pieces for the audience and begin to edit the news bulletin. Attached is the other sports stories recorded since the last recording post.

Paralympics Story Discussion

Initially it was decided we would include a story about a young girl from the Island entering into the 2016 Paralympics and include it within our sports section of the news. It was decided initally that I would introduce the story and pass it over to Vince to read the main (cue and voicer). We recorded Vince's part and had planned to record my introduction for the story at a later date due to problems with the recording equipment. However after having a group discussion on social media, we decided to include the story in the local news section and would be presented by Chris. We felt this was suitable after discussion as it was local news about a local person instead of being sport fixtures.

Recording - Part 1

To start the recordings, we recorded the jingle. Spoken by Vince, we decided this was sensible recording to begin with as we may need the longest time with it, to make it a suitable jingle with music. We felt it was very important to have a perfect jingle as this keeps people listening and so we tried recording two people saying it but when it was decided it would be Vince, continued to record to find the audio that was clearest and most suitable for Rhythm Extra. As Vince was not a news presenter, we decided it would be sensible to record his parts for the bulletin day one, and so also recorded his talk of the Isle of Wight Festival to be included in a cue and voicer story, both featured below. We then went on to record my second part of the sports news, this is the part featuring football fixtures from the south coast teams. This was easy to record as it was a copy story so it did not take too much time. The audio clips are shown below:

Script - New Stories

Although we had thought that our script was ready we decided to add a couple more stories. After doing some rehearsals reading the scripts we found it too short and we had put aside some stories in case this happened and we feel they are exciting and relevant for the listeners. They are about the Cowes Fire and Sandown Robbery.

Chris (Cowes fire):
In other news it is understood several boats as well as cars and buildings have been destroyed today in a large fire that broke out at a workshop at Medina Yard.  An eye-whiteness at the fire said: {clip} The blaze has now been brought under control however it is still unknown as to what the cause of the fire was.  Fire Investigation crews will be on site tomorrow and will be undertaking investigations alongside Police throughout the day.

Chris (Sandown robbery): [Copy story]
This afternoon a young man brandishing a large knife attempted to rob a jewellers on Sandown High Street, it is understood that the 17 year old was apprehended by someone from the store and was stopped from getting away until the police arrived.Detectives and police are appealing for anyone who saw the incident that took place this afternoon to contact them, they would also like to hear from the driver of a blue transit van who assisted officers who made the arrest.

Running Order for Rhythm Extra

The post below is the full script at this stage of the task. It shows the news articles and who they will be read by. The full list of articles is posted below in order with an explanation to where they have been placed.

Costa Coffee teaming with the Pop Up Soup Kitchen - We felt that this was a nice story to begin with, it focused on positive points, would be interesting for our audience and instantly gains attendance from the audience when 'Costa' is heard. We felt this was a good opening story and helped to demonstrate that the news we are focusing on, is good news.

Isle Jump Opening - As a big event for Island teens, we knew this had to be near the top of the script, we felt this would be an extremely popular story at the time and we didn't want to make people have to wait too long to hear it, but we didn't want to have it right at the start, because listeners may have switched off afterwards.

Star Wars The Force Awakens - We felt this was an ideal third article, it breaks away from the extremely localised stories, although it is bought into local context, it adds variety in the news and is a topic we believe our audience would be very passionate about.

The Isle of Wight Festival - This is an exciting story for our young audience as it is the announcement of festival acts, we hyped this one up in the introduction but felt it didn't need to be near the top. Although some may see this as breaking news, we felt that given our audience, through the means of social media, it is likely they would already know and so we didn't put it right at the top.

Sport News Story Harriet Little - We wanted to group together the sports news but wanted this article to be kept in the main news section read by Chris and so we kept it just above the sports stories.

Youth Story Charlotte Morris - We felt this was ideal first sports article, as it was local and exciting at the time. We wanted to keep it near the top and end with the bigger sports results focusing on teams rather than individuals.

Under Eighteens Hockey - We felt this was the perfect article because it involved a popular local sport with local teams, it was placed in the sports news above football results as this is more local but still big team results. Note than in the script the word 'hockey' is never mentioned. We felt it was unneccesary to mention it was the Junion Raiders hockey team as we are a local station aimed at local people and we felt the whole of our target audience would know who the Junior Raiders are.

South coast Football Results - This was placed under the more-local sports news and is a good way to end the sports articles as it is interesting for listeners and comes just before the weather update.

Weather - We knew weather had to be a very brief topic and so it would not feature in the main news, this is why we chose to only put in a short update right at the end for the listeners that specifically stayed tuned to listen to it as most of our audience didn't want the weather to be a focus.

Complete Rhythm Extra Script

The text below shows the final copy of the script having been assessed by the team and checked against the thirteen rules of radio. From a previous blog post we learnt the importance of using the thirteen rules of radio, when writing the script for our own radio show, we made sure to use these rules throughout our writing process. The numbers below in the brackets with explanation refer to the rule numbers on a previous post. The colours indicate who they are being read by.

{Chris}

{Pete}

{Vince}

{Charlotte}

• Hello and welcome to this evenings news, it’s 5 o’clock, I'm Chris Case bringing you today's top stories, a local coffee shop backing a campaign to help the homeless, the new trampolining activity center Isle Jump, the latest Star Wars film and the lineup for the Isle of Wight Festival.  

• Over the past couple of weeks Costa Coffee, situated in the town center in Newport, has been helping local man Trevor Blanely by raising money for his Pop Up Soup Kitchen which aims to help the homeless on the Island (3 - Showing simplicity by saying ‘Island’ as this is the commonly known term by Islanders) by providing them with food, warmth and shelter.

• Isle Jump had its opening today,  James, an employee at Isle Jump, says it’s (1 - By saying ‘it’s’ instead of ‘it is’ the news bulletin sounds more natural as well as appealing to our target audience further ) a great place to work and is a perfect place for young people to hangout.

• In other news Star War The Force Awakens came out in cinemas today (10 - Here we have wrote ‘today which breaks rule number 10, however we feel this is justified because it is something that many of the audience would not know instead of being assumed)  on the Island, we went out to ask some of these fans whether they felt the new episode lived up to all the hype.

• The organisers of the Isle of Wight festival have announced several new acts that will perform at the annual music event starting June ninth (5 - To allow the reader to read the article word by word, it is easier to put numbers into words) and finishing on the twelve (5). The new artists that have been announced include English Pop Band Busted, British Singer Jess Glynne (PRON Jess Glin) (8 - When saying names it is important to pronounce them correctly otherwise it could cause offence and be unprofessional, here we have written a pronunciation for ‘Glynne’ as ‘Glin’ as we were concerned it could be read as ‘Gline’) and Irish Folk Band The Corrs. They will join headliners Queen with Adam Lambert, Stereophonics and Faithless.

• 16 year old Harriet Little became disabled through an illness at the age of 9. She has been given the opportunity to become a member of the British talent identification development squad to practice her sport of choice, archery in order to prepare for the 2016 Paralympic games in Rio that take place from the 7th to the 18th of September.

• And now here's (1 - By saying ‘here’s’ instead of ‘here is’ sounds more natural as well as appealing to our target audience further ) Pete (3- Shows simplicity and appeal to the target audience by saying ‘Pete’ instead of ‘Peter Barfoot’) with the latest sports news.

• And in sports news, eleven (5 - To allow the reader to read the article word by word, it is easier to put numbers into words) year old Charlotte Morris has been reached by two sponsors after her shooting skills have been shown off in competitions. She'll be further competing in her biggest competition in May.

• 7 all, that was the score between the Under eighteen (5 - To allow the reader to read the article word by word, it is easier to put numbers into words) junior raiders and Bracknell last weekend. The game was the raiders first tie of the year and was full of excitement… (Cue) (7)

• And in football, Portsmouth beat Crawley Town three-nil (5 - To allow the reader to read the article word by word, it is easier to put numbers into words) on Saturday keeping them at fourth place in League two (5), while up in the Premiership League, Bournemouth vs Leicester ended with nil-nil (5) and Southampton lost to Norwich City with a one-nil (5) defeat. that’s (1 - By saying ‘that’s’ instead of ‘that is’ sounds more natural as well as appealing to our target audience further) all in the sports news, I’m (1) Peter Barfoot. (4 - This paragraph giving us sports news is just a copy story rounding up the news, it is around four sentences giving it the feel of a conventional copy story).

• Tomorrow should be dry and bright and will stay like that for most of the day however we might see a few light showers in the evening, with highs of twelve degrees and lows of nine, tomorrow is looking to be a lovely day. I’m Charlotte and this was your weather update. (Although this is not one of the 13 rules, previously set. We have used direct address to make our audience feel as if they are being served and for us to emphasise we are doing it for the general audience instead of ourselves).

• For more of the latest news and weather visit us on our facebook and twitter pages, @RhythmExtra.

Scripting for Rhythm Extra Part 1

After having gathered the news stories, it was important to start scripting. Scripting is a vital stage to creating a radio news bulletin and so quite a time consuming one. We made sure that the stories were written in draft, and then checked by the rest of the team for corrections. The text below shows an initial script I wrote for my sports stories. Much of it is the same still but improvements have been made and will be posted above.


And in the sports news, Charlotte Morris who is 11 years old, has been reached by two sponsors after her shooting skills have been shown off in competitions. She will be further competing in her biggest competition in May 2016.

The score between the Under 18 Isle of Wight junior raiders and Bracknell last weekend was 7- all. The game was the raiders first tie of the year and was full of excitement...

And in the local football, Portsmouth beat Crawley Town 3-0 on Saturday keeping them at fourth place in League 2, while up in the Premiership League, Bournemouth and
Leicester ended with 0-0 and Southampton lost to Norwich City with a 1-0 defeat. that is the sports news, I’m Peter Barfoot. 

Main Newsgathering

The presentation below is about the other news articles included and an analysis of why we decided they were suitable for our news bulletin:

Sport Newsgathering

The next step for our team was to gather news reports, initially I focused on gathering articles for the sports news as this is what I would be presenting. From the research we realised that we would include two local sports news based around the Isle of Wight as well as as news for the professional local football teams including, Portsmouth FC, Southampton FC and AFC Bournemouth. The results for the news from these teams would be the 2nd of January league games (Portsmouth 3 Crawley Town 0, Bournemouth 0 Leicester 0, Southampton 0 Norwich City 1). The local news articles considered were:

http://www.iwcp.co.uk/news/sport/ice-hockey-thrilling-draw-for-juniors-93652.aspx
^ This news article is about a recent exciting game for the Isle of Wight's junior hockey team. We decided it would be ideal for our radio show as it is the under 18 games and an exciting sport for islanders to watch. We decided this would be a suitable story for a cue and cut as we could easily ask a member of the team their opinion of the game.

http://www.iwcp.co.uk/news/football/new-kit-deal-for-newport-football-club-93570.aspx
^ This news article is about Newport FC securing a new deal for their kit sponsorship. Initially it grabbed my attention for being local news and about the most popular sport in the UK. However, after discussing it with the rest of the group, it was suggested that this does not appeal to our target audience and so we decided not to include this within the news bulletin.

http://www.iwcp.co.uk/news/sport/shooting-charlotte-is-aiming-high-93589.aspx
^ This news article is about a young girl gifted with shooting. Although it may be considered a niche sport we believe this is ideal for our teen audience as it is exciting and is likely to appeal to our target audience and unique style we are creating. We decided this would make an ideal copy story as it is short and can be easily understood without a cut or voicer.

From gathering the two articles we will use, as well as the football results from the professional teams, we can begin to consider the script for the bulletin. The other news items will be gathered by team mates and we will discuss them before writing the script together to decide how the article should be presented.