Thursday, June 12, 2014

News broadcasts - evaluations

This is my evaluation for both the local and BBC style news broadcasts. 

News Broadcasts – Evaluations


To select our groups news stories we first discussed what kinds of stories each kind of broadcast would be expected to have. We decided that because local news bulletins contain a lot of news which only targets people in one area we would make sure that all of the stories were from the north east or affected that community. For the BBC style bulletin we looked at the biggest national news stories as we had a more general target audience. As part of this we found one report which was on a lighter note to be our “and finally” story which usually has human interest values. I then looked at the biggest sports news for the north east and included two bulletins at the end of the local news because they did not have as higher news value as the other stories. The sports news I added for the BBC style script was much bigger (title win and international retirement) so I decided that they would get a much higher order in the bulletin. In my opinion all of the stories which we chose were right for the target audience and hit on the right news values each kind of report would look for.

When recording our broadcasts we did encounter a few problems, mostly with the delivery of the scripts and the time it was taking to record them. I had my speaking section of the broadcast recorded to a standard which I was happy with considering the delays. It took a while longer for the other members of our group to record their parts and I needed to help them with pronunciation of difficult names. If we were to do this task again I would have ensured that all names were spelled out phonetically. We actually worked well in the group as we divided the writing of stories well and everyone knew how many stories they had to cover and I made sure that the final script layout was consistent. As a group our editing process could have been much more coherent but again due to time restraints I thought that I did an okay job on the recording I edited.

The audience feedback we received was generally positive with people remaking that our selection of stories was good. The only thing which other people said we could have done better was taking more time to edit and make it sound that little bit more professional, a view which I share.  The technical quality of my presentation was much better than previous recordings I’ve done on the Myriad System. My tone was clear and I felt that I sounded quite professional considering I had not done this kind of thing before. We could have maybe rehearsed the scripts a few more times before we recorded so if I were to do this again I would make sure that the whole group was well prepared. In comparison to professional broadcasts there is still obviously a long way to go but with more time taken in editing and just a little more work on microphone techniques I don’t think I would be far off that standard.

The local bulletin was fit for the target audience because of the stories we featured. They were all local and current covered a varying range of topics from crime to sport. The sport section of this broadcast covered the range from top level sports to smaller teams like Gateshead football club going to the playoff final at Wembley. The major weakness with this broadcast was the varying quality of presenting styles and the quality of editing. Given more time and more team work we could have made sure that the local report didn’t have the feeling that it had all been stuck together, which it had. As for the BBC bulletin I felt that it was stronger than the local report, it had better editing and I felt that the main news stories were much better written. The shows weaknesses came from lack of preparation in front of the microphone which lead to me having to heavily edit Dave G’s parts due to stumbling over words. As I’ve said before more preparation would majorly help with this so next time rehearsal will be key.


David Burd.

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