Radio Analysis

The demographic for South Coast Radio (age 40 plus in Hampshire, Dorset and the Isle of Wight) is similar to that of Solent Radio’s, so it’s aimed a slightly older audience than Fire FM and has a bit of a wider radius of listeners. Fire FM being transmitted across Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch makes it closer to the other radio station we produced bulletins for, Talbot FM (age 16-30 in South East Dorset). So South Coast Radio has more similarities with BBC Radio Solent with both the target audience and the broader areas it covers.

When deciding which stories to report on the news bulletins these aspects have to be taken into account. In the first week of the radio productions days we had a good mix of stories for the South Coast area and demographic. The story I reported on was about the rise in youth unemployment which, despite being a story about youths, was more aimed at parents who would be concerned how their children might be affected after leaving school.

To do this I researched a report about how school leavers were finding it difficult to find jobs and I interviewed Charlotte Hill from the UK Youth organisation who commented on the story and gave some views from her organisation’s point of view. For these bulletins there isn’t much time to put together a package so it was a quite a short script followed by some snippets of the interview. It was succinct and I think it fitted in well with the rest of the bulletins we put out on the day.
As I was presenting it really drove home the way radio scripts are written, that they have to be short sentences with punctuation so the presenter can take a breath and get through it without stumbling over difficult words or similar sounding syllables.

In the next session the group produced bulletins for Talbot FM which is aimed at a younger audience and covers a smaller area. I tried to do a story on the Imax coming from a different angle with an interview with Brian Jenner who wants to save the building rather than it being demolished. Unfortunately the interview didn’t record, even the second time I did it, as there was something wrong with the desk. But I was still able to write a story using quotes I had written down during the interview. I also wrote a story with vox pops on whether students agreed with a report that using the internet too much made you depressed, which really fitted in with the target demographic.

The writing styles between the two stations is quite different. Much more formal for South Coast and for Talbot you have to jazz it up a bit for the younger audience while still getting the information across but in a way that would appeal more.
This is further exemplified in the podcasts. For the South Coast podcast we did short discussions between the presenter and the reporter as they acted as specialists for the story, while in the Talbot podcast it was much more a group discussion bordering on a chat between the team. They were quite different from the podcasts I’d done before for the magazines I worked on, these usually went on for an hour and structured very differently. I think the shorter podcasts work better because it keeps things moving and you’re not listening to long winded arguments or explanations that go on forever.

The challenges faced in radio news production are the speed at which you have to get the news out there. If you’re doing local stories then you have to really hope that you can get the interview or get out to a place where the news is happening and then of course you’ve got to write the story, edit the clips and get it to the presenter so they have time to read over it, to prepare for the bulletin. Another challenge is creating pictures in people’s heads. Obviously the language used in the script can do this though it is easier to be more descriptive in a package rather than just in a straight news story. But descriptive words can help a great deal not just because of the word itself but also the inflection the presenter can put on the words themselves can make it sound all the more interesting.

For my package I had trouble trying to fit in clips to help the story along. I had thought that maybe I could have used some audio from the two films I mentioned in it, Avatar and Alice In Wonderland, but when I had them there they seemed completely out of place and while Alice has some recognisable catchphrases such as “Off with her head” Avatar really doesn’t. So in the end I left them out. I had also thought of using the Imax signature tune or jingle but I think that not many people would recognise it and again no matter where I tried to fit it in it just seemed awfully out of place.

But I think I have managed to create a picture in people’s imagination of the Bournemouth coast and that there is something in the way. The interviews I got with the organiser of the Demolish The Imax party, Graeme Sweetapple, and with Bournemouth Councillor Stephen MacLoughlin certainly paint the picture about what they want done with the Imax building and the ideas that came at the end of the meeting should hopefully put the pictures into people’s minds about what the site looks like now and how it might look in the future.

I do wish I’d been able to use some clips or some music at some point to try to liven it up. But everything I tried just seemed to break the flow of the package and sometimes it’s best not to try to shoehorn something in if it’s really not working. As it stands at least it’s informative and the interviews are pretty clear.