Television news is a very different thing to radio news. Obviously this is to do with the whole pictures aspect of television news. You’ve got to plan it all out well in advance – what the story is, who you can interview, are they willing to be interviewed on camera, and everything else that needs to be brought together for a mere one minute and twenty seconds of news.
In the first week I started working on a story about the council having a meeting about whether or not it should charging people to pick up their garden waste. It’s a free service at the moment but it costs the council money. Before I headed out I got a radio interview with Councillor Lisa Northover over the phone. Unfortunately phone interviews look rubbish on television especially when all you have to show is their picture and a caption explaining who they are. But I think it’s very difficult for us to get decent interview in the time we have to put everything together as it takes some amazing coordination to get a story, get an interview, get out to do it, get back and edit the piece. I don’t think this story had particularly high news values but it was interesting getting the views of the public with a few vox pops and having them play against (and with) the views of the councillor.
I cheated a bit for the general views, instead of getting footage of actual garden waste I just filmed some leaf litter in Bournemouth gardens, it looked pretty messy but it would have been a better idea to have got something that was actually moving to film. While it did fill the visual gap for when the interview was playing it still didn’t look very interesting. If I had a bit more time I could have perhaps persuaded someone in a nearby garden to do some gardening. But time was a difficult thing to manage especially as I agreed to go out and get some general views of a building about a mile away for another member of our group. I thought the teamwork here would help bring the bulletin together but when I got back it was decided they didn’t need it, so it was a totally wasted trip. I was pretty impressed with the speed I managed to get my package edited together and ready for broadcast. The presenter intro was a bit light hearted and my piece to camera seemed somewhat forced but it got the story across succinctly.
It was a shame that we didn’t broadcast on time and that stories were dropped and others not used due to some technical difficulties.
For the second week of the television news days I wrote a story about the planned protest over the reduction of the speed limit on the Wessex Way and the slow car convoy that would be happening on the weekend. This involved filming the Wessex Way and the already slow moving traffic on it. I got some good close ups of the speed limit signs which I then timed to appear whenever they were mentioned in the script. Unfortunately I couldn’t get an interview with any of the councillors I rang or with the organiser of the protest, Steve Old, so instead I had to go with just a graphic and statement from the council that was on a press release. In terms of on-the-day relevance this story was probably premature, the protest was the Sunday following our Wednesday broadcast. I imagine that if anyone had seen it they would have forgotten all about the protest until they just so happened to be stuck in a traffic jam on that Sunday. It might have been better to have been on a Friday bulletin as a fore warning of what was going to be happening.
The strength of television news lies with the pictures. The ability to convey a story and see it happening before your eyes is very powerful and with live broadcasts it happens instantaneously. The weakness this though is that the pictures can be manipulated to tell different stories as well as the script being able to tell people what to think about what’s happening on the screen. There is a very good example of this on Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe program detailing the different reporting methods of news teams covering the Haiti earthquake disaster.
Team work is essential. Whether it be for operating a camera or getting some shots for other members on the team the whole group really has to pull together. Unfortunately I’m not sure that we did coalesce all that well. Because everyone was working on their own story there was little time to be all that helpful to others. But initially when deciding the stories to be covered, the running order and how long each story should be then everyone has to pitch their ideas and help decide on the news worthiness of each item.
Another problem I faced was not having a car and having to rely on buses to get out to a story and back again. It can get very frustrating waiting about but at least it does give you a chance to work on your script before you get back to studio. Obviously this isn’t a problem for proper news programs but definitely something to think about when you’re doing it yourself.
I think the difference between online video and television is narrowing. Thanks to broadband everyone can stream video easily these days and although the screen size is much smaller online the way you set up shots doesn’t need to change that much. The rule of thirds still applies and you still have to put up captions to identify people. Online has the advantage of usually having both video and text beside one another so you can read the story then watch the video for moving pictures.
Here is a clip of the first week's news:
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