Thursday 21 October 2010

WINOL YEAR 3: WEEK 2

I attended the Monday conference this week to ask all reporters for text stories. Not every reporter has met their deadline though.

Apart from that, we caught up with everything that was already on Joomla for subbing. I'm perfectly aware that certain people don't think that we're doing enough, but there are so many problems with the articles in the first place that we find ourselves doing half the reporters' job before even checking for errors.

Obviously this isn't always the case, some stories have been really good, but some people aren't following simple grammatical rules and then subs don't follow the house style. We need a meeting!

On Tuesday, had a bit of a masterclass from Horrie regarding Stu's brilliant investigative report. The story was about councillor's allowances and how an anti-tax group was against the level of them. One problem was the credibility of the source IsItFair, leading to a lack of balance. The other reason why there was a lack of balance was the fact that the councillor at the heart of the story didn't comment. Stu did try several times but it was a bit dodgy, which I should have realised.

On Wednesday, there was a sport story that I had to sub before Chris kicked me out into the studio to direct the bulletin.

Amazingly, we were pretty much on time to rehearse but that soon changed when we put in two stories in place of two weaker ones. It involved changing the running order, headlines, the script etc and it was worth the effort. But frankly, it wasn't executed well enough.

As director, I hold my hands up for not dealing with the changes; I feel disappointed with fulfilling that role, but when you are still trying to direct a bulletin with a old script, it's not going to help.

After complete carnage in the studio, we managed to get the bulletin out on time and to a decent standard, which is what it's all about.

But it didn't stop there, Chris was onto me to update the content on the front page straight after the bulletin. I also had stories to approve for publishing.

Then I subbed a sports story myself after all of that. Let's just say it took me until 9pm to finish, but enough said about one for now!

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