Thursday 9th February

Todays lesson we got put into groups and with my group we started to talk about and decide on roles. For my roll I’ve decided to that I wanted a go on the production side of things as I’ve presented in other assessments, so for this assessment I’ve taken the role as producer.

Thursday 23rd February

As a group we got told what our target audience is, and the station that we are roughly basing our show around. Our target audience ranges from 30-55, slight male bias; we are a national and international rolling news station; the programming contains news and sport 24 hours a day; also with magazine programmes and some phone ins and there is extensive live sport coverage. So for listening ideas I’m going to be listening to BBC Radio 5Live for ideas of show layouts, presenter style, the flow of each items into each other. As a producer I really want to get the flow and feel of the show the best it can be so by listening to 5Live, I feel it’s going to really help me.

Thursday 2nd March

I’ve come up with some ideas for packages that we could make in advance and still be relevant by the time we get assessed. I’ll be putting them to the group next week to see what they think. The ideas I’ve come up with are:

• Comic Relief – where does your money go – charities
• National pet month
• Stress awareness month – tell their story,
• 17^th April – men’s cancer awareness week 2017
• London marathon 23^{rd April}
• Saint Georges Day 23^{rd April}
• National stop snoring week 24^th 2017
• Europa League
• Rugby union
• Cycling – tour de Yorkshire
• National Gardening week 10-16^th April – why get gardening? It’s all about getting new gardeners to start gardening, urban gardening,
• Shakespeare’s birthday 26^th April
• Easter – eggs – significant eggs – package on how people like their eggs – chocolate workshop, why chocolate?
• Urban gardening – urban farmers market https://www.timeout.com/london/shopping/peckham-farmers-market

Thursday 9th March – Production Day 1

So we had a quick lesson on how to use the TieLine and then had a practice. I’m happy with the communication from the studio to the OB producer and presenter, it actually went pretty smoothly for our first go. After this we got into our groups again and this is where is pitched my ideas for package and OB’s. Some of my ideas were too far in advance of the show to talk about, however, a few have made it through and I came up with some more on the day. I also sat down with Dan and we put a number on the amount of packages we want in the bag, we would like 5, and then play 2 out on the day.

As for the OB we are thinking now of going for the topic of National Gardening Week, but then relating it to National Stress Month possibly. However to try and aim it at our audience I need to find the right connection.

These are the packages we are going with so far and other ideas:

‘Final’ ideas for the show

• OB – National Gardening week 10^th – 16^th April – Why get into gardening? Get new Gardeners – hobbies that aren’t seen as ‘cool’ – hobbies that distress people
• National Stress Month – PACKAGE story style, kind of like This American Life feel?
• Losing the meaning of Easter – (have this in the bag) – chocolate workshop as back up – Why Chocolate at Easter?
• Segregation of football fans in pubs – PACKAGE – quarter final of champions league day of our show and the first leg of the quarter finals of the Europa league – DOM

Thursday 16th March – Production Day 2

This week we had to present our groups ideas to Matthew to see if they would be suitable for our final show. Before the meeting we all grouped together to decide on new stories, angles and how we wanted to treat them. Some ideas we felt were stronger than others but thought if we took them all in, we could see if anything happens. After the meeting we dropped ideas that weren’t strong like women in power, after this Dan allocated stories to develop over the following week.

Thursday 23rd March – Production Day 3

This week was slightly different as the previous day was the Westminster Attack, so we did a short 15 minute show with an OB on Westminster Bridge dedicated to reporting only on that. I thought it would be a good ideas to get a board up so we could just shout out ideas and get them into a logical order afterwards. I felt this show went very well and showed how we can produce content and scripts in a short time frame. However we still need to make sure that scripts are checked and well looked through and double checked with other people before they go ‘on air’.

After the show we re-grouped and thought the mindmap on the board worked well, so we decided to come up with some ideas as well as David helping us understand how they can relate to our target audience age which I felt we all struggled with slightly. David also gave us some feedback in our show and said that we needed to use the talkback system to the booth more.

Thursday 30th March 

Today we have the opportunity to produce a 30 minute show that resembled near enough our final show as possible. I didn’t feel that it was going to go well as not everyone was there. To start the day off we had a group meeting a decided to delegate jobs and to people, I had to make a package on Glastonbury as the majority of the line up was announced earlier that morning, I decided to take the angle of ‘Is Glastonbury Too Mainstream now?’. I was pleased with the package considering the time I has to make it in. One thing I think we need to work on is the script, this week it was very last minute with cues missing and IN and OUT words missing from the script. Next week for the actual pilot the script needs to be started as soon as we walk in the room. Saying that there wasn’t a lot of content that actually got played so the meant to be 30 minute test run turned out to only be 15 minutes.

Monday 3rd April

We had a group meeting today to decided on topics for the pilot that is going to be on Thursday. We were still thinking of using the idea of electric cars but thought it should be dropped in favour of male contraception (the jab) and I started emailing Northwick Park Hospital so I’m just waiting on a reply, I don’t think they’ll get back in time of the pilot on Thursday but it could definitely be used for the final show as the live interview. I also suggested the topic of endurance because earlier on in the day I saw on the news that someone was going to be cycling around the world in 80 days, so I thought it fit the show in terms of asking the audience when have they had to put themselves through mental or physical endurance.

Thursday 6th April – Pilot

As soon as I got in the room I knew from previous days that the script need to be started on ASAP so that what I started with. When everyone arrived we had an editorial meeting and allocated jobs. I started to just draft the script that needed to be check and presenters obviously need to change to how they would say certain things. I also found a guest for the topic of the Pepsi advert controversy. When we got in the studio we had a few dilemmas being the back the phone kept cutting out, one number wasn’t working and neither was the TieLine so the OB had to be done over the phone. Because of all of this, the script should be been rejigged so that we had time to get people not the phone and the presenters knew what was going on our end. Overall I wasn’t happy with the outcome of the show but after our debrief with David he gave us good pointers and what to do for next week and hopefully we have everything sorted and can do run through before next Thursday.

Saturday 8th April

I got an email back from the communications team from Northwick Park Hospital, all they needed to know was a bit more exact information on male contraception and they are hopefully going to get back to me before Wednesday so we can confirm a live guest interview.