My first semester on WINOL went a lot
better than I could have expected and that’s largely due to the fact that, as a
team, everyone works efficiently to produce an incredibly high quality product,
and nothing shows that off better than the Alexa rankings.
At the start of term WINOL had slumped to a
level around the 1.8 million mark, the website’s lowest ever ranking. This was
because it had not received any attention over the summer, nobody is going to
look at a dead website with no new news. Raising it back to where it belongs
was always going to be a challenge but with a combination of great news
stories, well-filmed sports highlights and fantastic features. WINOL now sits
in the top 500,000 in the world and in the top 10,000 in the UK; it’s the
highest ranked student output in the country, and also has a higher Alexa
ranking than The Hampshire Chronicle’s website.
WINOL’s primary output is news and over the
course of the semester the stories have improved massively. In our first
bulletin there was a story on bottle collection which was important to a few
locally, but it does not have massive amounts of news value. However, in later bulletins
there have been stories of national importance that we have adapted to work
locally, such as the ash tree disease.
We were also lucky to have national stories
developing locally – the closure of the Ford factory in Southampton is a great
example of this, and with interviews with people at Ford and trade union
representatives we made sure that balance was maintained.
On a technical level the stories have also
improved. Early in the term there was no use of natural sound but recently this
has started to shine through. In particular, there’s a story on new jobs being
created in Southampton which is full of natural sound of machinery. The most
striking of which is at the start of the VT where a circular saw is being used.
It isn’t just the VT’s that have improved
greatly – the presentation of WINOL as a whole has kept up with the high
standards set by the reporters. One way that this has been achieved is by using
a coming up belt; this isn’t just a tactic to make the broadcast seem more
professional, it’s a device to keep the viewer interested by advertising some
of the stories that are still to come. It also serves as a reminder to people
that we also cover sport.
Another way that this has been achieved is
through OOV belts which add slickness to the broadcast and also show that we
have other stories that are newsworthy. We also experimented with a highlights
reel at the end of the bulletin to create more traffic for our website.
During the course of the semester there
were three huge successes – the Hampshire Police Commissioner Debate, coverage
of the American Elections and 99 News.
The HPCD had a total of 101 viewers
watching it live on uStream, along with another 250 who filled the auditorium.
These are incredible figures for a vote that had a notoriously low turn out.
The coverage of the American elections was
dogged with problems from the start, but you wouldn’t have thought this if you
watched it live on uStream. Obama had already been declared the winner before
we went live, so that lead to constant changes to packages in a small amount of
time. My involvement in this was making graphics – I made a motion one for a
package on the swing states where it zoomed in and out of the map, with
different states flashing when they needed to. Only some of this made it to the
final edit. Other graphics I made didn’t make the final cut, including one
involving a green screen and a map for foreign affairs. It was the first
student broadcast to do live interviews across the Atlantic and it made the
front page of Journalism.co.uk.
99 News was the first daily student news
broadcast in the country and was something that I was involved in – I made the
main graphics for it, including the countdown in the bottom corner. I was also
my debut as a presenter, a role that I
enjoyed. The project as a whole gave WINOL a boost and the bulletins have
around 500 combined views.
The sport team worked incredibly well
together, always helping each other out when they needed it and this shows in
the output. Every week there would be highlights of football, ice hockey and a
sports news story or feature. Some of the sports news stories would make it
into the main news bulletin – this was largely down to how well they were produced
and how relevant they were to the local community.
The main issue for the sports desk wasn’t
how good it’s output was, it was the circulation that Sportsweek received. Despite
promoting it on social media, football websites and the like, the number of
viewers is significantly lower than they used to be. I believe that the reason
for this is competition; we simply don’t get our highlights packages up quick
enough.
AFC Totton have someone else down there
filming their games who gets the highlights up on the same night. The quality
isn’t anywhere near as good but as long as football fans can see their side’s
goals they don’t care. We need to be beating this competition and stealing
their views. It’s worth noting that our student competition don’t have a
separate sports show and their sports coverage is very limited, so this keeps
the WINOL platform head and shoulders above them.
One suggestion I have to improve the
viewing figures for Sportsweek is to do it in a Match of the Day style where
there is analysis after every game, rather than just a quick link into the next
package. We could even do a live stream version at some point as well.
Certain features drew more traffic than others;
the highest flier of the semester was an interview with the wrongly convicted
Paul Blackburn, which has over 500 views. It’s this content that helps WINOL
keep ahead of its rivals, and with fierce competition from other student
broadcasts such as East London Lines, the output had to be consistently brilliant.
Another feature that worked very well was
an interview with Hitler’s neighbour. I feel that the reason the hard-hitting,
confessional interviews drew greater viewing numbers than any gonzo pieces is
because they are generally more invigorating. I’d much rather watch a
confessional interview than someone play an ‘odd sport’ because I’ll learn more
from doing so.
Saying that, the gonzo pieces are
especially important to WINOL’s output as they reach out to the primary target
audience – students. Although this is a hard audience to target, as their
attention span is usually low, I feel that we drew them in. The feature on
wrestling has 182 views, most of which are from the student demographic. This
has worked well because wrestling usually draws large student audiences, so the
idea was to draw them in with content that they are familiar with. By having a
go myself it added a slightly comedic effect, whilst also acknowledging how
difficult it is for the athletes involved, something that students will
understand.
Social media has also played a part in
WINOL’s rise to the most-viewed student broadcast in the country. By using
Twitter and Facebook to plug stories a new audience is drawn in of a winder
demographic. WINOL has something for everyone to enjoy.
My role as a sports reporter was to film
football matches and gather sports stories whenever I needed them. I feel that
my work improved a great deal over the course of the semester. The first football
match I filmed I was worried about zooming in too far, so I shot wide to be
safe. The problem with this was that it was much harder to see the ball, so
from then on I stayed up close to the action, aiming to immerse the viewer in
long-ball football.
There were four VTs that I feel especially
proud of, but I also know that they can be improved upon:
The first is a news story on AFC Totton
purchasing a defibrillator; the first of it’s kind in English football. I used
a drop intro where I started outside St. Mary’s stadium and ended up in
Totton’s Testwood Stadium. The problem with this was that it seemed a bit
gimmicky – it didn’t add anything to the piece other than a visually nice
start. Another issue with this VT was that it featured a guilty building due to
a lack of shots. Although I haven’t done many of these stories this was the
first thing I got rid of. Having approved images of Fabrice Muamba allowed us
to name-drop. I reached out to his agent on numerous occasions for a comment
but eventually he stopped replying.
Another VT I felt worked well was when I
followed AFC Totton to Bashley for the return of manager Steve Riley to his
former club. I did a piece to camera on the pitch with the players training
behind me and also grabbed interviews with Steve before and after the game. I
tried to get some vox-pops from Bashley fans on their feelings towards him, but
nobody wanted to speak to me. The main issue with this match was that there was
no high vantage point to film from, so I had to film on pitch level. This still
looks okay but it wasn’t ideal and the game didn’t look as good as it could
have had their been an option.
I also covered the ‘WINOL Derby’ between
Totton and Basingstoke. To do this effectively I had to find a link that would
appeal to both sets of fans and luckily there was one: Stefan Brown scored the
fastest hat-trick in FA Cup history whilst playing for Totton, but he now plays
for Basingstoke. I played on this at the start of the VT by starting in one
changing room and finishing in the other. The only problem with this was that
the away room didn’t have any shirts hanging up so it looked a bit plain. I
used WINOL archive footage of the hat-trick and interviewed Stefan before and
after the game. I had four cameras at the game, two behind the goals and two up
the top. I feel like I under-used the tight shot camera but there wasn’t a
reason to as the highlights wouldn’t have suited it.
My best package of the year was a piece of
gonzo journalism where I went wrestling, but this wasn’t without faults: I
didn’t dive into the action quick enough, I dwindled around outside the
training warehouse for too long, the interview wasn’t as interesting as it
could have been, and I wasn’t allowed to be slammed because I couldn’t land
safely. I have similar ideas lined up so I aim to improve on this. There are areas
where it works really well: I actually got to practice some skills and I got
really good natural sound and used this to punctuate sentences whenever
possible.
One thing I did try that didn’t work out
was a piece to camera with the players entering the pitch behind me, but you
couldn’t hear my voice. The issue was that the camera records straight into a
mp4 format so I couldn’t edit the individual sound channels. After hours of
enhancing the audio I couldn’t use it. I tried to dub it but this just sounded
worse because it knocked out some of the atmosphere.
I also spent one Wednesday as sports
editor, a role that I found very challenging, especially as sport was two
minutes too long and had to be cut down. I also had to make a fat minute out of
a polo package, which was difficult as I had none of the actual footage, so I
had to use what was there already and make it shorter without losing any of the
narrative. It looked a bit shoddy as I only had ten minutes to do it but I’ve
recently edited it further and it now works much better than it did.
WINOL has succeeded in it’s aim to reclaim
the top-spot in UK student journalism and if the output quality continues to
improve there’s no reason for it not to stay there. However, innovation is the
key so the ideas need to keep flowing, and with a multi-format website there’s
no reason for them not to.
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