Critical Evaluation - WINOL (Semester 2)

This semester saw the quality of WINOL continue to improve across the board. Not only were the stories on our weekly bulletin improving both on a content level and technically, other areas of the website such as the Absolute:ly fashion section and the artsy New Winchester Review started to take shape and grow.

Undoubtedly the biggest story for WINOL this semester was the Eastleigh by-election, the result of a long running saga that saw Chris Huhne step down as the town's MP. This national story broke on WINOL's doorstep giving us the opportunity to film some of the biggest names in world and UK politics including the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who gave us what we thought was an exclusive quote when he branded the Lib Dems as 'quivering jellies.' WINOL's reporters even followed Boris down the street, asking him if he was thinking of running for Prime Minister in the next election. This story lead to a special edition of WINOL called 'The South Decides.' This was an example of the best student reporting in the country.

It wasn't just the Eastleigh by-election that held WINOL up, the quality of stories improved across the board, with a visit from Prince Edward to the University also proving to be a highlight. A 16-year-old girl was killed in a hit and run incident and WINOL got the emotional shots of her parents' appeal for people with any information to come forward. It wasn't all about the shade on WINOL, we also covered the lighter side of life with stories about teddy bears being shot off in to space and a beer bus in Lyndhurst.

One noticeable change to WINOL this semester was aesthetic - the use of a new opening sequence which changed twice. The original sequence was old, bland and uninteresting so it was replaced with a spinning world with shots of Winchester and past stories whooshing around it. This was replaced again, the new one has a 'Sky News' feel to it and looks more professional.

WINOL Sport underwent a dramatic change this semester due to the low viewing figures for Sportsweek. We decided to not show any football highlights in the news bulletin so that fans of non-league football teams would be directed straight to Sportsweek. We replaced them with sports news stories which included news on Hampshire County Cricket and Southampton F.C. We also included gonzo style features.

The New Winchester Review is aimed at the Arts market and arguably a much older target audience than what most student journalists try to reach out to. It has reviews of museum trips, art exhibitions and even a competition to win a week on a writing course on France.

Absolute:ly is a fashion website aimed at the younger generation and is in a similar style to gossip magazines. There are features on summer styles, festival clothing and up and coming trends.

As far as WINOL's Alexa ranking is concerned, this semester has seen a steady improvement. In January it had a global rank of around 460,000, almost 200,000 places higher than the nearest competitor, East London Lines. By the end of the month WINOL was the second biggest online news service in Hampshire behind the Southern Daily Echo which has a much larger news patch. The only serious competition WINOL has had in the past five months came from The TAB, a collection of 12 universities working together. Although their Alexa rank was much higher, it has to be noted that it took 12 institutions to have enough force to overtake WINOL.

As I mentioned earlier, Sportsweek was suffering from low viewing figures, an issue that desperately needed to be addressed. The week that saw the biggest viewing figures was when we had an interview with Sky Sports' Spanish football expert, Guillem Balague, an interview that was arranged by another website I write for. I saw the opportunity to question him on Mauricio Pochettino, the newly-appointed manager of Southampton F.C. and former manager of Spanish side, Espanyol, who Guillem supports. I posted the link to this Sportsweek on different fan forums which drew a lot more traffic. It has the highest viewing figures of the semester.

Sportsweek's viewing figures also benefited from the lack of highlights in the main WINOL bulletin, this change proved vital as it helped double the viewing figures from the first semester.

Posting on fan forums was another tactic we used to create more traffic for Sportsweek, along with sports teams' social networking pages. We also got Retweets from notable sporting figures with large followings. This was something that wasn't happening enough before - the viewing figures have improved since we started doing it every week.

This semester we trialled extended match highlights, using the Conference South Play-Off Semi-Final between Eastleigh and Dover. We positioned one camera in the stand, one behind each goal and one in line with the edge of the penalty boxes. The end result is staggering and looks highly professional. I created graphics inspired by Sky Sports to show the team line-ups, the score in the top corner and a main scoreboard to show after every goal. The transitions work well, making it look like a non-league version of The Football League Show. It's a result of a real team effort.

Like WINOL, Sportsweek has also had a makeover in the form of new title credits which I made. Using HD footage from the previous semester, new music and scrolling text I made on Adobe After Effects, Sportsweek was brought into a new era, replacing the titles that had been used for years before. There is an issue in that they miss a few stings, but I aim to create new one's for next semester over the summer. We also tried to create a new background studio image but our attempts weren't up to scratch.

I continued my role as a sports reporter from the first semester, building on the contacts I had gathered and the techniques I had already learned. I feel that this semester was much more successful than the first one for me as I put contacts that only I had in to use to bring in some exclusives.

The first of these exclusives was a gonzo feature on the growing Paralympic sport, Wheelchair Rugby. I made Aaron Phipps a contact last semester and through him I learned that there was a Wheelchair Rugby team starting in Southampton. He invited me to one of their training sessions to film it and take part. I used this opportunity to take Mike Bushell's advice from his WINOL visit and took a GoPro camera with me. Aaron, a Team GB athlete, agreed to wear the camera during the training session. This got some fantastic shots that I used to full effect in the final VT. Once I got in the chair I proved how useless I am at the sport and did a PTC whilst taking part in the session. The BBC's David Hayward said that this VT was good enough to run on any local news network.

I later made a follow up to this story, a report on their official launch. The BBC attended the event but I feel that my story was far better. Technically their's was poor, deciding to use sound from the GoPro camera and interviewing uninteresting people. My VT used archive GoPro footage, had a good PTC shot from a height and showed a lot of the action.

Another exclusive story is one I mentioned earlier, the interview with Guillem Balague. Although I filmed this for another website, only WINOL got the information about Southampton F.C. There were technical issues with this story as the lighting was quite poor throughout, but this could not be helped because I couldn't carry any more equipment on the train than I already had. Another issue was that there was a woman behind him who kept standing up and sitting down.

I put my gonzo hat back on for a third exclusive story to WINOL on Touch Rugby when I was invited down to Trojans Rugby Club in Eastleigh. I took a GoPro with me again and got more great shots using it. I feel that the point of view images it gives the viewer helps to immerse them in the action, something that a lot of sports reports lack. I took part in this training session too but the defining feature of this report was arguably the final PTC where I suggested that there was something missing from Touch Rugby before taking a full on rugby tackle to end the package.

The two rugby variants weren't the only gonzo stories that I chased this semester, other attempts weren't so successful. I arranged to try dog sledge racing on a cold January morning, but the weather got the better of this attempt - the torrential rain stopped me when I was half-way there as I did not want to ruin the equipment. Another story that I chased and chased (and am still chasing) was on Sledge Hockey, another Paralympic sport. Sadly, I had issues gaining MOD clearance to film current soldiers as they would not get back to me, no matter how much I tried, so that put this story on ice.

The quality of my football highlights packages also improved this semester, the best undoubtedly being my pre-match build up and highlights of Basingstoke vs. Dorchester. Basingstoke are leaving their current ground, the Camrose Stadium, very soon, so I focussed the package around this. The Stoke were also in relegation danger at the time, so I suggested that their league standing could be going the same way as their home. Their manager, Jason Bristow, insisted otherwise during the interviews.

I had one major technical issue when I realised that I had no sound for an entire half of an A.F.C. Totton game. To resolve this I gathered sound from the Basingstoke game's rushes and overlaid it on to the Totton highlights. You couldn't tell the difference so I got away with that one but it taught me a lesson to always check that the equipment is working for the entire game.

When it came to presenting I was less lucky - my first attempt at presenting was in the Stripe Lecture Theatre as the Production team could not get use of the studio. After spending hours in there perfecting the links without an auto-cue we decided that we could not use any of the footage because the sound was echoey and terrible. Another issue we had was that I had to have an in-studio discussion with Jack Griffiths who is a lot taller than me. This posed an issue because you couldn't get both of us in shot with the portable green screen at the same time, leading to him having to kneel uncomfortably on an upside down bin.

My second attempt didn't go an awful lot better as the auto-cue in the studio was broken this time so, again, I was faced with the prospect of rewriting the links and learning them. Jack and I had another in-studio discussion but the problem this time was not caused by my lack of height, instead it was the fact that we could not both sit round the desk in what looked like a natural position, we were either cooped up or Jack was forced to the corner. In the end we decided to run with Jack on the corner.

Overall, this semester on WINOL was far more successful than the first - as we were already used to using the equipment it took us less time to get up to speed which was lucky with the quality of stories breaking in our patch. On a personal level I feel that the semester gave me an opportunity to showcase what I'm best at after using the first one to find my feet. It made me realise just how passionate I am about sports journalism.

Totalitarianism

- The state controls EVERYTHING

- Everything is the state

- Destroy people's identity

- State Terror - Control people through fear and oppression. Show them what happens when people disobey the state - mass executions, torture, threaten their families

- Ideology - State ideas that are used to run the state and forced on the population

     - Justification of actions for authority/state

     - Frees you of common sense and reality

     - Breakdown of human world knocks down barriers of possibility and morality, paving the way for things like concentration camps

- Not comparable to tyranny as tyranny has no law

- Examples include Nazi Germany which used the law of nature and Darwin's evolutionary theories and developed them to suit their own needs.

- Another example is Soviet Russia which structured their ideology on Marx's Communist Stage Theory. This was teleological meaning that it had an absolute ending - Communism

- Banality of Evil

    - You don't have to be inherently evil to do things, just following orders

    - Eichmann trial - put on trial because he provided transport to get Jews to concentration camps, his defence was that he was just doing his job and didn't actually kill any Jews.

Kierkegaard

- The first Existentialist

- The Sickness Unto Death - Similar to Schopenheaur, rejects rationalism and objectivity of the scientific movement (Shcop - World as Will and Representation)

       - Christianity - Either Or - Despite being a devout Christian, Kierkegaard rejects religion, "To be a Christian you must reject Christianity." If everyone was a Christian it would be impossible to be a Christian.

       - Christ - Likes the loneliness and eternal suffering, refers to this as the human condition. Starting point of knowledge is despair, an existential fear or angst, unknowing.

       -Despair is the Sickness Unto Death. You'll never be cured of it, it is an ontological fact, it is the phenomena of being. Life is despair. Similar to Shcopenhaeur's  "Life is suffering"

       - Starting point of wisdom is looking up to despair and trying to transcend it. Can only do this by having passionate commitment from one moment to the next. K's commitment is to Christ, needs an irrational surrender to Christ.

       - Despair is not an objective fact, it is subjective, it is exclusively contained within yourself. Each has to deal, individually, with the sense of despair.

       - Angst - Unease / Unhappiness in relation to life

       - Despair is caused by not knowing the purpose of your existence

       - Alienation is separation from god, trying to get back in to the garden of Eden. Despair is the sense of this.

       - Despair is not a defect in the human condition, it IS the human condition. To remove despair would be to remove humanity.

       - Dismisses systems of good and morality in favour of inexplainable and irrational subjectivity.

The New Journalism - Seminar

Nietzsche: boredom destroys even the gods

Phonetic dialectic - accents, vocalised punctuation, etc

From objectivity to not objective - go from facts, no comment, no subjectivity, no colour, to comment, subjectivity and colour.

Science is objective

Chic - word's meaning no longer relevant to the use

Gonzo style - no 5 w's

Journalism is becoming more gonzoised

Old journalism used to be new journalism, used to be dickens and propaganda

Factual entertainment - Top Gear

George Plimpton - God of gonzo sports journalism

Emile Zola - Gonzo

Clean up quotes

The New Journalism

American Journalism

- Penny papers - controlled and funded by political parties / businessmen.

- Mid 19th Century - Objectivity became an issue, Associated Press (AP) needed objectivity to be profitable.

- First New Journalism - THE YELLOW PRESS - Late 19th Century

     - Make newspapers less stuffy, more interesting
     - SENSATIONALISATION -  Huge, emotive headlines with big striking pictures, The Sun
     - William Randolph Hearst - NEW YORK JOURNAL
     - Joseph Pulitzer - NEW YORK WORLD
     - Sin, Sex and Violence

- America 60s and 70s - Similar to Hearst. political and social upheaval - fighting foreign wars, military threats coming from abroad.

- The Five W's, News Pyramid etc. Letting language from the events bleed into the copy.

Political and Cultural Scene

- 1960s - JFK embodied the American Dream then got assassinated in 1963, catastrophic war in Vietnam, controversy of the draft (get people in the army), Muhammad Ali refused "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong"

- Demographic reasons - baby booms (spike in populations) hitting teenage life, spurred youth culture, massive generational clash between young people protesting government actions.

- Sexual revolution - the pill, sexual freedom, Reichian free love (Reich - Freud had it wrong, you should let it all hang out and not be depressed, way to happiness is through orgasms)

- The student movement - worldwide protests in 1968

- Civil rights - Black Power

- LSD introduced by the CIA to access the altered thinking of counterculture

- Music - Music of the 60s was attack on the norms, drug fuelled (Doors) and anti-esablisment (Dylan) - political lyrics

- The Revolution Will Not be Televised - Gil Scott Heron (The revolution will be live - the revolution will put you in the driving seat)

- Real world is happening outside not on TV.

Influence of Existentialism

- Heidegger's Authenticity, Satre's Bad Faith - No god, you don't come into a world with meaning, there's great expanses to fill with meaning for yourself, no religious superstructure keeping account of you. Create meaning through your choices and through your actions. If you had an existentialist machine you can put yourself through as a scanner, you wouldn't see yourself or past or future, you'll only see the choices you've made. Most interesting choice you have to make is the next one. Freedom of choice.

- Fanon - Act of violence is an extreme expression of choice. Have to push and use violence to get to the point of freedom quicker. Super-charged choice.

- Malcolm X - Anti-establismen feeling - "there is a policeman in your head - he must be destroyed" - leaked into journalism.

- Journos question whether press releases, official statements and press conferences was really objective and a true reflection of events (Bad Faith)

- Let's try to reflect what's happening in an accurate way - how can you trust organisations? Began focussing on setting, plot, sounds, feelings, quotes and images, while being as true as before.

- Alternative journalism was personal - unconventional, disagreeable, disruptive

Shift in form of narration from DIEGETIC TO MIMETIC

- Telling to seeing

- Marshall McLuhan - Hot Media - Echo, tells the story, no room for interpretation - Cool Media - Interpret yourself

- New Journalism - 'Authority's message' (objectivity) is chucked aside in favour of a subjective experience.

Features

1 - Scene by scene - cinematically, telling story in scenes and not in historical narrative. Need to witness the events

2 - Reflect the realistic dialogue, defines character more quickly and effectively than any other single device.

3 - Third person view - giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character's mind - need to interview them about thoughts and emotions.

4 - recording everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, modes of behaviour, towards children, superiors, inferiors and other symbolic details that might exist within a scene. Symbolic of people's status life.