Rob Kirk's review in noteform

Rob Kirk

Best news show seen without question.

Successful because it was organised.

A lot of thought went into it.

Nichola directed very well - appreciated relation between gallery and presenters.

Very good

Co-ordination

Excellent

90% of good journalism is organisation, and we did that very well.

Content of bulletin was excellent. Headline sequence vibrant & effective.

Sheep headline and link were conflicting. Did not marry words with pictures as well as it could have.

Council services - OK story, but shots were weak.

Fluoride - Started very well craft-wise. Didn't say enough about advantages of fluoride.Imbalanced peace

Course cuts - graphics didn't work very well, it was a bit of a dull story.

Assault - intro & package didn't quite link together. Link talked about man's conviction, package about victim mostly.

Sports

Hockey - very good

All the sports worked very well

Robin Cousins - Ok, sound very good, but started quite oddly. Pictures did not match the words again.

---

Very good, be proud, etc. Even with the same material it could have been better.

WINOL 22/02/2012

Our feedback this Wednesday with Richard Burton.

Very collaborative, professional in the gallery

Headlines-

-emphasis of the police story - the tazer should have come before sentence

-tarmac was a bad shot

-wordplay didn't work. The uniqueness was in the lego, not enough drama.

----------

Education

The King Leer - went too long, not a good shot

Interviews - well edited, got to the point
Straps swept over too quickly

Angus: Getting there with the construction of the story. Great interview with the MP.

---------

Court

Guilty Building did not evoke 'law court'.

Wanted to hear why it was covered.

Didn't really tell the story of the tazer, which is usp of the vt.

Angus: Banning court reports without pictures! Do it for the site, but don't do it for the bulletin. Link to story was too short. 3 lines for each.

--------

Water

The river/clump in hand too close together, not edited well enough.

Angus: You had trouble. Best pictures were the last two. Should have been opening shots. Should have shown the water in the river.

Chris: The two shots at end were absolutely excellent, did not need words to tell story.

--------

Eco Homes

Did not use oppor to show the outside of the houses enough.

The ending shot was not good enough

Angus: Links too short again. What's going on in a carbon neutral house that's different than other houses? Great sound to Dan's voice. Needed Dan inside the house.

--------

Transport

The images did not connect with the words.

Angus: Link didn't reflect what was going on in the story. Link did not talk about the row. Angle could have been better.

--------

Sport

Was good of course.

OOV - would have avoided any word already used. Manager twice, maybe change second to boss, etc.

Angus: Gray & Murphy, no shot about them

--------

Totton

Footage was good. Integrated with the natural noise well.

Angus: So complicated a link it wasn't understandable. Could've been simpler.

--------

Basingstoke Bison

Angus: I can't fault it. I really can't. I thought it was really - as sports packages go, I'd happily give that to anyone I'm working for and let it run.

--------

Lego

'lego expert' word play doesn't work in link

Great images

Words didn't give the scale - could have used images to show.

Angus: Terrific start. Cheesiness of the microphone is great. Should have seen a massive pile of bricks. Quantify 150,000 with pictures.

--------

Overall

Wow, I didn't expect it to be that good! If I was a little audience I'd applause

Angus: Presenters, excellent. Gallery, terrific. Only as good as your last show. We were very good this week, let's keep it up.

-------

Angus - terrific bulletin

Editorial level stuff needs to be worked on

quality of some news stories still not quite there

Headlines: Getting there with the writing, best pics still aren't there. Need better pictures!

Updated Straps

We've been working on new straps this week and here they are. They might still change, but here are their latest version.

Click for Full Size

Click for Full Size

Click for Full Size

Click for Full Size

The last one is for sports. The three colours are Basingstoke Bison, Winchester City and Basingstoke Town FC. More will be added as the term goes on. They were Henry's idea (for sports scores) and the first is in his ice hockey package, looking pretty awesome too. I'll be putting these up on the wiki soon, along with the Photoshop files (easy to edit even for those without any skill, you just have to edit the text), so if I get hit by a van (hopefully not) the straps won't stop without me.

Update: More sports straps. The first is for football scores, the next ones are for hockey.

Click for Full Size

Click for Full Size

Click for Full Size

Click for Full Size

Click for Full Size

Straps Templates

Below are three templates for straps.

Headlines Strap

 

Interviewee Strap

Sports Scores Strap 

In all, every word is capitalized (with the except of your 'and's, 'or's and 'of's).

The W's top line is used as a centre line.

The WINOL Wiki

I started working on the design of an archive for WINOL over the Christmas break, as some of you know, and as I'm now on production I can make the thing official. You can find the archive here: http://winol.wikispaces.com/

The Plan

The archive/wiki will have all the bulletins listed from this week onwards, with spaces for individual packages to be posted. The aim is to have all our work in a centralised place, and so we can avoid the confusion we currently have. Finding stuff that's more than a week old becomes difficult as we increasingly forget about it, all our work is wiped off the computers at the end of each year. The archive will be a place for all our produced content, and if we're willing to write any guides (such as on production elements or a how-to on pull focusing) they can be put into the place, rather than rotting on our blogs where only a few people will read the post and soon forget of it.

The wiki is split into 5 parts:

• Video
• Audio
• Photo
• Written
• Manuals

Video and Audio is split into news, sports and features, which are further broken down. The written section isn't on there yet - as I'm actually debating whether or not to include it, as we can go to winol.co.uk for that. And the Manuals are any guides we write of course.

Currently the only section of the website that's roughly complete is Video, but that's enough for this week's bulletin.

The video archive is split as follows:

• Bulletin, with the full video and details
• Stories, with each individual story listed with the package separate of the bulletin (helpful if it has been reversioned)
• Running Stories, e.g. Barton Farm or bin strikes, with each story from this series and a timeline
• Interviews, with unabridged, full length versions if possible

Where You Come In

Unfortunately, I can't do this all on my own. My side is the simple but menial task of organising the archive - embedding videos, making sure links work, so on.

Reporters need to upload their footage individually to youtube for this to work!

Putting your videos on your personal youtube account is already a good idea since it keeps all your work in one place and comes in handy when you're making your show reel. It's helpful for me as well if you upload following three things to youtube as you're editing:

• Unabridged interviews
• Any stock footage that might be reuseable, such as GVs of Winchester, snow leopards, lamp posts, etc
• The package itself

I know editing can be hectic, but you can easily export the complete interview right after you've captured your footage and upload that separately even before you've started editing proper. Failing that, there's usually a lull from12pm and 4pm on a Wednesday for most reporters, between handing in packages at the last minute and the debrief.

From editing the relevant bits to uploading all this to youtube and then sending me the links via facebook, twitter or email I don't think I'm asking for more than 15 minutes out of anyone's day to do this.

I'm aware this is the boring production side most reporters will gladly skip out on, but doing this will, if nothing else, help us each individually when it comes to writing our critical reflect or editing our show reel at the end of our uni time.

I know Chris would like this to be accessible to the public for any usage and traffic, but we can't really do that until we have something to show - so it would be great if we can get this filled up with all our work by the end of the semester and have something worth showing off!

A Rock and a Hard Place

A quick foreword before the article: this is something I've wanted to write for a while now, though I've had trouble expressing my thoughts. I've been thinking about nationalism a lot recently. It's one of the bedrocks of our identity this day, whether it's a pride in one's nation (as Americans feel) or a quiet disgust of it, as most English feel when they the St George's Cross flapping in the wind. My own experience is a bit confusing, and this is a culmination of my thoughts on my own nationality and the impact of the Arab Awakening on it. I suppose I felt it necessary to explain this because of how grim a worldview I express below, and because I've sacrificed detail for brevity. I intend to come back to this when I've developed my ideas more deeply and coherently.

---

What is the point of Bahraini nationalism? In whichever way you cut your belief that Bahrain should belong to its people - whether that includes all residents, all born residents, or only those elite, impoverished Baharna, who are the most ancient amongst today's people, you must ask yourself, why bother?

Bahrain is a minute country. It is an archipelago of 33 islands, of which only four are inhabited. And of them, the largest of these islands - Bahrain itself - is largely only inhabitable in the northern-most stretch of land. Within that stretch live roughly a million people, of whom only half are citizens. Its oil reserves are minuscule comparative to its neighbours, and as a centre of Islamic banking it's not quite where others are yet. Few tourists come to see those hundreds-years-old mosques, or the historic fort that once stood guarding the island, or the burial mounds where a millenia-old people, more ancient than the Baharna, lay resting.

Were Bahrain's people to claim their political independence, it would not stand. Because Bahrain, unfortunately, is little more than a clump of sand off the Arabian coastline. If a democratic revolution were to ever have succeeded, we would no doubt have seen a hugely Shi'i parliament. And while secular and economic political lines should be striven for, it is far more probable that, at least in the early, formative days of this theoretical democracy, politics would be religious.

So in this religiously-charged democracy, the Shi'a would come to rule Bahrain, those people who were oppressed will become oppressors no doubt. You would see the Sunnis disenfrachised, and the foreign workers sent home. Most importantly, Saudi Arabia would stop bankrolling Bahrain's continued 'independent' existence - because the Saudis are Bahrain's current patrons.

And what then?