Christmas Shopping Package

The recession, christmas shopping and the dear local people of Farnham.

UCA today bring you their Tv journalism assessment package. Complete with,

• A link/voiceover, on top of some ‘fill in’ footage of Farnham
• A piece to camera (P2C)
• On camera head to head interviews (vox pops) with retailers and consumers
• An improvised outcue

And all this in just a minute 15.

So maybe it’s not quite BBC ready just yet. . .

We are mere students of the trade.

For now.

Christmas shopping package evaluation

Allocating roles for each group member was the initial task for this project. I’ve learned you must put your inhibitions aside when leading a group and ensure everyone knows exactly what is required, even if it seems obvious.

When working ‘in the field’ in TV journalism you have different considerations to radio and print, such as camera shots and equipment, making it a more complex (but more enjoyable!) practice. Print journalism emphasises the writing element. The journalist gathers information before making a report, in effect, working independently. The writing itself has to really grab the readers’ attention and ‘hook people in’.

In radio you must write simply and concisely so that your story is easy to understand, easy to read and fits into a time slot. For TV you also have time constraints, the piece needs to be interesting visually and audibly and again needs to be easily understood. There is a lot of focus on introducing stories in TV. Links and P2C’s play a major part in the script. Flamboyant language is used so you can be more creative with your writing.

In TV and radio, the journalist begins with a plan but the project is shaped when they go out and meet the public. The angle of the piece can be directed beforehand but could end up quite different, as you can never be sure what the public are going to say. There is an editorial process in all three areas where you can pick and choose which quotes or parts of quotes you want to use.

After going through scripts, plans, equipment checks and recording Chris’s voiceover (adding in a nifty news intro we stumbled across), my job was to approach people for interview. People were generally happy to help out when they knew it was a student project. Approaching them with this information confidently, like in radio, worked much better than asking them to ‘spare some time’. I wrote the questions, altering them slightly for consumer and retailer interviews and consciously aimed for people I might get mixed responses from. Unfortunately the best consumer responses were all from women so we used them in the final edit. This reduced the scope of responses as I would have liked. This was a considered editorial decision. We could have improved this by carrying out more interviews.

I could have manned the microphone better, waiting until I had completely finished asking the questions before turning the microphone to my interviewees. With practice my performance of these tasks will improve. The importance of preparation is therefore emphasised.