The bulletin this week took a while to progress due to a few things. I was director this week, which was daunting enough without the added stress of a legal change in one of the stories which led to a re-write of the whole script.
We had guest editor Tom Hepworth, video journalist and presenter for BBC South. He helped Andy, who was presenter this week, re-write the script for the bulletin. This began, as one of the packages was altered, as the case which was being reported on, had moved from the Magistrates Court to Crown Court.
The director’s role is to ensure the bulletin runs smoothly and all members of the production team and presenters know exactly what is going on.
As director I was looking to begin rehearsals at 2pm so everyone would be confident to go live. We had to practice the hand-over to sport and two OOVs – ‘out of vision’ – that were within the bulletin. Rehearsals did not begin then and at 2.40 we still did not have a script, therefore I decided to call a later deadline at 3.15pm to give us time to run through the OOVs and the hand-over before we went live. This was necessary due to members of the production team being new to their roles, so without any rehearsals the bulletin would not have shown our capabilities. At 3.15 I knew we still weren’t ready to go live so I called yet another deadline of 3.20pm. It was not a good thing that the bulletin did not go live at 3pm but having those extra 20 minutes meant everyone knew exactly what they had to do (including myself). The bulletin went well.
Tom Hepworth feedback was positive. He said the packages were good – some could have been re-worked to be more engaging. Andy and Karen were good as presenters. For news packages, he advised to keep any graphics simple, otherwise the audience will not be able to keep up with the story. GVs – general views – are about people doing things; Tom stated that you should only use GVs when you have nothing else to put into the package.
He said that the reporters should write the link to their story before they start editing their footage. That way you know the way in which you want to tell the story and this will make the bulletin stronger also. It was a very good thing that the legal aspect was noticed in advanced because we would not have had the defence of privilege if we had run the original story within the bulletin. Tom explained that it was not great that the bulletin did not go out on time but it was a good call from director to move the deadline to slightly later in order to have more time to perfect the running order of the bulletin.
Angus took a different approach and stated that there is no excuse to miss a deadline. He explained that if issues are preventing rehearsals before going live, director should inform everyone that we are going live without a rehearsal or cancelling the whole bulletin.
Angus said this week was our strongest bulletin editorially with strong stories and good production. It was not style over substance. We have been told to work on the headlines as some of them are not enticing enough, and we should not be afraid to give away the story in the headlines as we need to make our audience stay for the duration of the bulletin.
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