Critical Reflection Semester Two, Year Two:

After last semesters redesign if WINOL’s online presence, the whole team have constantly been thinking of ways to improve its quality and ranking in comparison of other news sites and student material. The websites Alexa ranking in January was 33,950 and continued to climb steadily throughout the semester to 12,025. Our main competitor last semester was East London Lines which only improved its ranking slightly, going from 56,486 to 49,664. The TAB is another student run news site which has a much higher ranking than WINOL.
Each week the news editor changed, giving everyone the opportunity to run the newsroom and still produce content. This worked really well and each week the standard of the bulletin remained high, with packages improving. The most successful WINOL bulletins were during the Eastleigh by-election and allowed ‘The South Decides’ happen. The election special was made up of studio guests and discussion as it happened. There was also a live OB from the vote count, of which I was involved in.
The OB was planned as a Skype call going through the gallery at various points of the night, as well as being recorded on a camera, but there were many issues that almost stopped the OB from happening. In the end the Skype call took place on an iPhone. The quality wasn’t great but it was the only way we could successfully get the result to the newsroom live.
The features team worked together to launch several magazines for WINOL this semester, following the success of Absolutely magazine toward the end of last semester. The Volt focuses on music and features music news, reviews and a playlist of the music it recommends. The New Winchester Review is dedicated to the arts, with reviews and features on theatre, tv, philosophy etc. The Adventure and Travel magazine is where the gonzo features, car reviews and travel blogs are found. The features site have been successful throughout the semester and have had content added regularly (unlike the first semester when ideas were being developed).

This semester I was assigned the role of a sport reporter. Knowing very little about sport, I found the first week of WINOL very daunting, especially after being part of the production team. My assigned beat was Ice hockey and knew that each week I would be expected to film and script packages on league games that would be part of Sportsweek and potentially part of the news bulletin.
My first package was a skiing feature, which was influenced by the weather at the beginning of the year and chose a ‘gonzo’ style. It wasn’t the best of packages because of the lack of camera angles, but it wasn’t a complete disaster. Using the GoPro camera made all the difference, but it was hard to find footage that didn’t have the main camera in vision. In comparison to the other packages I produced, the style of this was one was very different, and could have been improved if I had spent more time planning.
My first highlights package for the Basingstoke bison was a real struggle, even after filming a game with Lewis Salter the week before. Having no real knowledge of the rules or hockey jargon made scripting the game really hard and I relied a lot on the teams twitter feed to make it sound as professional as possible. The package itself was almost a disaster because I missed the first period and the first goal. Following the puck for the rest of the game wasn’t easy either and meant that the camera wasn’t in focus at times and shots could have been a lot tighter. After this package I knew what needed to be done to improve my work.
The following week we were unable to film the game and were told that we could no longer film the Bison games because we were unable to guarantee that the games would be reported on every week. I would have liked to have had a particular sport to follow for the semester as I could have seen an improvement in my work and become more confident reporting so that I could be more creative with editing games instead of each week doing something new.
I then seemed to fall into university sporting events, the main one being Winton Weekend. Over two days, all of the current sports teams competed with those who previously attended the university and were part of those teams. I was put in charge of organising what games/matches could be filmed and interviewing the vice president, activities. Getting a team together to help film was difficult and couldn’t be done by myself as events overlapped. From researching the history of the event it was certain that no matter what the rugby game had to be filmed. I didn’t get as many events filmed as I had wanted to. Winton weekend seemed like an opportunity to boost viewing of sports week because people at the university would want to view something that they were involved in, and would be more willing to share it with others.
I also had the opportunity of reporting on the Totton vs Bournemouth game, as well as helping out with filming various football matches throughout the semester. For the Totton vs. Bournemouth game we used three cameras which allowed me and Liam to experiment when editing, particularly throughout the penalty shoot-out. Like the first hockey game, I found it really hard to script, but after listening to Liam’s previous packages I felt more confident with the overall package. 
There were a few weeks when I didn’t produce a package for sports week and I was able to help with production in the gallery. My experience in gallery from the previous semester meant that I was able to help out with all of the equipment when needed and was able to direct comfortably. I was also able to present sports week and the bulletin sport on a few occasions which I really enjoyed and would like to do again. The week I present was quite difficult because there was no one from the sports team to direct – in post-production the footage wasn’t very good and the team had to re-film on the morning of the deadline.
During our weekly debriefs our viewings were always disappointing – despite the efforts the team made to get sports week onto forums and social networking sites. This lead to the conclusion that it was the quality of our content causing the problem. This is where the idea for filming the multi-camera football match was suggested to us. Sam Sheard, Thomas Baxter, Jack Griffiths, Liam Garrahan and I filmed Eastleigh vs. Dover game. the addition of graphics in post-production made the package stand out and look professional.
As a whole, the sports team worked every week to try and achieve the best possible ratings, better than those of the week before, but for most weeks the views were really low and on a few occasions barely reached two hundred views (which was a disappointment when previous sport weeks had reached over a thousand views).
An issue within the sports desk and one we were all guilty of at some point, was putting the effort in to reach the deadlines. Once the package was edited it seemed okay to leave recording voice overs to the last minute.  
The way the final edits of the bulletin sport caused the sport to be missing from bulletin – despite being exported the same way as all of the other packages, the aspect ratio was wrong and meant that it looked horrendous as it was played out in the gallery.

The ‘Tuesday Takeover’ continued into the second semester following the same format, aired around the university campus, except this time we had the help of the first year students for the hourly news bulletin and benefitted us because the radio team is so small. Though, it was difficult having a new team every week and no one seemed to want to come back to help out.
As usual there were technical problems almost every week, but we still went ahead trying to meet deadlines.  The downside the radio slot was that there was no way to track if we were getting listeners, as well as being limited by Sound Radio which caused a number of problems. Unfortunately, sound radio has been shut down and means that there is no longer a ‘Tuesday Takeover’. Nadine toyed with the idea of podcasts for the WINOL, but there was a lot more to it than posting audio clips online.
I have thoroughly enjoyed being part of the sports team this semester and have put the skills I learned in the first part of the year to use. I found some things a struggle at first because of my lack of sporting knowledge but together with the team I found my way through and have become more confident in creating packages and being on camera - this I hope will be put to good use next year.