WINOL week 6: News Editor

I was assigned a different role on WINOL this week, I was the News Editor.

After a long three days the bulletin is up and here:

Click here: Chris Huhne sentenced, Dead Dogs and the Pope

The bulletin was very light in terms of news story. The Huhne sentencing story was the only hard hitting story. This was followed by the mystery toxin in the New Forest that seems to be causing Dogs to die. I really liked this story as it was local, interesting (visually too) and I know a lot of dog walkers would be concerned.

Working as a News Editor was more of a challenge than I did predict. I hoped that we would have a lot more stories from all the reporters. On monday night I only had the Huhne story and the dead dogs story confirmed, this left me quite nervous about the rest of the bulletin.

A couple of other planned stories fell though. The swimming rabbit story and the coastal erosion story. I took my initiative and assigned the reporters new stories. One of them visited a dementia awareness charity event and the other focused on making a package about the selection of the Pope. I thought it was a nice national story that we have localised before and we could interview a Catholic priest again.

After persuasion and not giving up on the faith we were giving authorisation that we could use the Vatican's youtube footage for this package.

The dementia package was a risk but I needed more packages and therefore pushed it into the bulletin.

I really had to find things to pad this bulletin out. A tree fell down in Southampton and we made this an oov. I would of liked this as a package but the lady whose house the tree fell on did not want to comment to WINOL and her neighbours didn't either. It still worked as a good OOV though. And I made sure the OOV belt was padded out in this bulletin because we were very short on stories.

The guest editor this week was Joseph Curtis. He offered us all good advise on how to find stories, because this seemed to be a biggie for us this week. He advised we use our contacts to provide us with story ideas, Ian Tait and Steve Brine could always know what is going on in Winchester.
He also added that he would of like to have seen a news story from Winchester. Very True!

Back to Reporting next week.