Winchester News Online Diary (Weeks 1 & 2)

Winchester News Online (or WINOL) is an online newspaper and weekly bulletin produced by my university which I am a part of. My job title is "Commissioning Editor for Reader Response/UGC Editor" which basically means I am in charge of getting feedback from the viewers of the bulletin and visitors of the website.

I started this role by starting up a Facebook group and Twitter account, both titled 'Winchester Speaks' as two easy ways for the people of Winchester to contact Winchester News Online. To publicise the site I plan to run some competitions over the nest few months.

The first competition is called 'Lucky Dates'. For this competition I developed lucky dates 'tickets' which said: "It could be your lucky day with lucky dates. All you have to do is check here: www.wincesterjournalism.co.uk. Your lucky date is..." and then put a certain year on each ticket. The corresponding piece on the website (which hasn't been uploaded yet, otherwise I would just post a link to it) says: "Is it your lucky day? Check if your lucky date is a winner here! This week’s lucky date is based on the now cult series of films: Star Wars. But when was the first ever Star Wars film originally released?" I then included a picture of the Star Wars logo, which is free from copyright because the 'image, or text depicted in it, only consists of simple geometric shapes and text. They do not meet the threshold of originality needed for copyright protection, and are therefore public domain'. I then reveal the answer: "The first film: ‘Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope’ originally just titled ‘Star Wars’ was first released in 1977. If your ticket has the year 1977 on it then you are a winner! Email winchesterspeaks@hotmail.com for details of your prize." However this competition cannot be won as I never printed a ticket with the winning date on it, cunning, eh?

The second competition that I am running is a basic 'how many sweets in the jar' competition (pictured right). However, this competition can actually be won and the prize is the jar with the sweets in which I paid for out of my own pocket, all for for the promotion of Winchester News Online! I also sat and counted the sweets out which took an awful long time! The corresponding piece for the competition of the website reads: "How many sweets in the jar? Guess correctly or guess the closest to the actual amount and this large jar of sweets could be yours just in time for Christmas. Email your guesses to winolonline@googlemail.com. Competition closes Friday 18th December 2009, winner will be announced later that day and informed by email. If there is more than once correct guess, the winner will be picked out of a hat." I then provided a little background as to why I am running these competitions: "The competitions that we run here on Winchester News Online are our way of promoting our website in the hope of creating a bigger awareness of it and making it the most popular source of news for Winchester and the surrounding community." When this competition is posted on the website I will post a link to it on here so you can all be in with a chance of winning the jar of sweets!

As for the weekly bulletin's that Winchester News Online puts out, I don't really have much to do with them because I am part of the features department. However I help out where I can and pay a lot of attention to the process of making the bulletin as I know I will have a more news based job next term. I would have liked more of a pro-active role because I tend to feel a bit redundant when it comes to bulletin day. However it is amazing just watching all the elements of the bulletin come together.

We did our first dummy bulletin on Wednesday 4th October and it was a complete shambles to be honest. Two of the packages that were in the running order were not finished in time and therefore could not go in the bulletin so the bulletin was significantly under time. Everything was just a bit too last minute, I don't think anyone knew what to expect or how much work the bulletin would entail. We also did not include headlines in this bulletin. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) this bulletin was not recorded, however I think we still all learnt a lot from the many flaws in the bulletin and it did show a lot of potential. The presenting was very good despite the presenters having no practice run-throughs and of the packages that did make it into the bulletin, some of the camera work was very good.

As for this past week's bulletin it was a lot better, the entire team was a lot more prepared and set earlier deadlines for all packages so extra time was available for technical difficulties etc. The only problems we had this week were a few timing issues where certain packages were not the length they said they would be or were labeled wrong, this meant that we have two black holes in the bulletin. We were also lucky enough to have Ian Anderson, the former deputy head of BBC News and editor of the BBC 10'O Clock news, as a guest editor for our bulletin. This a great help for us, with an industry professional giving us feedback on out second ever news bulletin.

Here is this past week's bulletin (11/11/2009). As noted by Chris Horrie this bulletin uses the old title sequence (we are hoping to get even newer titles for this coming week's bulletin) and the first few minutes of the bulletin were lost because the tape was corrupted. Nonetheless here it is:



Next week we go live at five for real. Dummy bulletins are over. There is no room for error now. I will post a link to the bulletin on Wednesday so you can all watch it, we're trying to get as big of an audience as possible for the first bulletin so the pressure is really on!