Winchester News Online Diary (Weeks 3 & 4)

A lot has changed in the last two weeks WINOL wise for me. I have got a lot more involved in my role and undertaken in a lot more work. The first change was to change 'Lucky Dates' to 'Date with Fate', we did this for many reasons, lucky dates has more than one meaning, and date with fate is more BBC, so we thought this would be a more appropriate competition name. We also made the competition real in this week in the sense that the competition could actually be won. Chris Horrie kindly bought three bop (student night out) tickets as a prize for 'Date with Fate'. The competition was a great success and we decided to make it into a video for next week to include an interview with this week's winner. The next change was instead of just having reader response social networking websites called 'Winchester Speaks', the features team and I thought it would be better to have a general 'Winchester News Online' twitter account and facebook group. I feel this works a lot better as 'Winchester Speaks' didn't really indicate it was at all related with WINOL and using these social networking platforms we will be able to publicise WINOL content as well as get reader responses. Needless to say I used the facebook group and twitter account to promote the first live bulletin as much as I could so that we would get a lot of viewers watching it.

So, here is the first live WINOL bulletin, week 1,(or week 3 if you count the two dummy editions) - 18/11/2009



We were lucky enough to have Kay Oliver of GMTV, Sky and ITV as a guest editor for the WINOL live launch and her knowledge and expertise brought a lot to the WINOL news team and I think we all took a lot away from meeting with her. Here are her comments about WINOL and journalism at the University of Winchester:



Week 4 was a very big week for me. I had the massive job of pressing the record button on the tape deck to record the live bulletin! But in all seriousness, it was quite a big week for me as the features team and I decided to run 'Date with Fate' as a video competition, revealing the winning date and featuring an interview with last week's winner. It was my first TV (internet?) appearance so cut me some slack. I think the thing I found most hard was to smile while talking and animate my voice more so I wasn't talking in monotone. We decided to make it a bit silly because we want it to be funny, and we included some cheesy gameshow music, anyway here I am:



Also in week 4 I created a twitterfeed for the WINOL website so every story that was published to the WINOL website is then published to the WINOL twitter page and I set up different feeds for news, sport and features so each story is categorised aswell. I think this is a good way to get the content on the WINOL website read because a lot of focus is put on to the bulletin and not so much on to the stories on the website.

So, here is week 2 WINOL bulletin (or week 4 if you count the two dummy editions) - 25/11/2009, this is where I had the very important and complicated job of pressing record on the tape deck to record the bulletin otherwise there would be no bulletin.



I think this bulletin was our best yet and we are improving more and more week after week. We also had Andy Steggall of ITV and Sky, as the guest editor for this week and I think that the guest editors are fantastic for feedback from people who work on bulletins like WINOL in the real world. The expertise and responses that they give the WINOL team are invaluable and it's always a great experience and great feeling when they praise the work that you are doing.