News unit prep

Sources and Contacts:

• A Broadcast Journalist relies on a wide range of sources and contacts in the never ending search NEW news 
• The best journalists do not just sit around and wait for an idea to appear, they go out and FIND it...
• You now have experience from the documentary unit of some of these - suggestions on how to find new stories?

How journalists find stories with "news value":

• Working what Fishman (1997) called 'patrolling' much like a police officer on recognised chains of information to supply potential stories with 'news value'. 
• What 'beats' form part of this chain of information?
• Many of these 'beats' are exclusively accessed by news journalists e.g. calling police stations or press offices.
• But in doing so, what other stories are ignored? Is it right to give priority to those particular sources? Why?

Primary Sources:

• Your own direct contacts
• original sources direct from source material e.g. archive material from libraries etc such as kew (National archives)
• Public appeals 
• Press releases/ Official Stats 

Secondary Sources:

• Stringers (freelancers)
• Other platforms/ Media 

Wires:

• Newsrooms frequently trawl 'the wires' for up to the minute tip offs on news stories such as - 
• PA (Press Association) - provide a range of news stories and content for print and digital media for the UK and Ireland 

Correspondents:

• These subject specialists work in newsrooms and are prized for their in depth knowledge and well honed contacts - often invited to confidential 'lobby' briefings with politicians and on the mailing lists of important relevant bodies 
• 'Lobby' politics - influential groups lobby the government in such meetings to get their views across and attempt to influence policy. 

Foreign News Sources:

• Journalists, editors and correspondents based permanently abroad for news networks e.g. Gavin Hewitt Europe Editor or Mark Mardell North American Editor
• Sometimes pooled foreign news 'bureau' with other broadcasters.
• Again valued for their local contacts and on the ground knowledge and access 
• Often long hours, lots of travelling due to wide area covered and can be in dangerous or politically unstable areas - special training usually needed and obviously goof language skills 

Communication:

• Whichever your source of information and stories, you will need to be a consummate COMMUNICATOR in order to access these.
• As with the documentary unit, know the essentials BEFORE you make a call - do your research and know what questions you want to ask.
• Get used to USING THE TELEPHONE.
• Emails are good for exchanging information and more functional tasks, but nothing can replace a CONVERSATION thus - 
• Build a rapport, gauge the person you are talking to and make a decision about them and the story 

Get Them On Side:

• Sometimes you have to be prepared to be creative in order to get what you need.
• Providing you are being ethical, find ways of negotiating obstacles to gain the access you need.
• Often you need to have stamina and be prepared to push at a story and find a way of telling your story in order to make it work
• When people are reluctant to take part, sometimes with good reason, it is useful to explain this is their chance to put their side of the story.

Methods:

• The art of tracking people down is one you need to master - do your research to identify key contacts and build from there -
• Just like a private investigator you will spend a lot of time simply trying to find people 
• Sometimes you have to think beyond the obvious in order to get what you need.
• Finding people who will talk might mean looking for someone outside the direct area of your story, look instead for those with a credible association with it.

Finding your Angle:

• The News 'Angle' is key to developing your story.
• The angle can be defined as the main significance of your particular audience. It is a particular viewpoint of any story.
• There will inevitably be several angles on any story, your job is to decide the angle which best suits and sells your story and will engage your audience. 

Setting up your story:

Just like in the documentary unit, the proof of your journalistic skills is when you try to set you up to shoot it.

By the time you set it up you should be clear about :

• What your story is (and is not)
• Who is in your story
• Where it is (locations)
• When is it to be shot (Schedule)
• How you will tell it (treatment/ style/ angle)
• Why are you making the story

Decisions:

Journalistic instinct plays a big part in determining the tone of the story:

• Location
• Timelines
•  Impact
• Prominence/ 'Impotance'
• Conflict
• Simplicity
• Broadcaster's 'values'

News unit - my part of the report/ story - Staying vs Going

My role in the group for this unit is to pursue a story that we may possibly use for our live broadcast or You Tube channel. We decided to target students as an audience so we can focus on problems that not only we but others we know can relate to. Not only this but "Students" as an audience are a guaranteed demographic due to the nature of education (one year moves on as a new one arrives - continuous flow of people for an audience). The subject i will  be focusing on is Students deciding to stay at home while they study or move into accommodation, which for many is a big step in their life and in some people's opinions the first step to adulthood.

Doing your own washing

   The average rent for a room in purpose-built accommodation has gone up by 25%o over the past three years to just under 1£23.96 a week, according to the latest figures from the National Union of Students (NUS). That is £5,244 a year, 95% of the maximum available student maintenance loan. So of course students will need to take up a part time job along-side studying to supplement their living cost etc. However, with the number of university attendees swelling each year bar jobs and waiting staff vacancies are becoming few and far between.

 Rents tend to vary depending on where in the country a student is studying. As you would expect, London is the area with the most expensive rents overall, averaging £157.48 a week. This is largely attributable to the increasing number of privately run student flats in the capital, some of which can cost £300 a week. The East of England has the second highest rents for purpose built accommodation overall at £134.18 a week and Northern Ireland the cheapest at £83.01.    















Ensuite self-catered rooms, the most common type of accommodation accounting for 55% of the purpose-built market, cost an average of £121.71 per week for a single room, compared with an average of £97.48 for a single room with shared bathroom facilities. Unfortunately not all universities supply this type of "affordable" accommodation which leads to my next section, why people stay at home when studying at university.








Mum still doing your washing


Now with all the points above about money its not hard to be dissuaded from considering the option of upping sticks and relocating closer to uni. For some it is a freedom thing, they rejoice in knowing they are free to do whatever they want with no parental shackles binding them. But for some it is a necessity, for some students pursuing their dream job and furthering their education not only cost them thousands a year on tuition fees, but also thousands in accommodation. So if you're reading this and live within commutable distance ask yourself whether living closer to uni is a need or a want. I'm not saying moving to accommodation just because you want to is a bad thing or isn't a good enough reason, simply that you should really think through you're options before jumping at the first opportunity to get a taste of what it feels like to live on your own. For example if your train fair was less expensive than accommodation and you also don't have to buy your own food and wash your own clothes, then you might consider staying at home. However staying at home isn't everyone's cup of tea and with student finance always available all you need to be set up for a year is to fill out some criteria checks online. Yet i think here is where the problem lies. It is so easy to sign yourself up for debt as a student now that you don't think twice about it, quite often it's advertised between students as "free money". If only that were true.












There are downsides to living at home too though. Annual rail tickets that cover the whole rail network cost roughly £6000! Now there are ways around things like this and being a student you are often given some kind of price reduction HOWEVER remember that this is at home so this will be without the maintenance loan, meaning if you live at home, you will definitely need to work more.


With these decisions more often than not it's just a case of weighing up the pros and cons and choosing the option with the less cons. So my advice for you as students would be to not rush into things, especially not on impulse. Let your decision brew for a little while and then when you're sure (and have spoken to your family about it as well) by all means take the path you choose.

News Unit brief

Skills to take forward:

• Sourcing stories and story telling (narrative)
• Sourcing contributors
• Sourcing locations 
• Scripting/writing to pictures "tie writing"
• interviewing
• sequencing
• SWEFF
• Good Coverage (GV's)
• Good Sound
• Factual Accuracy/ fair dealing/ impartiality and balance
• Team Work and Comunication
• Time Management and organisation 
• Interpreting information and finding news angles

New Skills:

Reporting - On screen/ directing talent

Fast Run - around 6 weeks to submission including this week) get story and access quickly!

Online Platform Development/ Branding/ Concept

Studio presentation/ News/ News Anchoring

Sourcing Talent - e.g. repoters, presenters

Unit aims:

A1 promote critical understanding of the news and current affairs output

A2 facilitate the development of a creative methodology for the production of news and current affairs 

A3 further develop technical and collaborative skills for production and post production of news and current affairs content

A4 develop group presentation and pitching skills 

Video Project Brief:

You are challenged to develop your own ORIGINAL online news channel and produce content for that channel 

Find a brand which will fit a particular audience and provide content for that audience - niche rather than mixed

You will be working in groups of 3 - 4 and will have individual responsibilities

 

Documentary Unit - Reflective Analyisis

Pre - Preduction

I felt like the pre - production was probably the least challenging part of this unit's project. We all grouped together and would all give our input and ideas and the project sort of materialised from that. Callum was the main person who made decisions on whether things should be included as the homophobia in football was his idea, however even that changed along the way as his idea started by the documentary being focused solely on why there are no openly gay premiere league players in todays society. But as time went on that idea was merged with others and evolved to what it is now, which covers a broader subject but still has references to the premiere league idea. Unfortunately we had a communication breakdown  with a member of our group and we had to adapt our roles to accommodate for that persons absence however we all pulled through and the transcripting, script writing and shooting script were completed. 

Production

                                                                  

Different parts of the production were filmed by different people at different times. Callum and myself went up to London to film Ed Connell and teh East End Pheonix's training session with Carl. I also filmed Carl's interview on my own which was fun as there were lots of "interesting" ways i solved problems posed by going solo without any lighting. First of all there was a problem with the sound, i thought the sound quality wasn't great but then i realised that the camera was using the interior mic and not the boom, so i tried plugging it into another channel to see if it was just channel 1 that wasn't working. Nope that wasn't the problem. I then checked to see if the cables didn't have a problem and the boom was connected, yep all good. By this time i was really stumped, i looked under by where the cable connects to the camera and see that the little switch is on 48v which means the camera powers the mic, so now i'm having a meltdown because i have the "talent" sitting and waiting and time is going faster than Lewis Hamilton. I message the rest of the group with a desperate plea for help and Callum asks if i have switched it to 48v to which i reply yes but i check just in case, and there it was. The blatant glaring problem.  I had changed the switch to 48v, but on channel 1, and i hadn't put the cable back into channel 1 since i moved it to see if it was just channel 1 not working. so after taking the cable out of channel 2 and and back into channel 1 HEYPRESTO!! the sound was coming through nice and clear, now to the next challenge. How to hold the boom pole just at the right angle whilst operating the camera. What i did to solve this was perch the boom pole on the back of a chair and hold the bottom if it down with my leg, whilst operating camera with one hand and reading questions off a sheet with my other hand. The last challenge was lighting.

 As we hadn't managed to book any lighting out i had to use things from around the house. we cellotaped a small lamp on it's side to the fireplace, then a similar situation to the side of his face and then the fill lighting behind him was a wall light. Another problem was a shot I needed to get for coverage of Carl, the classic "Tea making shot", however the angle that would allow you to see both Carl's hands and face couldn't be achieved by tripod or me holding the camera as there wouldn't be enough room. So i took the tripod plate off and asked if Carl had anything i could stand the camera on that could sit on the side of the kitchen, we found a stool and a washing basket but it was't quite right, so i put the plate back on and the top of the camera ran flush the the cupboard and everything was in frame. Mission accomplished!

Post Production

I was also involved in post production as a co-editor alongside Melisa. She and i both worked together closely on the editing often swapping roles and trying to help each other find/ do things that the other could not. The first thing we noticed we needed to change was the colour. We needed to use colour correction as i had only been able to use very yellow light and therefore anything white had a slightly yellow tinge to it. Once that had been sorted we then sourced the other clips and over the next 3 days ran through a plethora of different structures on the timeline. After our meeting with Zoe however we came to a decision that we should point the documentary more towards the Team East End Phoenix and then revolve mostly everything around that. So we started with Carl's interview then followed him to the training session and moved onto Ed Conell's interview but whilst including the football team in both first and second half. Graphics were a big section of the project too, one of the hardest parts was synching each word (title) up with each word said when a horde of fans are changing at an exhibition in Brighton Street. One of the final steps as well as adding all the narration was a sound track. Originally we chose a piece called strings 1 but that seemed too cheery for the subject matter so i then looked into a soundtrack that used a mix of piano and artificial sound however that seemed too depressing, as though someone had died. Finally i found a piece that was a guitar playing a a continuous piece in a single chord with seemed to flow just right for the tone. Using the Pen tool i fluctuated the sound up and down depending on what was on the screen and who was talking at that time. 

Documentary Director - Documentary unit

Director

Barbera Kopple

Barbara kopple is an American through and through, born in Scarsdale New York, in 1946 she is no stranger to changing times. No doubt she has been recording landmark events on camera throughout her life however her first recognized piece of work was Harlan County, USA which was a documentary on the coal minors strike in Kentucky. Since then she has come out with works such as American Dream, Winter Soldier (my favourite) Fallen Champ: The Untold Story Of Mike Tyson, and Running From Crazy. Watching these stories you get a real sense of the style of filming Kopple likes to use when filming documentaries. It's a sort of fly on the wall cross guerrilla filming with all her crash zooms and holding shots on close ups and extreme close ups (as demonstrated in Winter Soldier) as well as using more mainstream documentary traits such as the filming locations with people on screen who are relevant to the topic. For example in the Mike Tyson documentary the journey isn't shadowing someone with a camera much like a lot of modern ones,it's sort of a following a trail of someone's past that they have left behind. One of the biggest reasons I like this director and chose her for my inspiration is that her signature style of filming is varied, she uses a large arsenal of techniques and filming methods that lead to very interesting documentaries and this is what I hope to do in mine.

Documentary 

Sweet Sixteen: A Transgender Story

The documentary I have chosen to draw comparisons with is the BBC Documentary Sweet Sixteen: A Transgender Story. Something I have drawn from this documentary was a few minutes in when the farther of the transgender son is being interviewed about a sad/ sensitive moment; when he was first told his son wants to become transgender. The farther is recounting something in the past and it is a close up shot to allow the audience to see in great detail the emotions he is experiencing. We will do something similar when our gay teenager Carl tells us about why he went off football including not involving any cut aways at this point as not to break the emotional tension. 

Another similarity between the two documentaries is the use of a sort of "master shot". In the transgender doc the camera keeps returning to her collection of makeup on the side in her bedroom. Which is relevant and keeps reinforcing what the documentary is about, which will also be used in our doc. We will keep cutting to the East End Phoenix team playing football which will remind the viewer that football is the topic of the doc.  

Throughout the documentary about this young person changing their gender, they use the method of spanning the documentary over a period of time. Granted this is over a period of months and ours was a period of days/ weeks, however the principle is the same. By shooting it at different times and making it chronological it creates the sense that the viewer has been on the journey with the presenter/ topic of the doc for a long time therefore forging a stronger emotional bond. 

Finally and most obviously this is not just a documentary about the journey of an individual, but the challenging of stereotypes within society. One documentary is about gender, and one is about sexuality, both incredibly closely bound subjects that have equally abusive stereotypes and treatment however our documentary touches on that slightly more than the transgender doc, however with that doc the main device that transports you along the narrative is the teenagers journey unlike ours which focuses more on the team East End Phoenix and the general topic of homophobia. 

Documentary Unit - structure

The documentary structure will follow the journey of a gay teenager who currently plays football. It will start with an introduction of him, with cut aways of him playing football etc. Once he's been introduced we will follow him like a presenter on the train and his travels with the camera hand held and he will interview our people that are being interviewed e.g campaigners etc. Once the interviews are over we will have our teenager pose a question to the audience after having spoken to the London team East End Phoenix and got their view on why there are no openly gay premiere league players.

The gay teen will have a mic or clip mic and will be presenting locations like a news reporter.

East End Phoenix is the name of the team Callum's Partner plays for and have already agreed to let us film them

Documentary Unit- update

After pooling ideas for the documentary's story/ structure we have decided to use a gay teenager as our main focus of the documentary and follow his journey trying to discover the answer as to why there are no openly gay premiere league football players. We will use him/ her as the presenter for the documentary being the face of young gay footballers venturing into the ugly side of football.

Mood board: