Broadcast Logbook - Radio Newsdays

Throughout the newsdays, I took on the role of sports presenter, which is a task I love and although I don’t particularly enjoy the presenting part, I felt that over the course of the newsdays I had started to establish my ‘voice’.

During our South Coast newsday, we gained a firm understanding of our audience - our stories and running orders reflected this. Alongside our content, we also had great stings and beds.

Between our two bulletins, we altered the tone and style of our broadcast, to ensure we gave it a real ‘afternoon’ feel. In our first bulletin, we forgot our presenters’ ident, but this was the only real mistake we made. The high point of this bulletin was our self-generated Sea Monster story, which had great clips from an interviewee.

The afternoon bulletin was strong as our editor made good decisions regarding which stories we should progress and which we should replace. The sport stories had all moved on to look at Premiership swine flu fears and preview the evening’s matches, including a Portsmouth match for a local angle.

Our Talbot FM newsday started slowly and lacked pace and enthusiasm. We hit some problems as we sent a roving reporter out but upon his return, we realised the story was flat and dropped it, which was frustrating for the roving reporter and the team as we had little self-generated work.

Fortunately, our afternoon bulletin was a bigger success with a better pace and tone alongside more self-generated content. The presentation on all desks was snappier and chattier – suitable for the younger audience and our roving reporter’s vox pops worked well with the surf reef story, adding colour and atmosphere to the bulletin.