The internet has become a vital part in many peoples lives and most couldn’t live without it. A poll by BBC world found out that four out of five of us believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right.
The survey – of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries – found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide.
Countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens. International bodies such as the UN are also pushing for universal net access.
This all comes at a time where the UK government is pushing through it’s digital economy bill. A major strategy in the bill is providing universal access to broadband. I believe this is needed and completely agree with the importance the internet will play in our future.
Some people even argue that you are limiting free speech by not allowing people access to the net, whilst others see it as something that we don’t need and is a ‘want’ and not a ‘need’.
If you’ve seen Die Hard 4.0 then maybe you can see a negative side to the internet becoming ever powerful, although it seems unlikely that this sort of power can be gathered , who knows that he can’t?
Many businesses are operating purely on the internet now which has a massive effect on our economy, I wonder what would happen if the internet stopped for a day? Would it be turmoil, or would people just go sit in a park?
A friend of mine, Esat, 21, said “I’m afraid to say that without the internet I feel cut-off from the world and am starved, both socially and in terms of information and entertainment.”
Harry Campbell, a student, said “People can’t read maps anymore, organise complicated meetings/events in person, afford to shop in real shops, use an index/scan a page to find information.”
All the questions surrounding the internet are still fairly unanswered but I believe we will all become more and more dependent on the web and its power.
It’s only a matter of months until the general election and the potential power of the student movement is huge. But how many students will actually vote? and do students really believe that issues affect them?
Being at university is a surreal experience, you are in a little bubble where breaking news stories can just breeze past you without you feeling a thing. This is a massive generalisation, but there are many students who are truly like this and are never affected by anything that isn’t directly in their line of sight.
In saying this, we’ve all come across an activist and they do exist in the student world but usually there are few and far between. They are often the lonely figure handing out flyers for what they believe in, they often stand out amongst the rest of us who have opinions but are happy to let others do the leg work.
It only takes a quick glance into the recent SUBU (Students’ Union Bournemouth University) elections to show how many students care about what affects them. There were 1,727 votes out of nearly 18,000 students, a very small percentage who care and with only 10 candidates. With a student population of nearly 18,000, the fact that only a handful of people are standing for election suggests that the rest of us truly can’t be asked.
A recent ‘Unite’ poll by Cambridge University has shown that student ignorance of politics is widespread. A third of students polled did not know that Gordon Brown is the leader of the Labour Party. Nick Clegg may have been a Casanova in his youth, but his fortunes have since declined: less than half of students knew he heads the Lib Dems. Overall, an eighth of those polled said they had no interest in politics at all.
The problem doesn’t just lie with students, it seems that politics is disengaging much of the adult generation as well. A recent survey on the British public resulted in only 56% of people believing they have duty to vote, in contrast to around 68% in 1991.
Surprisingly, the only time that we have engaged with politics fully in the last few years is the US election race in 2008. There were lots of reasons for people to get interested in the election with Obama’s mass marketing and a campaign that engaged young voters.
The number of students who vote in the general election is still unknown, i’m not really a cynic and would love to see a mass student turnout to have you say in an important decision that will affect our lives.
Any technology magazine you pick up will have used the term “iPhone killer?” at least 10 times since its release in 2007. Don’t get me wrong, there are many phones out there that have better features like a decent camera, flash integration or a more comprehensive email client. But none come close to competing with the iPhone overall, I am pretty sure Apple were shocked by the ‘app revolution’ which has really propelled the iPhone to its unbeatable status.
Tech radar gives us a simple(kind of) explanation to why the iPhone won’t ever be killed “Fundamentally, the problem with most iPhone killers is that they’re not actually trying to kill the iPhone. They, as devices, may think they are, but most of them are playing a different game because of the OSes they run, and the companies behind them.”
MG Siegler suggests that “One way to think about it is to compare smartphones and more precisely, their OSes, to religion”. This is where it gets a little whacky, he kind of goes off on one right now, read his explanation with caution… deep breath:
“In a religious sense, the iPhone is a monotheistic religion. Basically, its OS believes in one device. Yes, I know there is the iPod touch, as well as variations of the iPhone (original, 3G, 3GS), but these are essentially all the same device with essentially the same hardware, just boosted specs. Meanwhile, Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian, etc. are all polytheists. But “pagans,” while perhaps not exactly right, is a cooler term, so let’s go with that. All of these other mobile OSes are pagans. They answer to many devices, their “gods.”
Now, I’m not saying that the pagan approach is a bad one, I’m simply saying that trying to kill a monotheist device with a pagan OS is going to be very hard. The problem is that none of these pagan OSes have that one, single device that they can use to help spread their doctrine to the masses. They may put more faith in one device at any given time (which Android is already doing with Droid), but ultimately, their allegiance lies with the many other devices under their OS umbrella as well. The pagan church (in the Android case, Google), would be unwise to play favorites because it would undermine the ultimate goal: To be on as many devices as possible.”
OK regardless of how much coffee he had before writing this, I kind of agree with him. They are fighting a different battle that can never really be won. It would be interesting to see how many smartphone manufactuers thought in this way and believed they weren’t competing with it.
Regardless of all this, I cannot see myself buying any phone that isn’t an iPhone or one of its successors in the next 10 years.
Talbot FM was our radio station for our second radio newsday. Talbot FM’s target audience is 18-30 year olds and we focused our news based around them. We wanted to make news that was relevant and of interest to them but also had strong news values.
Some of our stories were fairly general and wouldn’t seem to be aimed at our audience but it is always possible to get relevance to your audience. This is a challenge for all broadcasters and their audience but can be achieved in most news stories. For example, our unemployment story highlighted people going traveling which was of interest to our target audience.
We used a sports reporter in our bulletins which was criticised as it was a short section and didn’t need a second reporter. It was roughly 20 seconds in length and was slightly distracting for the listener without a proper allocated section.
The order of news stories is always a tough decision and a difficult skill to master. Boyd’s book on techniques of broadcast journalism says “The myriad of baffling decisions and bewildering juxtapositions are resolved in a moment, thanks to a mixture of pure instinct and experience.”
Several of our stories were used throughout the day with fresh clips and angles. Most members of any radio audience will only hear one bulletin so repeats are never a problem. There are also lots of people who may only listen to certain sections so won’t be bothered by a repeat in stories. Many of the fresh audio clips had been recorded at the beginning part of the day so it wasn’t a long job to use a different section in a later bulletin.
To improve our Talbot FM bulletins we really needed to ditch the second reporter and really focus in on our target audience so we matched their needs.
As part of our radio days broadcasting from South Coast Radio and Talbot FM we produced a podcast released at the end of each day with discussions on some of the hot topics of the day. A podcast differs from a news piece as it lends itself to more of a discussion with points of view rather than a fast paced news bulletin.
The improvement from our first to our second podcast was huge, we really got to grips with the concept and it all become less scripted and natural.
The aim of a news podcast is to take news stories and open up discussion to get a rounded concept of the news item. In my opinion, it’s a good idea to have a guideline but as long as you have people who know enough about the topic then scripting isn’t necessary. This was our primary mistake from our first podcast, we lacked the confidence to ad lib anything and it sounded slightly too clunky and rehearsed. Many podcasts are edited together but ours had to be done in one take which wasn’t a problem but made it difficult for us to work out particular things, including the length of it.
Our second podcast aimed at a younger audience included a well rounded piece on the Brits including vox pops, an interview and a discussion. We managed to get an interview with a lady who was backstage and she gave us an insight into the atmosphere backstage. We rounded it off with a discussion on whether awards were deserved with a singing example from a talented member of our team.
It also included a bit on people going traveling instead of finding work which could have been improved by some vox pops or even an interview.
If we were to improve our podcast’s we would have used more sound bites to make it feel rich and interesting to our audience. Less scripting would have been an improvement but overall the second podcast fulfilled it’s aims and objectives. Possibly more sound beds would have allowed for a deeper understanding for our audience. For example, some sounds from the brit awards.
Our second TV broadcast was two hours earlier than the first. We were broadcasting at 1pm which limited the measures we could go to in gathering video for stories. In saying that, we did try and gather a similar amount of video to our first bulletin. We included national headlines and sport which were simple to produce. Our range of news was broad but many were national stories with a local angle to them including government plans to cut down on smoking, Skipton Building Society and Alzheimer’s research funding.
I covered the smoking story, which was a little basic in terms of shots as the statistics being used as part of the story wouldn’t have made great TV unless animated to a great degree. We also covered a story on the play Journey’s End which was our most rounded package as it included an interview with two of the cast on its opening night. Coupled with some fantastic stills it turned into something that was very visual and great for TV.
We decided to be a little bit more adventurous in the studio with two presenters and a reporter on screen. The two presenters worked well as they could bounce off each other and spread the load. There were times when one presenter was idol which was slightly off putting for the audience with lots of wandering eyes. The technicalities of having three people mic’d up was slightly difficult due to only two lapel microphones. This was solved with the presenters on one and the reporter on the other. There was a slightl difficulty for the reporter in reading off the auto-cue which looked a bit bizarre on screen with the reporter glaring away from the camera.
We included in our bulletin an ‘as-live’ interview with the presenters which may have been mis-leading to our audience as there was a LIVE symbol placed on screen. We would have done this completely differently if we realised that this was slightly wrong and telling a lie to our viewers. This ‘as-live’ piece was also placed at the beginning of our bulletin and dragged along a bit which may have caused our audience to get bored and lose interest.
The bulletin went out on time, with no real hiccups. A breaking news story added to the bulletin, with the addition of some graphics to this would have completed it.
If we were to improve our broadcast we would have scrapped the ‘as-live’ interview and replaced it with something else. We also would have changed the set up with three presenters to allow for a better transition. If the technology permits it we could have had him out in Bournemouth somewhere reporting from an interesting scene.
For our first newsday we were taking over South Coast Radio aimed at an adult audience aged 40+. We had three bulletins at 11:30, 12:30 and 1:30. We had to cover news of interest to our audience locally and nationally. Many of our national stories were given a local angle to target our audience.
The stories of the day were that of Lord Goldsmith at the Chilcot enquiry and Holocaust Memorial Day. We ran with these stories with different angles and a variety of information throughout the day. We recognised towards the end of the day that a lot of our stories were limited to Bournemouth and the surrounding area which was a possible weakness. Our target area was much larger covering Dorset and parts of Hampshire.
We tried to not repeat any story at all which was fairly ambitious and was the downfall of our final bulletin. The 1:30 bulletin was an extended 5 minutes which was a fairly large increase to make up in an hour from the 12:30 (3 minutes). It seemed like we were on target but we were ambitious and tried to fit in too many stories with a multitude of audio clips. Once in the studio we didn’t fully run through and had some clips missing and in the wrong order, this had a detrimental effect to our bulletin cutting it short.
To improve our first radio newsday we needed to be realistic and understand that we can’t cover all the stories we would like to. We underestimated the time it would take for our final bulletin and was left panicking and not performing under the pressure. With an extra minute or two we would have sorted out the problems and come away with a strong bulletin.
For our first newsday, we were ambitious in terms of the stories we followed and the lead time we had to prepare them for broadcast.
I woke up and checked my ‘Bournemouth’ twitter feed to see if there was any breaking news. I found news of a fire that started at 4am at Dorset Reclaim, which was a local charity company dealing in furniture. Within five minutes I was out the door, camera in hand. By the time I arrived the fire had been put out but there were still a lot of good shots, a lot of people to interview and enough to make it into a full package for our broadcast.
In the rest of our news we managed to a good selection of vox pops, oovs and interviews. There was one story that we didn’t cover related to the council which we couldn’t get any decent footage for. This is one of the drawbacks for TV as sometimes strong journalistic stories don’t lend themselves to TV.
We covered stories from BHS turning into Primark, the IMAX takeover by the council, wind turbines being used by Tesco and speed limits on Bournemouth roads. Our lead story was the IMAX takeover, in terms of news values this was of high interest to our target audience. Our general views were a little bit basic, with the addition of some alternative angles would have added to the package.
Our bulletin had a catchy intro sequence and a continuing purple theme. We could have spent a little bit more time improving our lower thirds to fit into our theme, but overall it was well rounded.
We were all surprisingly calm with only 2 hours till broadcast, we had a few stories already edited which allowed for everybody to muck in and work together as a team to finish the others. We ended up in the studio with 45 minutes to spare, we started to prepare our weather bulletin but realised that it was more important to have a couple of run throughs to highlight any problems. We got our broadcast out, on time and with all the stories we wanted.
The real key is communication in news broadcasts, with a strong leader and a team willing to go that extra mile you cannot fail. We were quite lucky that a few stories popped up and we had the transport to get there. One thing that differs to a real TV broadcast is the amount of resources we had, we were only working in a small area so getting anywhere was easy. A national TV news programme will be limited to certain areas as they can’t cover the whole Country in one shift.
If we were to improve on our broadcast we would have included a weather report and tried to be a little bit more creative with our packages.
I went along to film the Rallye Sunseeker 2010 for a video piece and decided to create a short promo video for the event and it got popular amongst the organisers and ended up on their website, http://www.rallyesunseeker.co.uk/
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