Critical Reflection
This year began with high
expectations for ‘WINOL’ due to the success of the previous semester. In terms
of ‘Alexa’ ranking we were beating local news sources such as the ‘Hampshire
Chronicle’ and the ‘Basingstoke Gazette’. Therefore, it was essential to
maintain this reputation of being a reliable news source for Hampshire. I
believe we have managed to achieve this aim because our latest ‘Alexa’ ranking
for ‘WINOL’ shows on the 8/12/13 was 34,210 in the UK which means that we are
still beating other student Journalism sites like ‘Leeds Student’ and other
Professional local news sites such as the ‘Hampshire Chronicle’ who have an
‘Alexa’ ranking of 49,025 in the UK. However, we have been unable to maintain
our global ‘Alexa’ ranking, as the figures show that last semester we had a
global ranking of 372,251 compared to our current global ranking of 776,668. For
instance, on the 1st of December only 8 people visited winol.co.uk
through ‘Google’. I believe to help improve these rankings, we need to add more
‘tags’ onto our site which are relevant to what people will be searching for
online. Consequently more people will
then be directed to the ‘WINOL’ site.
I also think the reason why we
haven’t improved on our rankings is due to our summer break, there was a whole
4 months where no new content was uploaded to the website at all, so it is inevitable
that people lose interest in the site. Once we were back up and running the
content uploaded to the site has remained a slow process, I still think we are
not updating it with enough new stories as quickly as we did last semester.
Another contributing factor could
be due to various technical issues with production, the bulletin has
been late most weeks. This is damaging to our reputation since our audience
becomes doubtful that we are a reliable, creditable news source if we are not
live at 5pm each week.
I think the reason for us managing to still
have a fairly reasonable ‘Alexa’ ranking in the UK, is due to an agreement made
at the start of the semester, in our editor’s meeting. We agreed to focus the
bulletin more on our local area. What led us towards this decision was the
majority of criticism we received from our Guest Editors, which was that we
were not keeping the bulletin local enough. Therefore, we’ve ensured that if we
are covering national stories they need to have a local angle. I think our
target audience needs to be Winchester, It makes much more sense to mainly cover
local stories, however, this means that we are not to ignore the opportunity to
cover national breaking stories too.
This semester ‘Access Winchester’
has worked well as an additional weekly
bulletin to include packages containing diverse coverage of local events such
as new productions at the ‘Mayflower’ Theatre in Southampton, or ‘Coffee House
Sessions’ being held at the University of Winchester Terrace Bar. ‘Access
Winchester’ has brought a whole new audience to ‘WINOL’ due to the fact that it
is local and consistent. It is produced and made available online every week
just like the news bulletin.
The news bulletin itself has made
vast improvements compared to the start of this semester but I believe that we
are still not at the standard that we were at last May. This is reflected in
comments made in the debrief of our last bulletin (4/12/13). Angus
explained how there is no such thing as a quiet news week and so it was down to
the reporters to find the passion and the drive to ensure that their package is
at the correct standard to be in the bulletin. This should mean that the News
Editor has a tough decision to make as he or she then has too many packages to
choose from.
A consequence of not having
enough bulletin ready packages could be due to the fact that this semester the
role of News Editor has been delegated on a rota system. This meant that no
real relationship between the News Editor and the reporters was able to be
established. Time was wasted each week due to a lack of communication of who
was to be News Editor that given week and so reporters were unsure of who to
contact with questions about their package. This meant that in the News Meeting
it would be the first time that the News Editor had heard about the reporter’s
story they’ve been working on and so if the News Editor is unsure about the
story he or she is unable to give feedback beforehand.
Another issue is that the news
agenda is sometimes not strictly stuck to, in my opinion this is due to there
not being enough drive to fight for your story to make sure that a package does
work and that you’re able to overcome any foreseeable problems. If your package
is turned into an OOV, this is the worst possible thing to happen but most
reporters seem to have already given up on their work and don’t put the effort
in to turn things around. All that said, package basics such as sound and shots
have been greatly improved compared to the start of the semester where essential
components of a package such as white balance and NATSOT were missing. The perfect
example of this is Liam Garrahan’s scrap metal package.
Due to the effort of Social Media
Editor, Georgia Spears, promotion for the ‘WINOL’ bulletin has been consistent
and effective. The bulletin is back on top, with an audience for features being
at a decline, in contrast to last semester when it was ‘the rise of the
features’. I believe this is due to the lack of interest we have had from the
team as a whole to produce any features. We have had all the magazines running
throughout the semester without enough new content being uploaded apart from
the fashion magazine ‘Absolute:ly’. This is because there is a team of four
working on the magazine. I feel that each of the other magazines also need a
dedicated team.
The decision to condense all the
magazines into one magazine called ‘Here and Now’ is going to help raise the
profile for features. I believe this to be the case because now that the
magazines have been compiled into one there will no longer be any confusion of
where to go to see the features and also the magazines will no longer look bare
and lacking content. This transformation is still in progress but once the
right look of the magazine has been achieved I’m sure that things will pick up
from where things were left last semester in terms of traffic to the features.
My suggestion is that all the editors from the magazines come together to work
as one team to keep ‘Here and Now’ updated regularly.
The Sports Team has made an
effort to produce packages which delve into different sports such as handball
which has a big following and resulted in a vast amount of traffic being
brought to the bulletin and ‘Sportsweek’. It is rare that in depth coverage is
given to local teams and this is why so many people are drawn to our coverage which
is promoted on Twitter. All this
considered I feel it is necessary for Sports to have a more dominant presence
on the ‘WINOL’ front page.
My role on ‘WINOL’ this semester
was Managing Editor; this meant it was my job to take responsibility for the
marketing and promotion of ‘WINOL’. This is including both advertising and
competitions for the news and features team.
We agreed that this semester we need to attempt to make more of a
connection with our campus, so I came up with the idea of creating an advert
for the bulletin to be displayed on the TV screens around campus. The reason I
suggested this idea was because I believed our University campus didn’t know
about the ‘WINOL’ bulletin.
The next step I felt was
necessary to complete the link between ‘WINOL’ and the campus was to get into
contact with the University of Winchester Design Team to discuss the
possibility of streaming the bulletin live at five every Wednesday on the TV
screens. It soon became clear that the Design Team believed this to not be
possible due to the fact that the TV screens do not have sound and also the
complications with streaming from the internet. I think that this is a real
shame because students are lazy and if a bulletin is broadcast to them directly
on the screens then they have no choice but to watch it. Despite this setback I do believe that the
‘WINOL’ advert has still increased our traffic to the bulletin and the site.
Arranging competitions for the
magazines was another one of my responsibilities. I phoned around companies
such as the theme park ‘Thorpe Park’ and ‘Benefit’ the make-up brand to ask for
prizes for our competitions. ‘Benefit’ sent make up samples which were perfect
prizes for the fashion magazine ‘Absolute:ly’. ‘Thorpe Park’ also sent back a 2
for 1 voucher to the park which I thought would be great for the ‘Adventure and
Travel’ magazine. I also arranged competitions and prizes for the ‘Volt’ and
‘New Winchester Review’ but unfortunately the Editors were unable to
cooperative, so I decided just to go ahead with the ‘Absolute:ly’ competition. It
was a great success with over 11 entrees for the competition which consequently
brought more followers to 'Absolute:ly' and 'WINOL'.
The competition for 'Adventure
and Travel' was a little simpler; all that the entrees had to do was re-tweet
our tweet posted on the magazine's account to win the vouchers. Unfortunately
the winner of the competition was unable to come onto campus to collect her
prize. We felt it was necessary for the prize to be collected instead of posted
so that we could take a picture of the winner with her prize. This is important
because it proves to the readers that we are true to our word and that our
competitions are real. I think this is why we don't have as many competition
entrees as I would like, because we are only a student run site so the public
don't seem to think we're legitimate when it comes to competitions. However,
the more we run, the more we build a good reputation for ourselves whilst
drawing more traffic to the site and bulletin.
Georgia Spears, and I agreed that
we would both like to work on an exclusive interview for ‘WINOL’ using social
media to conduct it. We decided the best way to go about this was to find and
interviewee and ask the public to tweet in questions for them. Our followers on
Twitter would be given the exclusive chance to put their questions to the
interviewee. I decided we should aim high and so I emailed the Deputy Features
Editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine UK, Rosie Mullender. Originally we planned to
both do the interview but due to the lack of space in the office provided,
there wasn't enough room to sit next to each other while we interviewed Rosie.
We made the impromptu decision to just do the interview one on one which was a
struggle as we had to fit two cameras into the room. I am really glad that I
put in enough time to write the appropriate questions for Rosie as the
interview just seemed to flow. It wasn't until we went to edit that we realised
that due to the cramped conditions of the interview, we had made the error of 'crossing
the line'. Luckily it was only the footage we filmed of Georgia that was
affected and so to overcome this issue we used a voice over to ask Rosie the
questions and flipped the screen on a cutaway of Georgia.
I believe that in order for
things to improve next semester for ‘WINOL’, reporters need to follow on from
their stories and report on any updates. Too often a story is reported on in
the bulletin and then not revisited. Updates will secure a niche audience will
continue to watch the bulletin to see if there is any updates on any particular
story they are following.
Also all reporters need to update
their twitter a couple times a day with pictures and ‘teasers’ of what to
expect in the bulletin. This will keep the ‘WINOL’ audience interested in the
up and coming bulletin all week.
Finally, all reporters need to
ensure that they continue to film too much footage so that when it comes to
editing packages they have plenty of footage so that reporters are not made to
compromise on what footage they use in their end results.
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