Winol - 16th February

This week went amazingly well. I can only thank my lovely production team girls for being fantastic. They have really picked up on their roles now and I believe that they are confident in those roles. For this reason I have decided to switch them round this week. This will mean that next week, after riding high on this weeks success they should be confident enough to get hold of their new roles with ease. After last week being such a train crash it was relief that this week that there were practically no technical problems.

Last week, the 9th Brian said that we should have a plan B for news stories. This will then mean that if a story fails or if a story is not exported in the correct way that we will still be able to fill the bulletin. Katie and Justina came up with a fantastic plan B. The plan was to set up the camera in Tab 9 so that if we had any breaking news or if a story failed and we needed the reporter to simply fill in the blanks of the story they would be able to do this from the newsroom.

After some encouragement from Justina, Drew managed to get the camera working and the OB broadcasting equipment. He is now fully trained on that and will be putting it up every week. This does meant that people in the newsroom will have to be careful of maybe being recorded.

The plan B was actually put in place when the "and finally" piece was spiked due to there not really being enough interviewees. This meant that if we had not had the plan B we would have a news bulletin short of about 1 minute and no "and finally". So I think Justina, Katie and Drew very much for this.

The OB went perfectly and Julie did very well writing up the answers and getting on air just in time, she spoke clearly and the whole OB was really well done. This meant that we also had news about Southampton in our bulletin which is more of our new target audience. This will hopefully improve readership.

Sam, is our new production person. Her main job is to work on the website and to make it look good but she will also be helping us on production on Wednesdays. She did very well on camera 2 this week with not much training. Sam also helped immeasurably with getting the headline clips and the packages on to the hard drive and then in turn on to the VT machine. She made sure the reporters exported in the correct format and that they got the packages on to the hard drive by the deadline.

Claire and Katie also did really well with the strap lines. We need to make them a little larger and maybe and easier font type to read. They were spelt correctly, looked good and even managed to pull a new one together for 'What's On'.

The headlines and graphic were superb from Justina, I love the new music and it is really good that we now have the healdines carrying on after the headline clips. It looks a lot more professional.

This week, everyone was perfect in their roles and I was very happy with what everyone did. We had one black hole that was at the beginning but we were able to slip that out in the editing quickly. Due to a few rehersals we were also able to calm Michael Connelly. He was our sports reporter this week and did a fabulous job. The rehersals also allowed us to spot that Aimee Pickering's sports package was nto completely finished and so Claire was able to cut it in time. Again Ali did well on the VT machine and if he would like to help next week I will probably put him on auto cue which will give him more experience.

The sound was a little low at some points of the bulletin and a little high at others, again Justina managed to this out in editing but it would be better if we were able to get this correct whilst recording.

This week we rehersed at 2 and went live at 3 so we now have the deadlines sorted and they are being met. However we did not use the tricaster last week because I could not get an Internet connection on my laptop. This week we managed to link it up to Brians laptop but because the tricaster had been reset accidently that morning we had lost all of the information needed on the tricaster to make sure that it went to the correct website. So this week I hope to complete the deadlines on time, to make the tricaster work, to have the ustream bulletin on Winol by 4pm and to have the recorded bulletin on Winol by 5 with no edits. This is ambitious but I am confident that we will be able to do this. I would also like to try and set up a mobile talkback system so that I can walk around and find out where people are and what they are doing.

I look forward to starting our third bulletin and only hope that we reach our goals and that it runs as smoothly as it did this week; which I am sure will happen as I have full confidence in my lovely team. Well done guys.