Week two of working at the Daily Echo. It is not as tiring now, I know everyone's names - just about - and it kind of feels homely.
On Monday I wrote up quite a few press releases. Some were small, some lengthy but I think I am getting better at news writing now. I did 150 words on Chortle's student comedian awards. 150 words about a man that got fined £75 for letting all four of his greyhounds foul the pavement. A very small piece on The Eastleigh Ramblers meeting place and times. I also re-worked my male childcare lecturer article from the Monday before for features instead. It just needed a few more words and a little re-organising of the paragraphs. Lastly, I wrote a small article on The Hamble Point Boat Show in April. Mostly a promotional piece about what you can expect there, when it is etc. Julian Robinson, the Eastleugh reporter, also showed me how to write and put together an article from a press release. It was really helpful and showed me what I need to improve on.
I have discovered that everyone has short hand. There are notepads everywhere with little shorthand scrawlings on them. Just taking a phone message, it is taken in short hand. I managed to get 30 words a minute in my first year of university but now all that I can remember is what 'the' is. I have all the books at home and I think that even if I am not 100 percent on becoming a reporter, shorthand will still be useful. During my interview with Barbra, last Friday I found I could not write quick enough and did not have many quotes that I could put in the article word for word.
Tuesday, I went to the Magistrates court with Sian Davies for a case about a man not keeping his dog under control. It was scheduled for 10.30am but when we got there it was delayed. We went in to another court room and watched to see if there were any other stories we could get whilst waiting for the dog case. I found it really interesting. It felt like a soap opera. The amount of people coming in, one after the other, I was surprised to see. I think I was quite naiive about the amount of crime in Southampton. After a while, the dog case still was not being heard so we went back to the newsroom.
As I had some afternoon free from work I decided to research tv listings. I need the SKY television listings for the Monday 27th August 1990 for my FYP. After exhausting the Internet it dawned on me that the Echo keep an archive of all their past newspapers. It was a long shot but I asked about any magazines they had kept. It turns out that after ITV Meridian moved from Northam they gave all their TV Times magazines to the Echo. No one had seen them since they had been put in to the filing cabinet except me. I was optimistic that out of all magazines the TV Times would be the one to have the SKY listings that I needed. Alas, the only channels they catered for was ITV and Channel 4. Not even the BBC. At a last attempt I asked to see the newspaper itself for August 1990. As it is a local and it does not do TV listings now I did think I was slightly wasting my time but it had to be checked in order for it to be ruled out. Since the 80's they had been putting the paper on to film. I checked the dates and found that not only did the paper have TV listings, it had listings for SKY too. I printed them out and was able to find what I needed for my FYP.
Wednesday was a busy day and I now know that a reporter should not wear heels. I started by doing the 60 second headlines, which I am really enjoying. I then did a phone interview and arranged a photographer to meet with Debbie Beale. She has been collecting animal necesities for a local rescue centre. I then typed up the article and sent it in.
I then went out with Patrick Knox, a news reporter on a couple of his stories. The first was that there was going to be 10 million gallons of water drained from a reservoir on Southampton Common. This would be news worthy because recently people in Southampton have had water meters installed. Meaning that they are paying for the amount of water being used in their household. After walking around the common trying to find the reservoir we gave up. It was a story that needed pictures and we were not able to get any. This was not an easy feat in heels and mud either.
We then went on to interview, David Reynolds. He had recently built a scale model of the Titanic out of matchsticks. I found this interview really interesting and thought it was amazing with what he could do with matchsticks. He had an entire room with amazing models of ships. David was also a Guiness World Record holder for the most matchsticks used, when building a scale model of an oil rig. Patrick had to do a written story as well as a video. Again, short hand definitely comes in handy.
Lastly there had been a tip off that there were rats around a broken gate in a river in Southampton. A river that recently had people canoeing and rowing on it that had caught viles disease. This disease can kill and comes from rat urine. Due to the gate being broken there had been a lot of rubbish and waste build up. I thought it was a lot but apparently it had been cleaned and so we needed to come back in a weeks time to see a lot more waste and rats, to make the story more concrete.
Thursday was amazing! Easily the best day of the week and probably one of the highs for reporters that are more commonly used to finding rats than celebrities. Arron Hendy, another news reporter took me out to No Limits in Southampton. It is a charity that helps get young people off of the street and in to homes and jobs. This is where Matt Cardle was going to be, signing autographs and taking pictures with the young adults there to promote Sports Relief. We were allowed to film and interview him for 15 minutes as well as vox pop the people that use the No Limits service and the manager Liz Carter. Again, due to convergence I filmed all the interviews whilst Arron wrote them and asked the questions for a written piece.
When we were finished there and I had stopped drooling over Matt we moved on to the job centre. Arron has an article in the paper every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday about people that are looking for a job, entitled, 'Give Me a Chance'. Here we stopped four people for the column and asked them about what jobs they are looking for, how often they look, their education history and how long they have been out of work.
When we were back at the office we edited all of our footage an put it in to a two minute video. At the Daily Echo they use Avid whereas I use Final Cut Pro so this was something else new for me to learn. It did look a lot simpler than Final Cut but it did not look like you could do as much with it. We had problems with sound too which took a while to sort out. Whilst we watied for that to be fixed Arron wrote up the article which appeared in the paper on page 2 on Friday 20th January. Along with Patricks article about matchstick man, David Reynolds on page 3. You can find the matt cardle video here http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/video/
Wow was I tired by Friday. I tried to get in touch with a local woman that is planning to run in the London Marathon in April in aid of the British Heart Foundation. I emailed, phoned and left a message for her but as she is a midwife I think that she was a little too busy.
On Monday I wrote up quite a few press releases. Some were small, some lengthy but I think I am getting better at news writing now. I did 150 words on Chortle's student comedian awards. 150 words about a man that got fined £75 for letting all four of his greyhounds foul the pavement. A very small piece on The Eastleigh Ramblers meeting place and times. I also re-worked my male childcare lecturer article from the Monday before for features instead. It just needed a few more words and a little re-organising of the paragraphs. Lastly, I wrote a small article on The Hamble Point Boat Show in April. Mostly a promotional piece about what you can expect there, when it is etc. Julian Robinson, the Eastleugh reporter, also showed me how to write and put together an article from a press release. It was really helpful and showed me what I need to improve on.
I have discovered that everyone has short hand. There are notepads everywhere with little shorthand scrawlings on them. Just taking a phone message, it is taken in short hand. I managed to get 30 words a minute in my first year of university but now all that I can remember is what 'the' is. I have all the books at home and I think that even if I am not 100 percent on becoming a reporter, shorthand will still be useful. During my interview with Barbra, last Friday I found I could not write quick enough and did not have many quotes that I could put in the article word for word.
Tuesday, I went to the Magistrates court with Sian Davies for a case about a man not keeping his dog under control. It was scheduled for 10.30am but when we got there it was delayed. We went in to another court room and watched to see if there were any other stories we could get whilst waiting for the dog case. I found it really interesting. It felt like a soap opera. The amount of people coming in, one after the other, I was surprised to see. I think I was quite naiive about the amount of crime in Southampton. After a while, the dog case still was not being heard so we went back to the newsroom.
As I had some afternoon free from work I decided to research tv listings. I need the SKY television listings for the Monday 27th August 1990 for my FYP. After exhausting the Internet it dawned on me that the Echo keep an archive of all their past newspapers. It was a long shot but I asked about any magazines they had kept. It turns out that after ITV Meridian moved from Northam they gave all their TV Times magazines to the Echo. No one had seen them since they had been put in to the filing cabinet except me. I was optimistic that out of all magazines the TV Times would be the one to have the SKY listings that I needed. Alas, the only channels they catered for was ITV and Channel 4. Not even the BBC. At a last attempt I asked to see the newspaper itself for August 1990. As it is a local and it does not do TV listings now I did think I was slightly wasting my time but it had to be checked in order for it to be ruled out. Since the 80's they had been putting the paper on to film. I checked the dates and found that not only did the paper have TV listings, it had listings for SKY too. I printed them out and was able to find what I needed for my FYP.
Wednesday was a busy day and I now know that a reporter should not wear heels. I started by doing the 60 second headlines, which I am really enjoying. I then did a phone interview and arranged a photographer to meet with Debbie Beale. She has been collecting animal necesities for a local rescue centre. I then typed up the article and sent it in.
I then went out with Patrick Knox, a news reporter on a couple of his stories. The first was that there was going to be 10 million gallons of water drained from a reservoir on Southampton Common. This would be news worthy because recently people in Southampton have had water meters installed. Meaning that they are paying for the amount of water being used in their household. After walking around the common trying to find the reservoir we gave up. It was a story that needed pictures and we were not able to get any. This was not an easy feat in heels and mud either.
We then went on to interview, David Reynolds. He had recently built a scale model of the Titanic out of matchsticks. I found this interview really interesting and thought it was amazing with what he could do with matchsticks. He had an entire room with amazing models of ships. David was also a Guiness World Record holder for the most matchsticks used, when building a scale model of an oil rig. Patrick had to do a written story as well as a video. Again, short hand definitely comes in handy.
Lastly there had been a tip off that there were rats around a broken gate in a river in Southampton. A river that recently had people canoeing and rowing on it that had caught viles disease. This disease can kill and comes from rat urine. Due to the gate being broken there had been a lot of rubbish and waste build up. I thought it was a lot but apparently it had been cleaned and so we needed to come back in a weeks time to see a lot more waste and rats, to make the story more concrete.
Thursday was amazing! Easily the best day of the week and probably one of the highs for reporters that are more commonly used to finding rats than celebrities. Arron Hendy, another news reporter took me out to No Limits in Southampton. It is a charity that helps get young people off of the street and in to homes and jobs. This is where Matt Cardle was going to be, signing autographs and taking pictures with the young adults there to promote Sports Relief. We were allowed to film and interview him for 15 minutes as well as vox pop the people that use the No Limits service and the manager Liz Carter. Again, due to convergence I filmed all the interviews whilst Arron wrote them and asked the questions for a written piece.
When we were finished there and I had stopped drooling over Matt we moved on to the job centre. Arron has an article in the paper every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday about people that are looking for a job, entitled, 'Give Me a Chance'. Here we stopped four people for the column and asked them about what jobs they are looking for, how often they look, their education history and how long they have been out of work.
When we were back at the office we edited all of our footage an put it in to a two minute video. At the Daily Echo they use Avid whereas I use Final Cut Pro so this was something else new for me to learn. It did look a lot simpler than Final Cut but it did not look like you could do as much with it. We had problems with sound too which took a while to sort out. Whilst we watied for that to be fixed Arron wrote up the article which appeared in the paper on page 2 on Friday 20th January. Along with Patricks article about matchstick man, David Reynolds on page 3. You can find the matt cardle video here http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/video/
Wow was I tired by Friday. I tried to get in touch with a local woman that is planning to run in the London Marathon in April in aid of the British Heart Foundation. I emailed, phoned and left a message for her but as she is a midwife I think that she was a little too busy.
Dom, the disease you talk of caused by rats by the river. Was it Cryptosporidium?
ReplyDeleteI don't know. The reporter I was with just called it Viles disease?
Delete