Radio Newsday 1: South Coast Radio

Our target audience was for people aged over forty over a wide range including Dorset, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Since we were broadcasting for South Coast Radio, we considered the regions and tried to make ourselves relevant to different areas by covering stories in various places, however due to the lack of interesting stories around, this meant that we focused a bit too heavily on Dorset stories. We also mentioned Weymouth, the Isle of Wight and Bournemouth, and in the sports news we mentioned Southampton FC, however ideally a radio broadcast would have a much broader range to include as many listeners as possible, and in future I would try to achieve this.

Because the media is constantly changing it is important to accurately report the news so that a radio station is trusted. The BBC aim to inform, educate and entertain audiences, and we attempted to embody these news values into our bulletins, by discussing stories which were relevant to our audiences. We discussed stories which were in the public interest, such as Holocaust Memorial Day and also included lighter stories such as sport to entertain.

A station with a similar geographical audience range, such as BBC Solent, tends to include local and national stories, and commercial stations such as Heart FM usually lead with regional stories. We led with a story about the Iraq inquiry, as this had been covered in all local and national radio stations and was the main story of the day. Some stories we included throughout the day such as Holocaust Memorial Day, the end of the recession, Haiti, and speed cameras were all national stories with a local spin; for example, we focused on events happening locally marking Holocaust Memorial Day. The other stories we included were regional. Considering it was a particularly challenging radio news day, I think we did well with these stories.




I did not make any mistakes when reading the script, so I am pleased with how the first broadcast went overall, although we realised that certain scripts needed tweaking. For example, the recession story lost it's immediacy as it started with yesterday’s news. It is important that radio scripts are as polished as possible; if a story starts with the word “yesterday”, listeners will lose interest, therefore we should avoid this in future.

The second bulletin also went rather well. I think I spoke clearly, although I did stumble over a few words in a story. We were frustrated with the 1.30pm bulletin. An error in the audio clip line up meant that the clip did not correspond with the story. Also, the sport was lacking the audio the reporter had prepared, therefore the sports news was cut short. We were late getting into the studio and could not check that everything was in the correct order, which impacted on our broadcast:




We were very ambitious, and mistakes were unfortunately made during the 1:30pm bulletin, however we definitely learnt from the incident to make sure we have all the scripts printed at least fifteen minutes before the broadcast and to double check the audio clips on Burli to make sure they correspond with the clips.