My group consists of Nayara Alvarenga, Megan Racz, Aaron Alleyne and I, Beatriz Nena. On the first lesson of being introduced to the project we will be working on for the next few weeks, we managed to come up with an initial idea. We are going to focus our 30-40 second radio introduction on the current occurring of New York Fashion week. Fashion week allows people to embrace the hottest trends and express themselves in their own style. The runway models themselves are dressed in the newest designs by the worlds most famous designers leaving the viewers in awe. We decided on fashion week due to its vast popularity especially in the week where it becomes the fans of fashions priority in life, so pause your daily job and drop everything for the runway. Furthermore by introducing an upcoming fashion designer whom's work shall be plastered over the runaways during this exciting week will have our target audience at our feet. We plan on making this radio show as if it is a revelation to the future of fashion. Moreover, we will have 3 females interviewing the breakout fashion designer of 2016, which will be played by Aaron.
This is the flowchart I created so that my group and I can follow when planning the production of our broadcast. Flow charts are essential in planning initial ideas as it shows clearly each step in a chronological order which not only helps for future reference but helps you stay organised throughout future progress.
When completing research into genre elements of a local radio news bulletin you need to be considerate of the 2 types of data. One is primary research which is a new type of research, carried out by the researcher himself to answer specific questions. It can involve questionnaires, surveys or interviews with people. Then there is secondary research, this makes use of information previously researched for other purposes and publicly available.
Recording & Editing Preliminary Task
Final Version of Preliminary Task
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| Before recording our preliminary task, we wrote a brief script of what we were going to say in the 30-40 seconds of our broadcast. |
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| Nayara and I recording our lines of the script |
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| Process of using Audacity to record our Preliminary Task |
Recording & Editing Preliminary Task
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| Adding new tracks |
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| Cutting out dead air so that it all plays smoothly |
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| Amplifying the jingle and then fading it out |
Understanding The GENRE of News
News Values
For me to understand the task and how to record an excellent broadcast, lots of research would need to be done. I used a secondary qualitative research method by using the website of the University of Strathclyde as it provided me with a huge amount of information into journalism and what is considered a news worthy story and the background decisions that journalists undergo. They did this through an interview with a journalist herself explaining what goes into creating a new bulletin.
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/introduction-to-journalism/0/steps/1605 - SCREENSHOT
I have created a Prezi to explain all these news values.
News Values
For me to understand the task and how to record an excellent broadcast, lots of research would need to be done. I used a secondary qualitative research method by using the website of the University of Strathclyde as it provided me with a huge amount of information into journalism and what is considered a news worthy story and the background decisions that journalists undergo. They did this through an interview with a journalist herself explaining what goes into creating a new bulletin.
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/introduction-to-journalism/0/steps/1605 - SCREENSHOT
I have created a Prezi to explain all these news values.
Codes & Conventions of a BBC Local Radio News Bulletin:
I am using a 5 minute extract from BBC Sussex to analyse the codes and conventions of a local radio news bulletin through Primary Qualitative research.
CC1 - Jingle
A jingle is crucial in a news radio broadcast because it make the show distinctive to others and shows the start of the news show. Moreover news broadcast is a 'blind' medium, thus it needs to use other techniques such as a jingle to grab the listeners attention.
CC2 - Continuity Announcer (Radio Identification)
Continuity announcer are the people who introduce programmes in radio and forthcoming news on the broadcast. This is important because it stops any dead air that could cause the radio to lose listeners but also tells them information about what they are about to listen to without jumping straight into it as it could confuse listeners and not keep them engaged.
CC3 - News Presenter
The news presenter is important in a news radio broadcast because it makes the listener aware of who is going to present the news to them and creates a listener to presenter connection. Moreover it is essential for the presenter to say his or her name as this makes them accountable that the information they are going to tell the public is reliable and correct.
CC4 - Contents
The contents of a radio show is the presenter giving listeners a brief summary of what is going to be on the news broadcast. It is important because just like a magazine it allows listeners to have the choice to keep listening if they find the contents interesting and worthy. For the radio show I have chosen they do not have a specific contents in the beginning, instead the presenter goes straight into the news. However he does keep it brief and doesn't include all the ins and outs of the 6am news.
CC5 - Interview
An interview is important in any radio show, however it is specifically essential in a news broadcast as it acts as proof and evidence to the listener that the news is accurate and provides the view point of a person who witnessed or is part of the mentioned event. The interview can either be done directly in the radio stations studio, in the streets or can be taken from another secondary source of information.
Content Analysis using L.R.N.B News Values
This research that I completed is primary qualitative research as I listened to my chosen radio show and analysed its content into categories, such as 'what issue are they talking about' and 'how does this fit into a news value'. This clear analysis for a radio show made it easier for me to understand how codes and conventions and news values fit together to make the perfect local radio news bulletin, benefiting me greatly when it came to recording my own bulletin.
Commercial Sector: Local Radio News
CC1 - Advertisements
Commercial radio derives its budgets from selling advertisements, therefore they need a consistent large number of listeners as they attract the advertising money based on ratings. A main difference between commercial and non commercial radio is that commercial radio includes adverts between either each presenter speaking or between songs.
CC2 - Jingle
A jingle is crucial even in a commercial sector of local news radio broadcast because it makes the show distinctive to others and shows the start of the news show. Moreover news broadcast is a 'blind' medium, thus it needs to use other techniques such as a jingle to grab the listeners attention. However, jingles in the commercial sector tend to be more vibrant and dramatic such as the example below, making it last longer as well.
Understanding Audiences Using Research Methods
Rajar is the website used to operate an audience measurement system for the UK radio industry, serving both the BBC and licensed commerciaL stations. The company is jointly owned by the BBC and by the Radio Centre (the trade body representing the vast majority of commercial radio stations in the UK).
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| Demographics |
The general public is the audience for any radio institution, with a goal of reaching as many people as possible. However, this can be separated into different constituencies due to a large variety of demographics in the UK. Firstly there are 2 main types of audiences, mass audience which is the main public on a large scale and a niche audience which is a specialised and usually minority audience. As a media student I have done more research into the different concepts of audiences and firstly I have identified the different demographics that the public can be split into:
- Age
- Gender
- Social Class/Culture
- Location
- Ethnicity
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| SH model of encoding and decoding |
This type of reading is what is most common and the widely accepted view of the media message. Therefore it means there are very litre misconceptions of the message between the sender (media institution) and the receiver (audience), this allows messages to be understood quickly and easily as the receiver agrees completely with the message without questioning it.
Negotiated Reading:
Negotiated
reading is when the specific audience decodes the media message using their own views on mediocre society and culture. The message is understood but is inferred
differently compared to the dominant reading. This is because the viewer
decodes the message in a more personal way which results in the message
decoding to be biased. Consequently resulting with the viewer agreeing or disagreeing with
the viewpoint of the message.
Oppositional Reading:
Oppositional Reading:
An
oppositional reading is when the viewers decode the media message completely
based on their own social beliefs. This can result with the viewer disagreeing
with the message that the sender is portraying, or possibly another unintended
meaning of the message. Although the viewer can successfully decode the
message, due to their own beliefs and social standing they reject the
message.
Using Stuart Hall's Theory
I have taken a news extract from a local radio news bulletin (BBC Leeds) so that I can analyse it using Stuart Hall's theories of types of reading. The news story talks about family benefits falling and how this will affect childcare and housing.
Dominant Reading - It is bad that benefits are being decreased by £6000 as this means families will struggle more with trying to raise a healthy family successfully.
Negotiated Reading - It's unfortunate that families will be getting less benefits but thats better for the general public because it means we get taxed less.
Preferred Reading - It is good that benefits are being sliced because they are only a bunch of lazy people stealing our hard working money.
Hypodermic Needle Theory
Using Stuart Hall's Theory
I have taken a news extract from a local radio news bulletin (BBC Leeds) so that I can analyse it using Stuart Hall's theories of types of reading. The news story talks about family benefits falling and how this will affect childcare and housing.
Dominant Reading - It is bad that benefits are being decreased by £6000 as this means families will struggle more with trying to raise a healthy family successfully.
Negotiated Reading - It's unfortunate that families will be getting less benefits but thats better for the general public because it means we get taxed less.
Preferred Reading - It is good that benefits are being sliced because they are only a bunch of lazy people stealing our hard working money.
Hypodermic Needle Theory
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| Model of The Theory |
The "hypodermic
needle theory" implies that mass media has a direct, immediate and powerful
effect on its audiences. It began evolving in in the 1920s and 1930s because people
began noticing that mass media was having a powerful influence on behavior
change.
Several
factors contributed to the strong effect of communication of mass media,
including:
- the fast
rise of radio and television.
- the
emergence of advertising and propaganda.
- studies which
focused on the impact of motion pictures on children.
- Hitler
& Nazi domination of mass media during WWII to unify Germany.
Moreover the
theory suggests that the mass media can directly and uniformly influence a very
large group of people by ‘shooting’ or ‘injecting’ them with appropriate
messages designed to trigger a desired response.
Both images
used to express this theory are a bullet and a needle; they portray a powerful
and direct flow of information from the sender to the receiver.
Cultivation Theory
The theory was first researched
in the mid 1960s as people were concerned with the amount of TV that people
watched, Gerbner and Gross wanted to find out if the amount of time people spent in front
of a TV affected everyday life activities. They found out that heavy
viewers of TV believed that the world they saw on TV was an accurate depiction
of the real world. Theorists are best known for studying television violence
and how it can affect viewers. If a viewers sees violence daily on the TV then
they start to believe that the world is a violent place and will take part in more violent actions as they believe this is a "norm". Moreover it suggests that the TV posses a small influence on the viewers, and that it can influence their
opinions and views on society and the people in the real world.
Cultivation Theory
The Cultivation theory is a
social theory that is based on the long-term effects of television,
rather than media as a whole. The theory states that "the more time people spend 'living'
in the television world, the more likely they are to believe social reality
portrayed on television".
The theory was first researched
in the mid 1960s as people were concerned with the amount of TV that people
watched, Gerbner and Gross wanted to find out if the amount of time people spent in front
of a TV affected everyday life activities. They found out that heavy
viewers of TV believed that the world they saw on TV was an accurate depiction
of the real world. Theorists are best known for studying television violence
and how it can affect viewers. If a viewers sees violence daily on the TV then
they start to believe that the world is a violent place and will take part in more violent actions as they believe this is a "norm". Moreover it suggests that the TV posses a small influence on the viewers, and that it can influence their
opinions and views on society and the people in the real world.  |
| Cultivation Theory shows how easy the viewer is influenced by the events that occur on the television, and how easy it is for them to translate the beliefs to the real world |
Media & Me
This blog post is about the role that social media plays in my life, being part of a modern society revolving around technology means I have access to many platforms of the internet with all the new and evolved tech. Ranging from smartphone apps such as snapchat, Instagram and twitter to entertainment like music videos and films. Social media is able to connect people all over the world that are separated by geographical boundaries using mass communication. It has also become a mean of expression for almost all of social issues in a mixture of cultures. 
For example, as you can see on the right, twitter made BBC headlines in 2013. This was to show the increase in popularity that this network gained over the years. I personally use twitter a lot as it is an easy platform to keep up with not only entertainment news, such as which celebrity has died her hair or who's dropped a new album but also whats trending in the fashion world and harder news stories dealing with crime and politics.
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| Donald Trump, a victim of twitter meme |
Snapchat
Snapchat has become increasingly more popular. It began in 2011 as the first social media platform where what you sent to your friends would be forever deleted after a maximum of 10 seconds. As Snapchat evolved, by May 2014, the app's users were sending 700 million snaps a day, including celebrities began using Snapchat story as a mode of communication with fans. Snapchat is different to other social medias such as Instagram, this is because snapchat is seen as the raw version of Instagram What you post on snapchat is raw and cannot be edited or perfected (unlike instagram). However, Snapchat filters is another phenomenon that mainly sprung into interest as of 2015.
Understanding 'Local'
The locality of the radio show that my group and I chose was Oxford Street. We decided on this area because it has a broad variety of audiences coming from different ethnicities, cultures, genders and ages. It is Europe's most visited and busiest shopping street with around half a million people daily. Although it faces competition such as its nearby neighbour, Regent Street or Westfield Shopping Centre it is still the highest demand for shoppers due to its several retail flagship stores.
News Item 1:
My group consists of Megan Racz (http://meganracz2016.blogspot.co.uk), Henry Hyseni, Jordan John-Francois and I. During the first week we firstly organised what roles each one of us was going to complete.
We then decided that our radio location was going to be Oxford Street, therefore we did some research into finding local radio stories based in this area and what specific topic we wanted it to be about. Our draft initial ideas about news items include:
→ Politics: VoxPop with teenagers on their opinion about Trump)
Questions: 1) How do you feel about Trump being
elected President?
→ Entertainment: Film premiere in Leicester Square
→ Social 1: Oxford Street lights switch-on
→ Social 2:Winter Wonderland
→Crime: Car crash in Berwick St
→Locality: Marble Arch Tower Construction
After planning our roles and topics we began to record our news items in our extra lessons. We firstly came up with a draft script for our first news item; Car Crash in Berwick St.
How did you find out about this news item?
We obtained this information as I listened to Absolute radio on a Thursday morning at 7.30 and they were having a short news bulletin. From this I then researched more into the crash on www.metro.co.uk so that we could build a script on it.
For a local radio news bulletin the first news item carries a significant role in catching the audiences attention, therefore we chose the news item about the car crash as it demonstrates the locality (of Oxford St) and is an issue that a large majority of the audience would want to know about, thus resulting in them being engaged and wanting to continue listening.
During the first week Jordan also used FL Studio to create our jingle.
After importing our radio bulletin's jingle we used the fade out tool, which lightly decreases the volume of a specific section so that it becomes a background sound while Jordan (Presenter 1) introduces the show.
After importing our radio bulletin's jingle we used the fade out tool, which lightly decreases the volume of a specific section so that it becomes a background sound while Jordan (Presenter 1) introduces the show.
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| Final Script Draft |
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Final Production of News Item 1:
News Item 2:
On the second week our news item was about the Oxford St Lights Switch-on that happened on the 6th November.
On the second week our news item was about the Oxford St Lights Switch-on that happened on the 6th November.
How did you find out about this news item?
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| Example of Secondary Research |
Due to this being a yearly tradition the whole group already knew about this event and we immediately wanted to include this event in our Oxford St themed show as it highlights an important news value for making a good news story, which is locality. Additionally, Megan completed some secondary qualitative research using a social media platform, Twitter. As the Christmas Lights Switch-on is also largely spoken about on social media due to the high profile names promoting the event we managed to gain more information through this research method as we were hearing from official people themselves
Our specialist reporter Henry spoke about this and here is the script I created. As this is a larger topic I decided that Megan (another specialist reporter) should also speak a small piece in the middle so that the audience hears a variety of voices and avoids boredom.
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| Editing in Audacity |
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| Final Draft Script 2 |
Final Production of News Item 2:
How did you find out about this news item?
As a group we decided to use a research method of secondary qualitative data from a valuable resource that is available through the internet, the Government Petition Website to find out if there was any interesting events that ticked off any important news values. We discovered the petition to close retail during boxing day and immediately decided that this was perfect as it fit our locality (as Oxford St is known for shopping) and also fit the time frame as boxing day would occur a month following our recording. It also gave our research some quantitative figures as we were able to give the audience a specific number of people that agreed with this petition (147,938 at the time). Moreover this news bulletin added a variety of issues that could reach out to a mass scale of our widespread audience as majority of those listening would be considered 'shopaholics' or residents that have to deal with the havoc of boxing day.
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| Secondary Research Proof |
News Item 4:
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| Group Meeting - Creating the Script |
The 4th news item was about Winter Wonderland. We spoke about the events and rides such as the German Style Market, to inform the audience about what is going on. We also included an interview where our specialist reporter Henry Hyseni interviewed a Winter Wonderland employee who had come into the studio. This was part of the brief given to create a 5 minute local radio news bulletin. Moreover, radio reaches millions of people each day and interviews are a powerful tool for communicating news and advocating issues or events through a first hand account.
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| Dialogue Script |
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| Interview Script |
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| Interviewing a Winter Wonderland Employee |
News Item 5:
The 5th news item in our local radio bulletin was about a film premiere in Leicester Square. The film was called 'Joe and Caspar Hit The Road'. This meant that we had to break a news value of proximity as we went a bit further out than Oxford St and there are very few residents around Leicester Square so this news story was more focused around informing and entertaining our other target audience of teenagers. Furthermore I believe that this was a positive choice for our bulletin as it gave us the opportunity to widen our audience and attract more of our target demographic as they would be interested in meeting these famous youtube stars.
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| Editing |
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| Interview |
FINAL PRODUCTION OF LOCAL RADIO NEWS BULLETIN:
Evaluation Question 1:
In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
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| Henry & Jordan Producing Question 1 |
Evaluation Question 2:
How does your media product represent particular social groups
Evaluation Question 3:
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
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Evaluation Question 4:
Who would be the audience for your media product?
Evaluation Question 5:
How did you attract/address your audience?
Evaluation Question 6:
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Evaluation Question 7:
Looking at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
