Research & Planning

What is news?

News is seen to consist of many distinctive topics that can all be based on different news values. This can either be good news, bad news or even news about celebrities or elites; but they are all considered on what type of news value they all are. News can be received newly or noteworthy information in which is mostly focused on events that have happened recently. News can be seen in newspapers, on the television, in magazines and other various places where news can be seen. Current events happening around the world can be seen a news; they can be categorised on whether that news piece is good or bad; categorising it under a news value, making it considered as news.

Genre Research

During the process of our research, we had to find archives, which would be a separate track to the background audio we'd be using in our news items. To help us find the suitable archive, we turned to SoundCloud (as seen below), to search for different songs that would be suitable to our genre of radio.

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As you can see (above), we, as a group decided to go for the song 'Who Let The Dogs Out' by Baja Man. This decision was based on the fact that although we focused on all sports in general, our initial sport was football and the first few seconds of the song went well with our genre of football. In my opinion, the song was able to emphasise the fact that the footballer is an animal on the pitch and the animal that they are is a dog; due to their hunger for success, presenting to us a better profile of the player.

Finding our archive, our next task was to look for a piece of background audio, which could help relate back to the genre our radio that we were doing. The end result was that we ended up using 'Changing' by Sigma & Paloma Faith, to fit as our background audio, interpreting 40 seconds of audio from this song. The reason behind choosing this audio, was due to how it sounded, as the beat went well with the adrenaline that the radio broadcast had within that interview (seen below).

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To be able to conduct this radio broadcast that we were hosting, we had to get some help on how to conduct the interview properly. So we had to research different sports interviews in order to be able to get an idea of how a sports interview is constructed. Since the genre we chose was sports, we looked at a sports newscast on youtube, which helped us to see the types of codes and conventions of a sports interview/broadcast, which helped us to try and make our radio sound as realistic as possible. This example from YouTube (link and photo below) was from the Sky Sports Football Punditry Team who casted an interview. This helped us identify what we needed to make our broadcast a success.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sports+interviews+from+sky+sports

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Our research was basically to research what we had to do in our preliminary task; which was to conduct a 30 - 40 second radio show. For our research, we used YouTube. This was to find out how other sports shows and radios were conducted. It gave us an insight to what we would have to do in our radio production and how it would help us benefit our task.




Audience Research

Using a secondary research method

This section of my research will include the different audiences that I've looked at, which will help identify the different audience groups; looking at what age group listen to what type of radio stations and whether they are age appropriate or what what is seen to be more popular.

An example of measured radio audiences can be seen through Rajar.

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What they do is they produce many questionnaires and surveys so that they are able to gain a wide variety of options that may have a relationship with the improvement of the radio station. Closed and/or open questionnaires can be used; closed questionnaires give the options which will help the radio know what the audience wants through allowing them to choose between a variety of options (usually being 2-3 options). From these closed questions, it will give them an advantage as it will help them with collaborating that into their daily/weekly broadcast. What Open Questionnaires do is they give the listeners more of a chance to get their opinion across on how the radio station is doing; whether it is doing well or elements that they need to improve it, making it better, attracting more audiences to listen to what they have to offer. What this allows the radio stations to do is adapt the problems to their chosen audiences; allowing the radio station's ratings or awareness steadily increase.   

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Above, shows an image of the most popular and undeviating radio stations that are listened to in England & the UK. From doing this Rajar are able to help different radios broadcasters know what audiences like to listen to (what they are attracted to). It helps us to view different sectors of Media and how prominent they are. For example; it helps us to view how what they are interested in; whether it be news, entertainment, music, or even video games (possibly).

An example of Rajar's research is seen through their work through averaging the different surveys of questionnaires into different sectors. An example of one of the sectors is the Average Hours per Listeners. This tells us the average length of time in which listeners spend with that particular radio station. From my research on Rajar, to be able to get the Average Hours per Listener, you must divide the Weekly Hours the station gets by the Population; how ever many people listen to that particular station. 



Audience Research
Primary Research Method
Face to Face Street Interviews.

Devising interview questions

In reviewing the progress of my local radio news broadcast, I noticed that I haven't included a news item which addresses the news values of elite personalities. In order to discover what my target audience consider to be elite personalities, I went out onto the streets of Kilburn to ask representatives from my target audience the following questions.


1.Which famous people matter to you? 

• The reason behind asking this question was to find out whether people had famous people that they looked up to. Under this context, it will show the difference between the various famous people that are liked around the world. It will show varying opinions on what famous people matter to different age groups 

2. Do you follow any famous people on Twitter or any form of social media? (Closed Question)

• The reason why we chose this question, was due to the fact that we wanted to find out whether people have personal preferences in the people that they followed within any form of social media. What these answers both show is the varying opinion between demographics (age class). 

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3. Some people are famous, some people are important. Who would you choose as an example of someone who is famous and important? (Closed Question) Why?(Open Question)

• The reason behind us asking this question was to find out how different celebrities a perceived within society> Some people may consider some celebrities to be also significant as they may have a strong influence of them. From this question, we gain opinion towards why this particular person(s) may seem important to some but others. 

What is News Value?

My presentation here analyses and explains the different concepts behind news. Each slide explains what hard news is (which is seen through Politics, Economics etc...) and what soft news is (which is seen through news which consists of sports etc...). It also gives you/us an insight to how worthy news has to be to be announced on the radio. It answers the questions in which:

• Is the news accurate?
• Does it provide vital information?
• Is the news local?
• Is it news that has come in that day or is it late news?

These are the type of questions that people would ask when it comes to news so my presentation is able to answer everything above.

Why Is It Newsworthy?

Here below, is my example of a five minute news radio:

We had to research a five minute radio show and then record it. We also then had to make a table and record in it the parts of news that we heard; in relation to its news values. This helped me to notice and realise how worthy news has to be for it to be announced on radio; giving me an idea of how my radio show be conducted.Through this, I managed to differentiate topics I found into different categories.

Good news is (news value)

Follow up is (news value)

News Agenda is (news value)

Certain newspapers and articles included different news topics; it may not be the same most of the time though. The news value has to be relative to the location you are in. In media there isn't a balance in it, meaning that there could more bad news than good news or vice versa.

Codes and Conventions of Radio News
A code and convention is a piece of evidence in which a radio news broadcast needs. It helps construct the layout of radio and it helps make the radio broadcast come together.

Radio Manchester (First Radio Station) 

1. This is the first code and convention of Radio News. At the beginning of the radio, there is always an introduction of the radio's name, which is also over-layered by the presenter's dialogue. The intro also allows the audience to be informed about what they are listening to.  

2. In any radio show, the name of the presenter is vital. Before any news is mentioned, the audience would obviously like to know who is mentioning the news of which they are listening to. Therefore, they will be able to be comfortable and the news that they are receiving reliable and true. This code and convention is important. Every presenter must have this at the start before they even think about presenting the latest news.

3. The headline is another important code and convention in radio. Straight after the radio presenter introduces the station and him/herself, they go straight into the headlining news of that time of day. Then after this, different other news stories are mentioned. 




4. The outside broadcast is pieces of evidence in which is taken from outside and is brought into the studio, whether it is an interview done by someone or also doing the continuation of a news story. It helps make the broadcast more realistic as this audio is coming straight from the person who was involved in the story.





5. At this time of the radio broadcast, we see the addition of the news of sports from another presenter. With each presenter having their own category of news, it allows the broadcast to flow with different but balanced flow throughout it. What also helps with this, is that each presenter has their own distinctive voice, helping the specific news that they present to be more outgoing and informative to the listeners. 




6. At the end of every radio broadcast, there is an outro jingle at the end and they always need to be in the broadcast; it is very important that it is included at the end. This code and convention can be seen to be more important than the intro jingle, as this shows the retirement of the broadcast. The outro can also remind the listeners of what they had just been listening to and who the presenter was/is.

Planning

Our Schedule

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Within the time of doing our tasks, we had set a timetable for ourselves in order to judge what we will do and also when we will do it by a set date. What this planning did, was increase productivity within the group, allowing us to to get a lot done quicker

Production

During this course, our aim was to produce a 5 minute radio broadcast which consisted of 7-8 news items. These will all include the 6 codes and conventions the I've explored in my research. 

The roles within our group:

Presenter: Bradley Loughnane

Specialist Reporter/Editor: Edevi Awodey

Editor/Researcher: Celyn Perez Dizon 

Editor/Researcher: Thiago Duarte

On each of the names, there is a link which leads to where you will see a version of the construction of our radio broadcast. 

When in the group, we had to decide upon the radio name for our broadcasting channel. Doing this task was quick and easy. We came together as a group in which we brainstormed good names for the radio broadcast, in which we shortlisted or favourites. We all came to the final decision of 'Canon FM' as the name was unique and outside the box. 

Upon deciding on the radio name, we had to set ourselves various responsibilities during the process of our production and below you will see what each member of the group was responsible for: 

• Bradley was the presenter for our show
• Me and Thiago research the news topic in which we will use for our broadcast 
• Celyn created the script from which she would get research evidence from me and Thiago to do so
• Once the script is ready to be recorded, me and Celyn gather the people who we feel would be relevant to our recording
• After the recording process, me and Celyn work together in editing the news item(s)
• Once all news items have been recorded and edited and we are all content with the final result, our next(final) step is to work on constructing our whole radio show. 

While we were in the process of constructing our radio show, we had to take part in answering the 7 Evaluation Questions. Each member of our group had to complete 2 questions each. Since there is 4 of us, we all decided to come together and answer one Evaluation Question together. 

The 7 Scripts

Before recording all of our news items, we had to create scripts for them; precisely we needed 7 scripts. For this me and Celyn took the responsibility of creating a script for each of these 7 news items. 

Below, you will see our final outcomes of scripts that we used for our local news bulletin. 'CANON RADIO NEWS'.

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Programs

Within our time of constructing our news broadcast, we used a different number of programs which aided us in making improvements to our news item. 

 The logo on the left is for the website Blogger. It allows you to create a blog, in which my case for using the blog is to record what I am doing during every stage of my project and its construction for the last 12 weeks. It is where we will explain and describe each stage of our progress in much detail, so that it will be easy to understand what we are trying to accomplish. As Blogger is connected to Google, it was essential for us to have a G-mail account, which everyone in our group has created. 

This is what Blogger looks like once logged in and a blog has been created. As you can see, there is one post there and this is for my AS work (which is being constructed).

Audacity is a free editing audio program, which enabled us to construct(record) our news items. Using this software was surprisingly easy, but was quite challenging at first. We managed to learn many things from using this program; for example, with the assistance of our codes and conventions, it enabled us to access how to correctly make a proper replica of a news item. 

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The image above shows the program that we used and the tools that were involved in the Audacity program. 

FreeSound is a website in which you can research any sounds that you need for free. Sounds may include: people talking, the traffic etc... This website was very convenient for our radio show as it enabled us to insert any different types of audio that we needed. This website enabled us to get sounds to be able to make our news items sound more realistic when our audience would be listening to it. 

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Above, what you seen is a screenshot of what the website looks like. At the right of the page, there is a search engine, in which you can search for any sound that you are looking for and the results will be likely to pop up.

GarageBand is a program that can seen on many Mackintoshes (Macs). This particular software allows you to compose sounds and music with your own touch.  This is the place of which we will be composing our jingles and intro music due to the fact that it includes hundreds of thousands of different sounds that we can choose from. By using Garageband, it will allow us to learn how to use the program as well as constructing our radio's intro music and also our jingle. 

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Above, what you see is what Garageband looks like when opened. There was many options of instruments to use for our local news broadcast's jingle and intro as you will be able to see on the left of the screenshot. 

SoundCloud is a free music website where you are able to share music or music of your own to the worldwide web and everyone is able to listen to the music without any charge. Once we recorded all of our news items, we would use SoundCloud; uploading our final edited recording from Audacity onto the website before embedding it in our blogs. Through doing this, we needed the HTML, which would allow the SoundCloud content we had, to feature in our blogs. 

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Above, what you will see is the SoundCloud website in which shows all the audios that we have recorded can be seen here. 

The Flowchart For 'CANON RADIO NEWS'

This flowchart shows how our local news bulletin is ordered in our radio news broadcast. By creating this flowchart, it allows us to see how the news bulletin (our media product) was clearly ordered; also allowing us to see what came after what. Moreover, the flowchart basically allows us to see the step-by step process in what was involved in our news bulletin.